I've been trying to find worldgen values that produce worlds with a lot of civilized animal people. By 'a lot' I mean having them everywhere in copious numbers and thus at least somehow likely to visit my fortress. I thought I'd SCIENCE a little, so I made up some measurements....
My criteria for checking how 'animal people friendly' a world is right off the bat:
- Relative number of historic animal people. (Count of occurence of '_MAN' in the legends xml dump compared to the total number of historic figures.)
I guess if worldgen produces many animal people that actually do something in the world (even if it's just luckily dying of old age), it is likely to do so when running a fortress. I haven't checked if this shows in fortress mode, but it nicely corresponds to the next criterium.
- Amount of playable civilized animal people types in adventurer.
For people to visit in fortress mode, they have to be part of a civilization. Bonus for spread out populations, because one elven civilization with three bird people kinds doesn't really help much with spreading animal people. I have had animal people join any kind of civilization in worldgen, not just elves, so I consider rat people living with humans another success.
- How many animal people visitors actually show up.
I had a wren woman bard once. She was awesome .... and kinda the cause why I even try to get this kind of world again. I'll need to see how the first two criteria even correspond. There's a myriad of other factors in a running fortress, so i guess this is somewhat arbritrary anyways.
I've had success pushing the relative historic animal people number and adventurer opportunities up a lot by forcing more savagery (min savagery at 25-30, high number of high-savagery tiles to not reject) and having more varied regions by forcing one of each of the main region types. Both animal people criteria easily double consistently doing this. 'Sprinkling' the savagery about with high variance values helped enourmously with rejections while still producing higher amounts of animal people. I guess a settlement doesn't need to be smack-dab in the middle of a max-savagery area to get animal people in world gen, as this helped a lot with human and dwarf civs having some. My wren bard came from a dwarven civ.
I've been generating 65x65 worlds for easier iteration - does this limit the possibilities too much? Has anyone scienced this stuff before? Do you guys maybe have a fancy trick my rusty DF brain just skips?
I know there's hacky ways to make the number of animal people explode, but i'd rather see what vanilla can come up with in this case. (Allowing all civs to settle in savagery would surely produce a lot of civilized animal people...)
...triple bonus points for anyone finding parameters that produce giant animal people in any kind of predictable fashion. A fellow player had a giant peach faced lovebird person visit. (v.47.04)
One of the best ones I got so far:
That's 1882 historic animal people on approximately 16k overall historic figures. 10%!
This world also has animal people in every civ.