Do humanoid creatures (such as ogres, giants, and animal people) belong to a civilization, and therefore perhaps have 'cultures' or are they considered wildlife?
If they do, can they become things like heroes, warriors or musicians during world-gen?
Answer you may be looking for is [LOCAL_POPS_PRODUCE_HEROES] which was a token introduced with 44. tavern arc responsible for creating the populations of animalpeople, gorlaks, mushroom men and other weird noncivilized oddities. [OUTSIDE_CONTROLLABLE] creates a single adventurer instance of that animal (any animal) not affilliated to any entity, but [MEGABEAST] and [SEMI_MEGABEAST] always draw hostility because they themselves are very hostile.
On the whole, how megabeasts operate
can still change in future arcs, Toady still has eyes on dragon subspecies in development goals and re-expanding ([POWER] to let MB's take over civs been functionally disabled for a time) & how they interact with entities (they can still draw abstract religion-sphere worship, though there's no reprecussions when you kill a particular cults "god", animal sacredness is a goal too)As for cultures, no, Giants might live in the same "lair" because they're members of a family in a sense, or other creatures inside a "mound" (a night troll earth hut with a few civilized knick-nacks and their loot) but it is no way a cohesive society, it has no entity or structure it's just a common place owned by them. Alternative societies to the settlement tokens and other outlying little social groups may be explored closer to the law arc & scenario's, mentioning in the last FotF nomadic groups of animalpeople etc. Which sounds closer to what you might visualize in your head for ambient [SEMI_INTELLIGENT] wildlife like said troggs and trolls. Far off, after the big wait, 5+ years kind of deal.
Would you believe I only had to go back a bit to answer my question, who would've known...
My stance on the matter is much the same now as it was then for 47.05, gremlins however as the only intentional "intelligent" pet, are still buggy to-date and very hard to integrate into your fort and keep tame, @PatrickLundell particularly has a axe to grind, having captured and trained them before trying to keep to strictly vanilla gameplay.
Though i know its not worth the bother really for all the modding, 3rd party tooling and waiting to make the game feature viable without homebrewing your own underlings, which isnt really as satisfying as knowing the potential reward that can be gotten from the effort of a gremlin trap.
Toady, with the new screens discerning animals & civilians much clearer will a gremlin's UI as a intelligent-feature-creature finally be cleaned to a usable standard to try and fit in with the rest of the dwarves?)I doubt any improvement with the steam df graphical would be mega-amazing drastic in a rework on release in this area, but anything that is a bit clearer helps, as well as seeing the said gremlins happyness passively in civilian counts if that can be correlated to how likely they are to go and petition for full labors.
A "go apply for petition" button as soon as the creature is trained to maximum would be easier though.