So I read in another thread about creating of a caste based fortress of animal peoples in the newest version since we can now both reclaim fortresses and play animal people adventurers. So I set about this absurd endeavor, and oh boy, have I done some stuff, and found some science.
I embarked in a nice, flat, small little 2x2 area of the world with my seven dwarfs and immediately retired the fort.
Next, I made 16 adventurers and retired them all at the fort.
4 Snail men (genderless),
2 Jaguar men, 2 Jaguar women,
2 Green Tree Frog men, 2 Green Tree Frog women,
2 Black Mamba men, 2 Black Mamba women.
I unretired the fort and stuck the starting 7 dwarfs into a walled in room to starve to death.
With the intention of setting up a breeding population I ran into a few hurdles, here is their story:
- Animal men have varying size, and as such many of them cannot wield equipment. The only creatures I had large enough to told the pickaxes and battleaxes for mining and woodcutting were the jaguar men with their 75,000cm^3 body size. This was fine since I could still mine and chop, but good to know for the future since equipment cannot be made in smaller/larger sizes like armor and clothing can.
- I had to marry the adventurers somehow. All adventures start asexual and as such would never form relationships. Here I had to use DF hack's "gui/family-affiars" tool to marry them off correctly. However, the Snail people still could not marry, I fear that being genderless makes breeding an impossibility.
- The Mamba people lay eggs, so they needed to have nest boxes, as well as not have their eggs stolen for food/kitchens. But, this was actually a pretty useful thing to have brought since because DFhack tells you when eggs are fertilized I could know without having to wait the 9 month gestation period of non-egg-layers if their was a problem with breeding. Which there was.
- The gender of citizens affects their breeding behavior, not only their relationships. As such, I had to change all the genders of the animal people to heterosexual with the dfhack command "fix-ster fert all", after this the eggs showed as fertile, confirming that breeding was indeed occurring.
I suppose you could skip the step of force marrying the adventurers and instead only change their gender orientations, but I didn't go that route, and I suspect the non-standard desires of adventurers may cause issues. Also, while waiting for all of these babies to come about, I also noticed that Snail people don't sleep, at least not in their beds.
- Finally I got a few births, a set of twins and a set of triplets, all Green Tree Frog people
I took a look at one of the new citizens:
Less than a day old, yet an adult! I can give them labors and everything! In fact, many of them were born with skills! However, I also saw (with Dwarf Therapist) that they were still very small.
- After this I knew the eggs must be hatching soon so I took a quick inventory of them: 51!!!!!! 51 eggs were going to hatch in the days to come!
The mothers had been sitting on them in their down time (No Job) but would run off to eat and do other such tasks. This made me fear that something may have gone wrong, but the mothers would always come back.
Finally it happened!
That's a lot of Snake people! Again many of them came fully adult with skills in some labor, and they all started very small, many around 100cm^3.
- What came next I wasn't expecting. I was waiting on my Jaguar people to create some spawn, when out of nowhere, I get a series of announcements
4 of my new Black Mamba people have been made nobility!? How is this possible? They're all direct relations of insignificant adventurers! and beyond that they're not even a week old!
Further one became a Diplomat! I've never seen that before! I check the wiki and it stated "The Diplomat is a noble position responsible for acts of diplomacy. In the current version it is not possible to assign a dwarf to this position, nor will one ever migrate to your fortress." How strange!
I'll keep you guys updated as things develop!
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I added the save file
here