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[FantasticDorf]

With unicorns being the sole aboveground large land animal that is neither sentient or vermin representing [GOOD], it is really hard to distinguish variations of biomes where they can be found, for instance in most typically temperate places they appear as the sole representative of those biomes, even undead ones when a good tundra biome collides with a evil glacier. This now tamable creature with [PET] and [MULTIPLY_VALUE:4] their rarity is reasonably gamebreaking without decreasing both their native population and adding more 'noise' of surrounding animals of both [GOOD] and normal varieties.

I've seen attempts mentioned before to populate the world with fantastical or least creative [GOOD] creatures like phoenixes in the deserts and savhannahs, but a small amount of commitment from toady to consult the for their ideas I think similar to the creature addition drive a while back would help fill the gap and also serve as a good community exercise.

Modding it yourself is a obvious solution but doesn't nessecarily fix the issues at hand for Vanilla gameplay. This may however change by the time of the magic arc redefinition of how the world is generated, but rudimentarily where we are now more [GOOD] creature templates approved of by Toady and Threetoe would be adding to the base game's variety and make [GOOD] areas not just easy areas with extreme profit to be made with minimal danger.

[Manveru Taurënér]

From how I've understood it there won't be any good/evil biomes any more after the myth stuff is done (though it might not be planned for the first pass that's coming up considering it's not listed on the dev plan), instead we'll be getting lots of different sphere biomes depending on the magical forces at work in a particular world (so unicorns will probably be linked to say nature related spheres, whereas undead of different forms will be linked to death/blight/etc spheres). Remember there being a few threads previously discussing sphere related additions, but one for creatures specifically if there wasn't one already would surely help too.

Edit: Dev page stuff for reference:

Core94, RANDOMIZED REGIONS AND THEIR FLORA/FAUNA, (Future): The current good/evil regions should be scrapped and replaced by a system that aligns a region to varying degrees with a set of spheres. In this way you could end up with a desert where the stones sing or a forest where the trees bleed, with all sorts of randomly generated creatures and plants that are appropriate to the sphere settings. It's important that randomly generated objects be introduced to the player carefully during play rather than just being thrown one after another to allow for immersion, though there's also something to be said for cold dumping the player in a world with completely random settings, provided they can access enough information by looking/listening and having conversations, etc. Requires Core92.

[FantasticDorf]

This may however change by the time of the magic arc redefinition of how the world is generated, but rudimentarily where we are now more [GOOD] creature templates

Yes but if there is a magical force of energy, high supernatural creatures might still be able to get in the game, which currently [GOOD] exists almost solely of and most of them may serve as templates to more procedural creatures. So candidates would need to be malleable in such a way that depending on the outcome.

I don't think the [GOOD] and [EVIL] tags will ever really be removed, just the static nature of their environments and nature will be reworked, personally i think that the forces described will be [GOOD] and [EVIL] descriptive but delegated to different spheres with their relevant effects like chaos (a type of force we've already seen) & harmony etc.

There are evil creatures assigned to pretty much every relevant biome in some respects, but only 1 mainstream good creature that in itself is a bit broken, let alone no megabeasts that may be considered [GOOD] game balance wise. Toady will probably present a solution like [GOOD][SAVAGE] and [EVIL] megabeast variations, like dragon subspecies to probably even this out.

[Manveru Taurënér]

And there are actually 4 good creatures currently (7 if you include vermin), satyrs, merpeople and mountain gnomes on top of the unicorns. But yeah, more of them would obviously be god, but my point was that I'm assuming these will be aligned to spheres rather than being marked as good. Preferably I'd say there should be maybe 1-2 fantasy beasts including procedural variations per sphere biome.

And I'm pretty sure they're the good/evil tags are actually going to be flat out removed/replaced, there's also this from some dftalk a while back:

Threetoe:   Okay, so the second question comes from King Mir: 'You've stated previously how the good and evil regions are ultimately going to be replaced by sphere-aligned regions. Recently you added a lot to the evil regions; how have these changes affected your future plans? Are you going to put as much work into every sphere? Will some spheres be much more distinct than others, or will you just stick with good and evil?'

Toady:   We did add a lot of undead and blood rain and mists and things floating around in the evil regions because we were just on our continuing night creatures drive, to get through those. It hasn't really affected the long-term plans. We still plan to diversify what the regions look like. The spheres ... talking about them specifically, like sphere-regions, is ... when you say, 'Will some be more distinct than others?' there are spheres like 'trade', or something like that, where because that's such a civilized concept ... there are probably going to be some spheres that simply aren't appropriate for regions, and a sphere is really just an idea, or a concept, so if you want to make one region more musical, or fiery, or evil, or torture-based, or darker, these different concepts ... that's really what we're getting at, that we wanted to have a strong sense of flavoring to the regions that sets the atmosphere but doesn't just go along this linear scale of good or evil, that allows things to be more diverse. So in a sense just adding stuff to the regions moves us along the way there. We haven't really started that project yet, but I it's still something that I think we're planning to do.

Threetoe:   A lot of the other plans we had for portals to different dimensions where the spheres would be a lot more powerful ...

I definitely hope there'll be some more baseline fantasy creatures to fill those gaps along with what you're suggesting rather than completely random ones, hopefully there'll be some small creature additions for the upcoming myth work as well and not all postponed to some post-economy work timeline.

[PatrikLundell]

It doesn't make sense to remove the good aligned creatures as such, but they could definitely be shifted to other spheres of sphere sets. It would make DF unplayable, in my view, if everything was just procedurally generated as you'd have no idea what anything is (look at the technical success/playability failure of musical instruments and art forms for a preview). There's a reason fantasy sticks to staples such as dwarves/elves/goblins, etc. because people know what those are, even if you're subjecting them to variations so they're not 100% conformant with the main stream (whatever that is) the core is. If a blarg is a member of a civilized race, while a blorg is an animal and a blork is a kind of plant, while blore is a mineral, things are going to be really messy (which is fine for the maximum randomization setting). In low-medium randomization settings things should be basically familiar, but open for twists, so you'd know a unicorn is essentially a horned horse that's aligned away from evil/despair/...

Good megabeasts do not make any sense in the current game, as megabeasts are rampaging monsters. What is a "good" rampaging monster?

[FantasticDorf]

Off the bat you could say from a existing creature, a Hypogriff or a Griffin, weighing in at a megabeast large size, the creature neither needs to be intelligent or malign but most [GOOD] creatures are recognisable and fantastical, at the end of the day it's still a wild animal in a similar way Roc's & Titans manage to ravage mountain ranges where they settle. Going back to that dragon subspecies discussion point where the types are randomised & features correlated to their surroundings for example.

On the other hand, a [GOOD] megabeast could also be a intelligent creature not dissimilar to Minotaur and night trolls, as far as you could stretch your reference material fairie queens for example appearing casting powerful magic against your dwarves offensively and making vermin fairie's on the map manifest as large creatures.

• Its funny to think that outside of necromancers, we don't have creature or megabeast types that utilise lesser minions through some sort of relationship with the ability caster. Some FB who can split off parts of themselves to fight or walk with a little entourage of lesser creatures would be a neat mechanic.

Back on topic there is room to make one, it is up to Toady and the driving point of this suggestion thread to address whether there's a necessity to because of a lack of one.

[ZM5]

Good megabeasts do not make any sense in the current game, as megabeasts are rampaging monsters. What is a "good" rampaging monster?

There are plans for there to be benign megabeasts that give out quests iirc. Perhaps it could be correlated to some kind of percentage token dictating the likelihood of benign megas of that type - bronze colossi, rocs, hydras and dragons probably would have it set to 0 since the colossus is explicitly stated as being bent on mayhem, and the others are just wild animals. On the other hand, titans probably could be benign as they seem to be some form of nature demigods.

I agree with the point about procedural generation though. On one hand, while it is neat, having most sphere-related creatures and so on be procedural would really not be fun at all for gameplay purposes since for every world you'd have to refamiliarize yourself with what everything is. A blorg in one world wouldn't be the same as a blorg in another world. As was said, this kind of lack of information is one of the issues with instruments - aside from a "urist" being different from world to world, the name also doesn't really tell you what it is.

The unicorns and so on should just be moved to appropriate spheres, rather than be outright removed imo. Perhaps to accomodate that there could be a depreciation of the old hardcoded spheres in favor of editable ones.

[Manveru Taurënér]

Didn't mean to imply the creatures would be removed (and also forgot to list the Gorlak!), but yeah, I agree as well that there should be a solid not entirely random base to build on. I'm not sure what the latest stated direction was, it's one of those things that seems to have shifted a bit over time and the talked about randomization settings when making a world supposedly allowing people to shift things more to their liking. I get why it's been shoved further down the line though, the reasoning here does make some sense:

Threetoe:   Okay. So the next question comes from Sizik, and he asks: "You currently have three in-game, mythical, non-existent creatures: the centaur, the griffon, and the chimera. What are your plans for these? Did you pick these three to be fanciful? And not say, unicorns or minotaurs? What about procedurally-generated mythical creatures?"

Toady:   Yeah, it's interesting because the minotaur is also a mixture of two creatures, like the centaur, griffon and chimera, right? The minotaur has the bull's head and the human body, and the unicorn is like a mixture of a horse and a narwhal. Those are real creatures.

Threetoe:   It could be said that all the animal people are the same kind of thing.

Toady:   That's true, that's true, the animal people. The real trick with, like, the centaur is that it, unlike the minotaur which is practically a human with horns or something, the centaur really does have pieces from two separate creatures, and the other ones have two or more as well. So it's one of those things we hope to do procedurally, where their bodies would have splicing points and you could kind of glue them together, but it slowed down a bit when we started worrying about like, well, what about the materials and how would the hair work. It's not an impossible problem, or even particularly difficult, but it's time consuming and just annoying enough that we haven't done it yet. I expect what will happen is that we'll just start getting procedural glued-together creatures and the specific ones may become real at some point, but I'm not sure.

Threetoe:   [garbled] before, the owlbear or whatever.

Toady:   He he he... You never know...

Like how a lot of existing fantasy creatures are just that, mixes of man and beast that could be done procedurally with the same result, and maybe you could even make it so that if it generates say a half horse half man creature it will be called a centaur or a magical firebird will be called a phoenix, but leaving it up to chance would of course make the chances of a world having ones particular favorite mythological beasts quite rare unless they were made baseline first.

As for "good" megabeasts, beenevolent dragons are enough of a fantasy staple to allow in some worlds I'd say. Those are the kind of values that would make sense to randomize imo, some worlds having dragons that are simple giant beasts, others where they are highly intelligent and meddle in world affairs and collect tribute for their hoards and so forth, as well as creating different kinds with different colors and breath attacks etc. Just need to be kept in line enough that dragons still stay dragon unless you bump up the settings.

[PatrikLundell]

My comment regarding "good" megabeast was made with the understanding that we were discussing short term measures to tide us over the big wait and without new mechanics. In that context magic is out of the question, of course. While intelligent megabeasts probably aren't, quest giving probably is, so rampaging is about the only thing megabeasts are good for currently.

In the longer term, yes, magic powerful beings are definitely reasonable, as are intelligent quest giving powerful beings.

As for dragons, I'd expect we'll see worlds where dragons are primordial animals and others where they are powerful, intelligent schemers (Shadowrun style?), some of which may have taken on some kind of protector role. Yet other worlds may have both intelligent and beast dragons depending on sub species (where sub species and sub species properties probably would be generated procedurally). A problem with dragon species, though, is that it's hard enough for them to match up and procreate currently, so it would be very hard if split into species. Races (i.e. dissimilar subspecies being able to reproduce) might make it possible, as would mate finding behavior in larger worlds if the number of variants present in that world is kept down to a reasonable level (portals with off world feeding of the pool would be another possibility).

As for spheres, I'd use some kind tags to indicate which spheres sphere aligned critters are always aligned to, may be aligned to, and possibly sphere's they are opposed to/can't stand (an example without any particular application in mind: a creature that may be/is aligned with good and and may be aligned with water, but cannot handle cold. Such a critter/plant could be found in non freezing biome that are either good or non deserts, and may require both spheres to match if aligned with both). For each world where such creatures are found, world gen would lock down which one(s) of the possible spheres the critter aligns with in that world.