So I am playing a bit with my random creature creator (RCC) and trying to create better templates. Here are some of the creatures. They are pretty messed up, granted this is with all of the options turned on. You will get much more reasonable creatures by only choosing from certain templates (e.g. don't mix and match tentacles and arms/legs, etc...)
This one shows off the body part color naming scheme along with the single body part name (blob) and hairless name (bald). The description isn't too crazy.
[NAME:pink skinned bald blob:pink skinned bald blobs:pink skinned bald blob]
[DESCRIPTION:A common animal found in the wilderness., It lives in deep underground places. A hairless leathery creature with a single part body,
a large head and no eyes, a simple nose, a beak, and large ears. It has two tentacles attached to it's upper body with claws and six tentacles attached to it's lower body with clubs.
It Is only found underground. It cleans itself when dirty. Maximum Size: 19kg ]
This one shows off the eye color naming along with feathered naming (both fluffed and fowl come from the feather template). I should restrict words to a single template. The number of fingers in the description might be a little much.
[NAME:fluffed purple eyed fowl:fluffed purple eyed fowls:fluffed purple eyed fowl]
[DESCRIPTION:A common animal found in the wilderness. A feathered creature with a single part body, a head a single horn and four eyes, no nose, a beak, and pointed ears.
It has two arms and hands with four fingers each and two legs with hooves. It Is found in hardy places. It often greets other animals by head bumping them. It cleans itself when dirty. Maximum Size: 22kg ]
Here is one with a basic name and a description that doesn't match it at all. The fen comes from the temperate wetland, and the centipede comes from the 100 legs (again number of claws seems overkill). The name should probably mention that it is tusked or it has pincers or some such
[NAME:fen centipede:fen centipedes:fen centipede]
[DESCRIPTION:A common animal found in the wilderness. A hairy creature with a two part body, two heads two tusks and two eyes, a snout, a beak, and no ears.
It has four arms with large pincers and one hundred legs and feet with four claws each. It Can be found in any temperate wetland. Maximum Size: 20kg ]
For reference, limiting which templates are chosen from you can get creatures like, which actually doesn't sound too bad.
[NAME:tropical claw-fowl:tropical claw-fowls:tropical claw-fowl]
[DESCRIPTION:A common animal found in the wilderness. A feathered creature with a two part body, a head four horns and no eyes, no nose, a beak, and no ears. It has two wings and two legs and feet with four claws each. It Can be found in any dense tropical location. Maximum Size: 4kg ]
What I really need to do now is create more templates and think up more names. Should I branch out from english? Start using prefixes like geo/terra/aqua/aero? I am using names like crustacean, insect, amphibian, reptile, etc... Should I change those to specific creature names? There are a couple templates I do that for (e.g. the single horn template can have the name unicorn, the single eye template can have the name cyclops, etc...) I could also just make names random, or select words from the language files.
EDIT: Alright, I added the ability to link templates, so now you can have a single torso template that's linked to specific other templates to create more complex random creatures. For example, say you wanted to create a host of random scorpions (with six legs, two arms with pinchers, and a stinger and the rest random) you would just need to create the scorpion torso template and link it with the appropriate legs, arms, and attachments. Then the creator will select random biomes, material templates, facial features, extra attachments (wings, spikes, etc...), and other additions to make each scorpion unique.
EDIT2: Another update, I have added the ability to weight templates. before you had to make multiple copies of a template if you wanted it to be more selected than another, now you just change it's weighting.