It was inevitable. And terryfying. And perhaps for the best.
Do the hellcats have any specific source of inspiration? Are they bakeneko, or something more generic/an original creation? [EVIL] and underground biomes don’t mesh, they’ll appear in any cavern regardless of surface biome alignment, like e.g. reachers.
The ”intelligence-granting headpat” is a nice feature, for those who are put off by the uncomfortable implications of pet humanoids (including myself). Wait, maybe it’s not, do they stay pets after being granted sentience?
It is sad, but not unexpected.
Hellcats were just inspired by boring old regular ideas of demonic cats (I guess technically Runescape could be said to have inspired them, since it's the first thing that introduced me to the concept
). That's useful to know about the cavern creatures stuff, my original idea was to have them both available to evil creatures, as well as in deep caverns. I based most of my info on what was listed on the wiki, which mentioned that cave creatures need to occur at depth 1 to be available to civilisations, though I don't think that would actually matter for goblin civs because I ended up giving hellcats
COMMON_DOMESTIC so they're always available to them, just like beak dogs.
As for the pet thing, yeah, they remain pets even after being granted intelligence, though to be fair pets and companions are treated almost exactly the same in adventure mode (aside from being able to name, lead, and gift pets). However, since uplifted creatures are considered both pets and intelligent beings, you can gift them themselves as pets, so they're not owned by anyone else. No idea of the fort mode ramifications of doing any of that, though :b
You ever hear of Bakeneko? Ordinary cats that develop various supernatural abilities, including but not limited to animating the dead.
I once added wild Nekomata that, if they encountered a regular cat, would secretly give it an animate dead interaction. Much fun would be had.
Aw man, I very briefly looked into them when seeing if there would be any appropriate names I could use for things, and must've missed that whole animating the dead part :c Secret dead-animating cats
do sound very
fun. Did you release that mod anywhere?