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[Taffer]

I posted to thank you for the mod, only to release I thanked you when you first made this mod 
None the less, keep up the good work Taffer! 

Thank you kindly!

[Taffer]

I'm quietly inching my way back into Dwarf Fortress. Hopefully I can get everything where I want it before the next update hits. The below change warrants mentioning as there's already been criticism on it that I'll be respectfully ignoring.

I'm rethinking my new elven weapons.

No I'm not. Traditional elves are boring, and the wooden weapons Toady gives them are rather pathetic. DF elves already deviate from Tolkien's elves, so I don't mind swapping out the wooden bows and arrows with "aztec-inspired" weaponry in the name of balance. This makes elves both thematically more interesting and actually capable in a fight.

I often cave to pressure, but in this case I don't want to.

[Taffer]

I've been loudly working on a huge creature description update for an embarrassingly long time, but people following this mod might not know what I'm up to since most of the posts are buried in the Modest Mod thread. I thought I'd explain, then shut up about it until I'm done. I'm determined to finally finish it soon so I can complete the next release and then work on my first module.

This example uses giant moon snails.

Original:
[DESCRIPTION:A huge monster in the shape of a moon snail.]

Revised:
[DESCRIPTION:A huge, brightly-colored, predatory mollusc the size of a grizzly bear. It makes undulating movements with its bloated, mucus-covered body, effortlessly carrying a great shell. It bores holes into its prey then eats the flesh with a long proboscis.]

It also standardizes how creatures are described and indicates the rough size of giant creatures in the description. Animal people descriptions have been gendered and also have appropriate size-descriptors in the same vein as the default humanoid descriptors (medium-sized, small, tiny, etc. Little things that you'd previously have to pay close attention to are now made more obvious, like how winged animal people have arms separate from (not attached to) their wings, how bark scorpion people have large pincers coming out of their shoulders, and how many (hopefully all) animal people with multiple arms now have the number of arms indicated in their description.

It all makes (in my opinion) a dramatic and positive difference in how I play, simply because I'm always reading the description of things and I'm (usually) slightly disappointed. Not everything will be wonderful, but the hope is that it'll at least be a solid improvement.

[Vherid]

So I'm not sure how it's supposed to work, I order a full set of clothing and the token gets made. Then the token just sits there and no one ever uses it?

[Taffer]

So I'm not sure how it's supposed to work, I order a full set of clothing and the token gets made. Then the token just sits there and no one ever uses it?

Thank you kindly for the bug report! I can confirm this: my bad. You can complete the reaction for now by going into the "automated reactions" menu and requesting the second part of the reaction yourself. It's rather embarrassing that I hadn't noticed this before. I'll fix this up right away, and it'll be done for the next release! My repository is currently in such a state that doing a minor release is annoying, so I'll have to wait until my next update is finished.

I'm reconsidering some (or all) of Microreduce, just because the reactions don't seem to quite fit in: I'll see about improving that or removing the mod. I admit that reactions aren't my forte.

If you notice anything else or have any suggestions, kindly let me know!

EDIT: This reaction...somehow...removes the ability to make shirts outside of the new "outfit" reaction, and I don't know why. I've just torn the reaction out of my mod entirely, and I'll be carefully reviewing and testing the rest of Microreduce to either integrate the remaining reactions better or remove them.

[sum1won]

Ran into an odd issue with a lip getting crushed (helmet did nothing) and the dwarf instantly died as if his lip were his brain.  Game crashed a month or so later, so I don't have a screenshot or save.

[Taffer]

Ran into an odd issue with a lip getting crushed (helmet did nothing) and the dwarf instantly died as if his lip were his brain.  Game crashed a month or so later, so I don't have a screenshot or save.

Thank you for the report! That's not Revised, that's just Dwarf Fortress being Dwarf Fortress. I don't modify lips or brains in any way, and helmets in Dwarf Fortress are incapable of protecting facial features, even if modded. There's a workaround that Grimlocke's mod uses, but it's a bit of a weird bandaid fix, so it's not on my list of things to add.

I'll look into shrinking facial features to make it less likely they'll be targeted and I'm already planning on integrating some of Grimlocke's other armor changes, but none of that will prevent the issue you describe.

[bloop_bleep]

I've been loudly working on a huge creature description update for an embarrassingly long time, but people following this mod might not know what I'm up to since most of the posts are buried in the Modest Mod thread. I thought I'd explain, then shut up about it until I'm done. I'm determined to finally finish it soon so I can complete the next release and then work on my first module.

This example uses giant moon snails.

Original:
[DESCRIPTION:A huge monster in the shape of a moon snail.]

Revised:
[DESCRIPTION:A huge, brightly-colored, predatory mollusc the size of a grizzly bear. It makes undulating movements with its bloated, mucus-covered body, effortlessly carrying a great shell. It bores holes into its prey then eats the flesh with a long proboscis.]

It also standardizes how creatures are described and indicates the rough size of giant creatures in the description. Animal people descriptions have been gendered and also have appropriate size-descriptors in the same vein as the default humanoid descriptors (medium-sized, small, tiny, etc. Little things that you'd previously have to pay close attention to are now made more obvious, like how winged animal people have arms separate from (not attached to) their wings, how bark scorpion people have large pincers coming out of their shoulders, and how many (hopefully all) animal people with multiple arms now have the number of arms indicated in their description.

It all makes (in my opinion) a dramatic and positive difference in how I play, simply because I'm always reading the description of things and I'm (usually) slightly disappointed. Not everything will be wonderful, but the hope is that it'll at least be a solid improvement.

Sounds like a great idea, though I'd like to point out that the wiki says giant moon snails are about the size of llamas, not grizzly bears.

[Taffer]

Sounds like a great idea, though I'd like to point out that the wiki says giant moon snails are about the size of llamas, not grizzly bears.

They're closer to grizzly bears than llamas:

Llama: 180,000 cm3
Grizzly bear: 200,000 cm3
Giant Moon Snail: 201,400 cm3

It's more bulk than height, so fat creatures end up seeming much larger than other creatures. You could (probably accurately) argue that grizzly bears are just fatter than llamas, but giant moon snails don't seem the "slender type" either. I go by numbers specifically to avoid thinking about body types.

The size numbers are off in any case: many creatures are almost identical in size. The vast majority of giant creatures are between 201K and 203K, and most of their descriptions end up with "the size of a grizzly bear". Similarly, the vast majority of animal people are around 35K. I just refer to them as "small" to avoid repetition, which is consistent with the descriptions for other humanoids.

My preference was to delete the giant creature size comparisons entirely: these numbers are best kept in the RAWs where they belong. I was convinced to keep them, though. Perhaps some middle ground could be arranged to convey that most of these giant creatures are larger than a dwarf but far from the towering monstrosities you might imagine when you first see them: I'd need to rewrite most of the descriptions again, but it might be better than endless grizzly bear comparisons. If anyone has any ideas, please speak up.

Thanks for letting me know, in any case, and thank you for the compliment!

EDIT: would this work instead? It implies that 201K is somewhat larger than dwarves, but doesn't make it obvious that the sizes are almost all identical. I'm liking this approach, so I'll probably go ahead with it if I get no objections and I can't think of anything better. Thank you for getting me thinking about this, bloop_bleep!

[DESCRIPTION:A huge, brightly-colored, predatory mollusc larger than most humanoids. It makes undulating movements with its bloated, mucus-covered body, effortlessly carrying a great shell. It bores holes into its prey then eats the flesh with a long proboscis.]

[Taffer]

EDIT: would this work instead? It implies that 201K is somewhat larger than dwarves, but doesn't make it obvious that the sizes are almost all identical. I'm liking this approach, so I'll probably go ahead with it if I get no objections and I can't think of anything better. Thank you for getting me thinking about this, bloop_bleep!

[DESCRIPTION:A huge, brightly-colored, predatory mollusc larger than most humanoids. It makes undulating movements with its bloated, mucus-covered body, effortlessly carrying a great shell. It bores holes into its prey then eats the flesh with a long proboscis.]

Warning: another lengthy monologue on a subject nobody cares about.

This change has been made so. Giant creature variations of the standard 200,000-250,000 range are "larger than most humanoids". A select few giant variations are "of immense size", and the rest are "much larger than most humanoids". Some nuance was lost, but after much thought I strongly feel that these numbers are a pretty poor indicator of physical size, even if the numbers are accurate (where possible). Fat creatures skew this number immensely, and the mass doesn't scale as you would expect. A size with 8 digits isn't necessarily much taller than a 6 digit size, for example. Furthermore, the usefulness of the comparisons is highly questionable. Some giant creatures are "larger than a donkey", a larger size than "larger than a grizzly bear", but I'd normally assume grizzly bears to be larger. Besides, when the mythology update comes out it's possible not every world will even have donkeys or grizzly bears.

It's enough, in my opinion, to imply that most of the giant variations aren't much larger than humanoids, note the truly massive creatures, and let people's imagination fill in the gaps for everything in-between.

[Grimlocke]

I've been keeping track of this thread semi-regularly, I just haven't had a whole lot to add

I'd say the descriptions are accurate enough as you have them there as long as you ignore giants and such also being humanoids. DF 'size' is purely volume and that doesn't actually correlate that well with perceived size. A large wolf and a small pony might look about the same size, yet the pony weighs around 3 times more.

Anyhow, keep up the good work!

[vvAve]

So I'm not sure how it's supposed to work, I order a full set of clothing and the token gets made. Then the token just sits there and no one ever uses it?

Thank you kindly for the bug report! I can confirm this: my bad. You can complete the reaction for now by going into the "automated reactions" menu and requesting the second part of the reaction yourself. It's rather embarrassing that I hadn't noticed this before. I'll fix this up right away, and it'll be done for the next release! My repository is currently in such a state that doing a minor release is annoying, so I'll have to wait until my next update is finished.

I'm reconsidering some (or all) of Microreduce, just because the reactions don't seem to quite fit in: I'll see about improving that or removing the mod. I admit that reactions aren't my forte.

If you notice anything else or have any suggestions, kindly let me know!

EDIT: This reaction...somehow...removes the ability to make shirts outside of the new "outfit" reaction, and I don't know why. I've just torn the reaction out of my mod entirely, and I'll be carefully reviewing and testing the rest of Microreduce to either integrate the remaining reactions better or remove them.

Is this bugged reaction included in the latest release?

[Taffer]

Is this bugged reaction included in the latest release?

Yes, sorry. My repository is most of the way through the description update, so I've been focused on finishing that for now. I'll see about posting a temporary fix this weekend. Sorry!

[Taffer]

Is this bugged reaction included in the latest release?

Temporarily release version v1.3.2. This is just the current stable release without the bugged reaction, so it doesn't have any of the other fixes and improvements I've discussed since that release. Work continues on completing 1.4.

[fbo]

seems you finished the reptiles in the repo. I'm looking forward for your release 1.4!
Also I like the comments a lot. As I always end up modifying such mods a bit to my taste such a documented collection of changes is quite helpful. Especially after coming back again to DF 
Keep it up!