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[GOTOTOTOE]

That's an excellent point. More variation in culture and style for every race in every every world would be appreciated. Elf retreats and goblin pits are literally my least favorite sites, goblin sites because the population explosion issue makes them unapproachable, and elves because they don't have enough interesting infrastructure. Iirc in the threetoe story about the elf/goblin hybrid child, the elf queen lives in a sort of natural palace of a tree, with a semi-interior setting which the forest retreats lack now. I'd like to see more variations on the way elven trees are grown, with some having interior spaces and rooms formed from trunk/branch walls or something. We never get to see shaping trees actually growing products, they just have meat and fruit stockpiles for the most part, like weird arboreal warehouses where items are hung out to dry. Their homes are always out on open branches, they don't have a thick branch ceiling or anything to keep them dry, which is weird, but I guess it's canon that elves are like immune to hypothermia and don't mind being soaking wet?

They could use some soil dens for animals, because some of their animals would prefer to live in dens even if elves don't want to live underground.

Human civs need more variation, or even one or two more civs, including mostly nomadic tribes and more structured empires. And more variation on architectural styles. Some cultures build round mud brick houses with a flat roof, others build sloped/ramped roofs, some use two-story structures or buildings which are supported on stilts. That would make human civs much more interesting. Oh, and workshops. They don't have places to work.

As far as improvements to the creatures themselves, I am eternally frustrated with cave adaptation in fort mode. Your militia becomes useless as soon as they walk out onto the surface to fight something. I often build large aboveground structures just because subterranean life results in such vulnerability. I would almost like to see cave adaptation as like a caste thing, where dwarves who grew up in subterranean mountain halls became cave adapted, but the populations of hillocks and forts aren't affected, so only some of your dwarves can even become cave adapted, depending on where they grew up. Or maybe if nausea on exposure to sunlight wasn't such a problem...

Animal people should spawn civs occasionally, but keep wild populations too. Right now you can't do that, as civ creatures never appear in the wild.

Subterranean animal people definitely could use little hovels they can protect themselves in and maybe some manner of interconnected trade network, like paths you can follow to reach other groups, they come wandering through and trade, can point adventurers to the nearest exit/cave level change.

Oh, what about more, and increased cultural variations of races? Like, they're all dwarves, but dwarves from civ b are smaller, and have higher average endurance, and dwarves from civ a have higher average agility.

PLEASE

[GOTOTOTOE]

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.

idk, i think that this would rather be a feature controlled by the wackyness setting in the magic update. i also kind of like the experiments that're currently there, although i dislike how little of them there are and that they basically don't form any large populations like other races do

[Lidku]

What's with Goblins having 9mil+ trenches all over the place in their sites? It makes no sense and it feels like a WW1 simulator lol. Goblins really need a rework BADLY.

[Shonai_Dweller]

What's with Goblins having 9mil+ trenches all over the place in their sites? It makes no sense and it feels like a WW1 simulator lol. Goblins really need a rework BADLY.

That's a sites issue. Any Dark Fortress civ will do that regardless of their race. And a map rewrite, making a site rewrite possible, is exactly what's coming up in Mythgen.

[Fikilili]

I don't know about you, but I would like Tarn to make literal living skeletons a thing in DF. As of now, there's only undead corpses and skeletons can't even walk or do anything, as they are completely devoided of muscles, and so they die almost instantly. Maybe giving them some kind of black mass to make them stand would be welcomed? They would make a nice "evil" race to fight instead of Goblins. Or a nice civ with funny bones.

[Orange-of-Cthulhu]

I musy say I rather like the races as they are.

I think the elves need to get upgraded fighting wise; for instance they could maybe only use bows and have good skills in bowmanship. It would make it a bit different to fight them then.

I would add the option that some of the other types of creature had possibility to get settlements - they should be rare, have low population almost static and almost never engage with other civs in terms or wars and such. So it would more be a rare special thing you could find.

That could be like a city for giants or cyclops or for animal people. Where there'd be like 20 giants living there.

Opens the possibility of an ultra rare invasion of a cyclops "army" if you happen to embark right next to a cyclops "city".

[Fikilili]

With the inclusion of magic, we should expect more races to be tied with magic. Including elves.
And with that, I'd like to ask you what could this link between races and magic could bring.

[Eric Blank]

I've been experimenting with giving the various races unique powers that individuals can occasionally obtain (as well as generic powers any person of any race can acquire.)

There's new races arising during worldgen, experiments like the necromancers do. Not always by evil needs to conquer, but sometimes experiments such as attempting to understand the nature of the soul or creation.

Gods altering existing races, again.

Iirc some stuff Toady pulled from the myth generator prototype included races that were angels or created through magic in some sense, being devoted to particular deities or forces. Maybe elementals too, like rock or gem people creating societies. Will ice people survive outside the frozen tundra? Maybe they're magically protected from melting up to a certain point. There's a note in the raws about blizzard men should be made out of ice/snow. Nobody will enjoy having magma men around if they don't stop setting everything on fire.

I also read on some wikipedia article about Philippine folklore, something about an extremely wealthy and powerful tribe of people who hid themselves away through magical means, and could abduct other people and force them to eat black rice, indoctrinating them into the tribe. I also recall some Hawaiian legends about a race of "little people" who built some things on the islands before disappearing or being killed off. Maybe lost tribes (or hamlets/hillocks as the case may be) due to magic are possible? Imagine a plane that consists exclusively of a single town inhabited by a reclusive group of magic users who don't want visitors.

Oh, and who can forget all the dragon-offspring in D&D. Half-dragons everywhere. Magical creatures coming into town and leaving them stuck with a bunch of hybrid children or children with special abilities. The escapades of Zeus.

Or just as silly, magically intelligent animals. Not like humanoid animal people, just intelligent animals created by gods or forces or regions. There is a knowledge sphere, what if regions beholden to it often produce magically intelligent plants and animals? Or animal-people coming from not savage regions, but regions with spheres like knowledge, or deformity; people going in and coming out changed into part-animal/animal-person/centaur-like forms, or entirely turned into talking animals. How would a society of intelligent kangaroos survive? Probably not well, I've heard kangaroo paws arent particularly dexterous. Better than the snakes will fare, though.

[Fikilili]

I've never really been a fan of what people call "Elemental magic", because as soon as we explore powers and all, you start thinking that all of it is pretty much BS. So alright, we got "fire" and "ice magic". So far so good. But then we get to "water magic", like you control water and fluids. Doesn't that mean you can rip off the guts of someone who just drank? And why aren't "water" and "ice magic" the same? And "air magic", can you deprive anyone of air? Or, dare I say, inflate them with air? It's pretty terrifying. Then there's "Earth magic", what qualifies as "Earth"? There's millions of different types of soils and ground and it's not just dirt or rocks or whatever. And then people make it even more confusing with "rock magic" which... More or less levitation centered around rocks.

I always prefered two alternatives, either you do it like FMA and have elemental magic being based on the periodic table, or create "magical elements" that are more or less magical interpretations of existing elements. Kinda like in Jojo where Magician Red's fire isn't actual fire but a form of magic that looks and acts like it, to the difference that Avdol can control it. I would have prefered to used different examples, but I don't think anyone would have known the source material.

But yeah, I like your ideas Eric, they're pretty good ones. I would probably not be all for half-anything in general because it's already hard to envision certain animal-people in the game, and I'm too much of a fan of the anatomical abominations of DnD. But still good suggestions nonetheless. I would have imagined Gods creating a magical race and send them to help their worshippers, like literally god-sent people.

[Nordlicht]

I wonder if DF should have it*s own periodic table, and what would be the benefits to it.

[Orange-of-Cthulhu]

I was just thinking, I would like the Elves to have blue skin.

[Shonai_Dweller]

I was just thinking, I would like the Elves to have blue skin.

So make them have blue skin. That's the great thing about all the customisation options that Toady's made for the game. Blue Elves.

Sadly the ease of modding in anything you can imagine becomes a lot more complex when the game goes graphical. Or at least, more complex to share with other people anyway.

[LilyInTheWater]

With the inclusion of magic, we should expect more races to be tied with magic. Including elves.
And with that, I'd like to ask you what could this link between races and magic could bring.

In Threetoe's stories, elves always seem to have mystical connection with nature, fairies (not the kind in dwarf fortress right now, like actual fairies you find in fairy tales who will take you to fairyland and stuff), and animal people. In Cado's Magical Journey, Cado saves a dwarf from her seemingly eternal enslavement to a fairy the elves seem to serve or work with.

Plus Tarn actually went over how other races are connected to magic in an example creation myth his existing generator had. Dwarves in it were magically connected to this evil thing, forgot it was called but they could do stuff like give up a finger to bruise people. That is definably planned, but it appears to vary between magic systems though I'm sure Tarn has a slider somewhere to determine how much this connection is based on one's race or not.

ThreeToe's stories are meant to show off a lot of the potential stuff dwarf fortress can have, actually. They've managed to answer a lot of questions/suggestions I might have through reading them, how they might work and so forth.

[GOTOTOTOE]

I've been experimenting with giving the various races unique powers that individuals can occasionally obtain (as well as generic powers any person of any race can acquire.)

There's new races arising during worldgen, experiments like the necromancers do. Not always by evil needs to conquer, but sometimes experiments such as attempting to understand the nature of the soul or creation.

Gods altering existing races, again.

Iirc some stuff Toady pulled from the myth generator prototype included races that were angels or created through magic in some sense, being devoted to particular deities or forces. Maybe elementals too, like rock or gem people creating societies. Will ice people survive outside the frozen tundra? Maybe they're magically protected from melting up to a certain point. There's a note in the raws about blizzard men should be made out of ice/snow. Nobody will enjoy having magma men around if they don't stop setting everything on fire.

I also read on some wikipedia article about Philippine folklore, something about an extremely wealthy and powerful tribe of people who hid themselves away through magical means, and could abduct other people and force them to eat black rice, indoctrinating them into the tribe. I also recall some Hawaiian legends about a race of "little people" who built some things on the islands before disappearing or being killed off. Maybe lost tribes (or hamlets/hillocks as the case may be) due to magic are possible? Imagine a plane that consists exclusively of a single town inhabited by a reclusive group of magic users who don't want visitors.

Oh, and who can forget all the dragon-offspring in D&D. Half-dragons everywhere. Magical creatures coming into town and leaving them stuck with a bunch of hybrid children or children with special abilities. The escapades of Zeus.

Or just as silly, magically intelligent animals. Not like humanoid animal people, just intelligent animals created by gods or forces or regions. There is a knowledge sphere, what if regions beholden to it often produce magically intelligent plants and animals? Or animal-people coming from not savage regions, but regions with spheres like knowledge, or deformity; people going in and coming out changed into part-animal/animal-person/centaur-like forms, or entirely turned into talking animals. How would a society of intelligent kangaroos survive? Probably not well, I've heard kangaroo paws arent particularly dexterous. Better than the snakes will fare, though.

sorry for resurrecting this thread but how'd you do the "attempting to understand the nature of the soul or creation." thing?

[towerator]

Eventually, will some beast race start as civilizations of their own? I'd like to see them fleshed out. Not all of them in a world should become "civilization-founding", just 2-3, and they could have some custom city models depending on archetypes:

-Flying avian: Large tower-like structures, as citizen typically access their dwellings from their balcony. Dwellings themselves are as open as possible, with many windows. Nobles live higher than commoners, with the monarch living on the roof of a particularily high tower.

-Simian: Ewok-esque treehouses built around the trunks of large trees. Unlike elves, they do not resent cutting wood, which is the preferred building material for their dwellings. Buildings are sometimes linked by rope bridges.

-Reptilian: Dwellings cave to their owners' needs of cool spaces as well as hotter ones by being made of stones or bricks, with few windows. The roof is accessed with a staircase, and is almost flat, for sunbathing purposes.

-Burrowing carnivore: (bear, fox...): Cities are small in size, but more numerous than normal, and centered around a large pen used to capture and raise game. Most buildings are underground and stem from it.

-Rodent: City is built somewhat chaotically, with new buildings being erected around, above and below existing buildings. Dwellings typically house several families at once, despite their small sizes.

Any more idea?