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[TheBeardyMan]

If civilizations of aquatic or flying races are added, there should be new game mechanics for trade depot accessibility for trading with those races.

For aquatic civilizations, the trade depot and an unbroken path from it to the edge of the map must be flooded to a depth of at least 4/7 - if you want to trade with them, make sure that your broker and trade haulers can swim.

For flying civilizations, the trade depot must be outdoors with no roof and in the top 5 z-levels of the map - if you want to trade with them, your broker and trade haulers will have to climb a lot of stairs to the top of a tower.

[Fikilili]

I'm not a fan of endless splitting of races in some fantasy. I don't really want High, Dark, Grey, Shadow, whatever Elves for example. I'd be more interested in there just being elves, and those elves have various cultures that we might associate with these differences.

Really, I wasn't trying to make specific hard-coded species of elves like most mods would do, but rather to propose variants that could come into play during world-gen. So that if you got elves that get more used to icy biomes, they get more blueish/whiteish. Or if they live they by swamps they green-er or browner. Hell, let them have a civil war and let their appearance reflect their division. Or make tribes with each their own physical attributes (not countries, tribes within a kingdom).
Or if some elves decide to deal with dark mystical powers, they get pale skin and dark purple eyes and starting mumbling stuff in the dark. Quite literally, let them change appearance according to their history. Sure it may sound manichean, but DF literally has "Evil Biomes". It's not hardcoded in the sense that the game will automatically set all those sorts of elves right from the get-go like it does with every other creature, but rather let the AI do what it wants and change the tribes accordingly.

As for animal people, meh. I mean sure they exist, they could live in their own societies or within human societies, but their implementation feels weird. Like I could see some Redwall stuff going on like with Rats joining the Goblins and being ruled over by a giant rat, or Pig men appearing as disgusting, fat, blood thirsty fiends. Or even Hen-people and duck-people forming an alliance and starting their own societies based on farm-like hierarchies à la Donjon.

[Nordlicht]

I mean humans are apepeople, so I don't see why other animal people can't have the same diversity and full implementation as own civs as humans and the other three do. I guess it's mostly we are not used to it, because in most other fantasy they are some kind of lone outcasts.


I really liked an idea i read years ago, where animal people refer to the dreamtime where animals and rocks could speak (or something like this), and the more mundane the world becomes. the more they will vanish. But this would be a different approach, though.

[Fikilili]

I mean humans are apepeople

le monke

I mean, I was thinking of a mod that explores animal people a bit further by implementing some tweaks and change to certain animal people. But I dropped the idea for better generated structures for human and elven civs, but I also dropped the idea for the Halloween mod I wanted to release this month, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to drop this aswell cuz I suck at programming.

[cauaule fantasy writing]

I think there should be maybe a sort of patchwork people like how Necromancer experiments work but an entire people. Like a people who have an entire system of random parts and bits. Like a mix of random horns lizard teet and wings. Squids tentaclse and spider eyes. A mix of monsters ink and John carnpeter. They all have randome abillty like forgotten beast. mabey they can have really werid musical insturemnts.
and they all have super wacky names like zoopzoop bingbam and MCfungin badaba and greg.   

[delphonso]

Cauaule, that should be in the cards for the Myth and Magic arc - just wait...2 years or more.

Animal people are probably the most neglected things in DF. For being around for forever, they are incredibly shallow. I'd love for them to get more attention.

[Fikilili]

Animal people are probably the most neglected things in DF. For being around for forever, they are incredibly shallow. I'd love for them to get more attention.

Well, I was thinking that animal people should create societies that are more or less based on the actual animal societies that exist (ha).
So for exemple, let's take chickenpersons; their own society is based around how chicks really behave in groups. Most of their civilization is composed of hen managing ressource gathering and craft-making, whereas roosters battle to have the dominant role and are more likely to be soldiers or nobles. Their clothes and attire could look very sophisticated and clean, and have high regardS of great craftmanship/craftdwarfship. So if you were to trade with them, they would expect quality work coming from you. They would also have one of the fastest growing communities as they usually have many children.
They could be allied with other bird-people, such as duckpersons, who could be less social and prefer to have a quieter existence, if not just travel at all times, and maybe some duckmen would be solo adventurers who look for danger.
Most other bird-people would be very migrating races and fly around, but also have a strong sense of family-bonding.

Let's take reptile-men. I wouldn't go for the same as Skyrim's honestly. I think Reptile men would be more secretive and be able to form bonds with one another, hiding their bodies behind cloaks and a whole lot of rich ornamental clothing. They would be very talented regarding certain things, such as crafts, martial arts or politics/trading. They would make good fortress neighbors. However, they would rarely reproduce and give birth to a single lizard they would treat with much care, like personaly educating him or her (or it, since some lizards don't have any gender). Turtle-men, Tortoise men, Gila Monster men and Gecko men would also be included in their communities. They could also have distinctive traits, like weird ears, eyes, different types of claws or more arms and legs, maybe even a beak.

Rats would live in mass underground, or be allied to the goblins. They would also probably live in caverns or lairs like Kobolds. I dunno, I like Skavens.

[cauaule fantasy writing]

True.

Animal people need more depth. mabye diffrent animals get a civ that is based on there biome, animal diversty,diffrent sort of magical aliement maybe when the Myth update comes out. You could have diffrent a Mabey you could have bands of roaming animal badits( speaficlacally animals who steal from famers like rabbits, foxes, badgers  who  spieacficly hunt down civs with high amounts of farming / pasterazation. Or if there leader is fat or short or lean. Or horrible crocks who may be diffrently looks but nothing more than mean! In all seriousness though It would be good to see more diversty and just animal people doing things. Imagen fairytail or Aseop fables type animal civs. Mabey even wizard animals or nercromancer vultures where you can make a skesisk.


  I also think it would be cool to mabey have construct race like golmes or even just straingth up normal/magic robots.

[cauaule fantasy writing]

I was thinking that here should be rat men who are like skaven. Or mabey theif guilds of ratmen.

[Fikilili]

Cauale, I know I'm not well placed to ask you this because I do a lot of grammatical mistakes myself and I'll surely sound like a bastard, but please, can you verify your orthograph before posting?

[Nordlicht]

Somehow I get the feeling that most ideas about animal people place them in some kind of narrow behavior spectrum, and I'm not sure if a fantasy simulator should really limit itself that way.

I mean, do we really behave like monkeys? I guess in some ways we are limited the same, but humans are always seen as the default standard for everything, and every other race is basically a specific kind of humans. (elves -> nature loving humans, dwarves -> crafty industrious humans...)

How would a civilization of rats envision us?


As a side note, I would love the game to create Beatrix Potter worlds, with fitting graphics

[Pillbo]

Interesting note, chicken people, duck people, and pig people are some of the only animals not to have a person variant.

Cauale, I know I'm not well placed to ask you this because I do a lot of grammatical mistakes myself and I'll surely sound like a bastard, but please, can you verify your ortograph before posting?

I believe you mean "orthograph".

[Fikilili]

I believe you mean "orthograph".

Nobody's perfect

Anyway, I feel like I'm only proposing sh!t ideas in this thread. Like honestly, my biggest fear about letting animal people getting too crazy is that the game would get ten times goofier than it actually is and/or end in an absolute furfest. It's kinda like having snail-people being the harbingers of death and axololt people to be worse than goblins and summoners of demons. I mean, it definetely sounds like a DF thing, but I think some things may get too goofy at some point.
Hell, some human versions of certain animals are very hard to visualize, and some of them must have the most pitiful of existence. Like Sponge-men or worm-men. Hell, Crab-men of any kind have ridiculous body proportions. So much so Kruggsmash of all people had trouble to envision them.

[Maximum Spin]

Anyway, I feel like I'm only proposing sh!t ideas in this thread. Like honestly, my biggest fear about letting animal people getting too crazy is that the game would get ten times goofier than it actually is and/or end in an absolute furfest. It's kinda like having snail-people being the harbingers of death and axololt people to be worse than goblins and summoners of demons. I mean, it definetely sounds like a DF thing, but I think some things may get too goofy at some point.
Hell, some human versions of certain animals are very hard to visualize, and some of them must have the most pitiful of existence. Like Sponge-men or worm-men. Hell, Crab-men of any kind have ridiculous body proportions. So much so Kruggsmash of all people had trouble to envision them.

You do seem to have a rather limiting conception of them. I don't think the animal people should "be like" anything specifically, they should have procedurally generated social values like everyone else.

[Eric Blank]

That would be ideal, yeah. Maybe modifying those ethical/civ values based on traits the animals actually have, like carnivores would never be opposed to killing animals, grazers would never have any ethical issues killing plants, and large_predators specifically could have increased value for martial prowess/power as values go. But every civ should be a little different in all the ways every human civ should be different, or even more randomized. And yeah, maybe it's a good idea to limit the number of animal person civs per world to like 1 for pockets up to 5 for large (as a worldgen setting like we already have for secrets, so you could turn it up to 11 or down to 0)

Maybe slightly higher than average fantasy rating worlds can have one or two  "metropolitan" civs that have large populations of many different species together: as opposed to what we have now, where occasionally civs may have small populations of animal people, these civs would have large fractions, as much as 75%, being animal people from surrounding wilderness populations, or other civs' races, without having to conquer them. Some fantasy settings literally have lassaiz-faire-economy driven "civs" with minimal government oversight and lots of foreigners, which DF mostly only has in the event of civs conquering each other and integrating populations of conquered sites which spread, at least for the moment.

My biggest gripes are currently still with goblin and kobold civs for killing fps and being unvisitable with the "identify yourself" repetition bug, and elves for having the least interesting characters to talk to and fewest interesting structures (most non-market retreats don't even have the equivalent of a mead hall/noble mound.)

Oh, and don't worry about "shit ideas;" Toady will read everything and come up with better ideas if he likes even part of our bad ideas.