Note: I ran into quite a few frustrating problems while developing this mod that kept discouraging me from working on it (absolutely read the "Notes / Known Issues" section before using!). I worked on it on and off, usually quitting after reaching another annoying roadblock out of my control, with the last point of quitting being right at the point the mod was in its final playtesting stage. It's just been sitting on my hard drive gathering dust, potentially fully functional (or closeish to it) and with a full writeup of what everything does, and so I've decided to just go ahead and upload it in case somebody gets some use out of it. Just know there could be problems with it.
Download LinkStyle- Crop-centred gameplay. Grow furniture straight from the ground, weave wicker goods, and build out of bushes and flowers.
- Above-ground requirements. Needing sunlight for nourishment, Florans will get sick and potentially die if left without sunlight for too long.
- Defend yourself with a selection of living plant creatures that are specialised for a slightly tower-defence feeling style.
FloransThe Florans are peaceful plant-based creatures. Their aim is to bring more plant life into the world, brining life into areas where there is little or none, forming sprawling gardens from living plants they shape for function.
The destruction of plantlife - especially trees - is greatly frowned upon by Floran society (though they won't turn away wooden products like the elves). Chopping of trees is forbidden unless sanctioned by site governments, being only done in extreme circumstances like preventing disease from spreading, otherwise Florans are expected to work and build around them. Even when given the blessing to do so, most Florans will be upset at being told to cut down a tree.
Using the plants for otherwise destructive manners, such as for drinks in places without water, or crafting into wicker furnishings, is a practice debated amongst Florans, but it's generally accepted that if such things are necessary, or that more plants are grown to replace them, such things are acceptable.
- Being plants, Florans photosynthesise and don't need to eat (they still need to drink, however). This has some added benefits of not having to break from whatever they're doing to eat, though means that they require semi-regular trips outside. Being away from the sun for half of a season solid (about how long it takes for a dwarf to become "Hungry") is lethal to a Floran, though this isn't very likely for above-ground forts. This wilting mechanic follows the same rules as cave adaptation, meaning that it's quickly recovered from (1 tick spent outside in the sun offsets 10 ticks spent inside).
- Florans can have one of four seasonal forms, with colourations and personality traits befitting the season. During adventure mode, you'll only find the Florans of the current season out in the wilderness, whereas Florans born in civilization will have a form of a random season.
- Florans reach adulthood at 5, have no max age, and grow to be the size of elf/dwarves.
- They're naturally immune to the effects of nausea, dizziness, and fevers, however will lose their resistance to dizziness, as well as become dizzy, as they progress through the stages of wilting.
Plants- Spindlewood - A fast-growing spindly plant that grows pretty much everywhere. Its primary use is for wickercraft, being able to be weaved into a number of furnishings and objects by a Weaver at a Craftsman's Workshop.
- Tangleleaf - A leafy bush that grows pretty much everywhere. Their leaves (made available by processing the plant into bags) are invaluable to a Floran garden, as leaves are required for crafting bushes - a staple for Floran construction - as well as woven objects.
- Rainblossom - A rainbow coloured flower that grows pretty much everywhere. Their flowers (made available by processing the plant into bags) are useful to Florans for making flower decorations, as well as blooms for building with. As one of the only plants with gatherable flowers, growing rainblossoms is important if you want to use any of the flower-related features.
- Woodsculpt - A valuable, somewhat slow-growing plant that grows pretty much everywhere. Woodsculpt plants are strange things, being able to grow into distinct shapes of furnishings and items straight from the ground (availabe after processing the plant with the "extract grown furniture/items" reaction). Woodsculpt wood is more precious than most, having a material value of 2, and though the products lack quality levels, they make up for it in quantity, what with skilled growers increasing the yields of plants that they grow. The following items are available as woodsculpt plants: armor stands, barrels, beds, bins, cabinets, chairs, chest, coffins, doors, statues, tables, weapon racks, cages, nest boxes, jugs, hives, minecarts, wheelbarrows, stepladders, bookcases, pedestals, buckets, altars.
- Timbersprig - A source of wood logs (after extracting them from the plant with the "extract grown furniture/items" reaction) without having to murder noble trees in their prime. Consider this an optional way of getting access to standard carpentry methods if you don't want to have to otherwise rely on woodsculpt or wicker plants for your wooden products. Grows slower than regular plants.
- Snaphydra, Man eater, Goblin's-breath, Creeping nettle - Plant forms of the Florans' plant creatures. They grow slowly for plants, taking almost a whole season to mature. Their pods aren't useful for much without DFhack (aside from being very valuable growths), but with DFhack they can be hatched into adult forms of their creature counterparts with the "release plant creature from pod" reaction at the Farmer's Workshop (this is also the only way to get more seeds back from the plant, besides the creatures themselves). Since normally-born plant creatures usually take a whole year to fully mature, making them this way is 3 times as fast.
CreaturesAll of the non-Floran plant creatures have several traits that make them more beneficial than regular fleshy animals: they feel no pain, can't be stunned, don't truly think, don't get tired, don't get dizzy, don't get fevers, and feel no fear. Unlike Florans, you won't have to worry about them wilting from lack of sunlight (this was a gameplay decision so you don't have to worry about wrangling all those animals). For simplicity, each of the plants give birth to live young like standard creatures (try not to think about it), though you can use the DFhack-enabled plant growing method if you're looking for a more exotic way of breeding them.
- Snaphydra - A small, sentient plant with many snapping mouths. No bigger than a cat, these plants enjoy scurrying around and eating up vermin.
- Man eater - A man-sized plant with a large, snapping jaw as a head. It devours any creature that strays too close. They are very slow-moving, and shouldn't be expected to give chase to fleeing creatures. Useful for defending areas you know attackers will be travelling through.
- Goblin's-breath - A large, squat flower that constantly spews a foul-smelling substance. Its gasses are nauseating for poisonable creatures who inhale them (Florans and plant creatues are immune to this, as they are not classed as poisonable creatures). Their oils can be milked from them and potentially be turned into soap, however the foul smell makes it less valuable than that of other plants. It has the same manoeuvrability (or lack thereof) as man eaters.
- Creeping nettle - A crawling mass of vines, the size of a dog. It can spray plant-based webs to ensnare creatures.
ReactionsFarmer's Workshop- Extract grown furniture/items (Plant processing) - Used to get the furniture items from grown Woodsculpt plants, as well as returning seeds. Also used to retrieve wooden logs from Timbersprig plants.
- Weave cloth from leaves (Weaving) - Takes a leaf and turns it into a cloth made of leaf. (Unfortunately, attempting to make bags from leaf cloth will result in boxes instead).
- Create bush (Grower) - Turns a leaf into a bush (a block you can use for building or making topiary).
- Create _____ bloom (Grower) - Turns a flower into a bloom of the chosen colour (a block you can use for building or making topiary).
- Release plant creature from pod (Plant processing) - Takes one of the special pods from the plant creature plants and turns it into an adult plant creature, freeing its seeds. This reaction is only present when DFhack is installed. NOTE: This reaction utilises modtools/create-unit, which is potentially causing crashes / save corruption currently. I'd advise strongly against using this reaction until this problem is fixed in a later DFhack version.
Craftsman's Workshop- Decorate with flowers (Woodcrafting) - Decorates an undecorated item with flowers.
- Cut topiary (Wood cutting) - Take 3 bushes or blooms and turn them into a statue. Note that because of some Dwarf Fortress weirdness, the reaction might not use bushes/blooms that are all the same material.
- Construct/Make wicker _____ (Weaver) - Take a varying number of wicker-suitable plants (by default, that's Spindlewood) and make an item. One seed is also returned for each plant used in the reaction. Wicker items include: armor stands, beds, bins, cabinets, chairs, chests, coffins, statues, tables, weapon racks, cages, altars, bookcases, display cases, hives, pedestals, pots, nest boxes, backpacks, quivers, crafts.
Embarking- Without natural access to stone (and therefore ores), Florans won't have pickaxes or axes available to embark with outside of the randomly generated ones that always appear in the prepare carefully list. Be careful, since if you remove those from your items, you won't be available to add them back in!
- Tangleleaf and Rainblossoms are pretty much compulsory if you want to build from bushes and blooms, or make any leaf/flower-based crafts, as the two plants are pretty much the only sources of the two.
- Spindlewood is the only source of wickerable plants, so you'll want to bring some along with you if you plan on making any wicker crafts.
- At least one of each Woodsculpt seed will mean you'll be able to grow whatever standard items you want.
- You might find Timbersprig seeds useful to bring so that you can have access to regular carpentry as a backup.
- Skilled Growers are fairly desirable, as skilled planting can increase the yields of everything you grow.
- Plant creatures are useful to bring to serve as fearless, indefatigable protectors for your gardens.
- By bringing at least a bar of charcoal and some Timbersprig plants to process, you can have access to some building material for your initial workshops without having to mine or cut trees. Use the charcoal to set up a Farmer's Workshop, then use "Extract grown furniture/items" to turn the Timbersprig plants into logs.
- By bringing along fully grown Woodsculpt plants, you can effectively embark with furnishings of your choice - all you've got to do is extract them at a farmer's workshop.
DFhack optional extrasThis mod features a number of extra enhancements which'll automatically be active when playing with DFhack installed. While they were intended to be nice optional extras to go ontop of a vanilla-focused mod, due to certain problems getting the plants always available for Floran civs, it's recommended you play this mod with DFhack installed exclusively.
- All the necessary plants from this mod will always be available to Floran civilizations, even if the plants aren't locally available (it's very unlikely for them to spawn with access to all their plants).
- All products from the "extract grown furniture/items" reaction (so woodsculpt items, as well as timbersprig logs) will become "grown" items, meaning that elves and other races who care about tree murder should accept them in trade (things carved from timbersprig won't count as grown, however).
- A new reaction "release plant creature from pod" will appear in the Farmer's Workshop. It takes in any of the plant creature pods, and produces an adult creature version of the associated plant creature, as well as some seeds. Warning: See "Notes / Known Issues"
- During Fortress Mode play, all the general reactions required to make use of the plants introduced by this mod (extracting grown items, weaving wicker, releasing creatures from pods) will automatically be made available to all civilizations without having to edit their entity files. This probably won't actually make the products available to the civ's resources, but will at least make the features available during gameplay.
- clothing-optional is included and configured for Florans, meaning they won't get unhappy about being unclothed, since being uncovered sounds like something plants would want to be.
Notes / Known Issues- Unless you get lucky with world generation, it's unlikely that Floran civilizations will have access to all of their plants. As such, it's highly recommended to play with DFhack, as then all of the plants from this mod will automatically be made available to Floran civilizations.
- Because Florans breathe through their skin, most injuries to their body will results in "mortal wound"s which occasionally give them trouble breathing. These wounds won't actually be mortal - Dwarf Fortress is hardcoded to display that message whenever any BREATHE body part is damaged.
- Being made out of plant matter, the plant creatures can be potentially flimsier than most.
- In order for some of the plants to be treated as proper resources by the game, they've had the EDIBLE_COOKED flags added to them, even if that's less than ideal or doesn't really make sense. Make sure to manage your kitchen settings if you don't want precious plants (like the expensive plant creature pods) from being cooked for food!
- All regular jobs are available to Florans except for fishing, which is disabled in an attempt to avoid some worldgen crashes related to NO_EAT races.
- At the moment, the Floran entity doesn't have any special positions. Entity-level positions are randomly generated, and site-level positions are just the basic dwarf options up to mayor-tier.
- Floran citizens will appreciate having somewhere to clean themselves - they constantly produce pollen and occasionally take the time to go and clean it off.
- Due to game bugs with PLANT_GROWTH items, some of the reactions that should use specific types of growths will use ANY growths. It means that you can create flowery blooms from garlic bulbs, leaves, and the like. That might be useful, but just make sure you aren't accidentally using up items you don't want to in the process (like fruits you may have wanted to brew with!).
- A repeat of the warning concerning the "Release plant creature from pod" reaction: This reaction utilises modtools/create-unit, which is potentially causing crashes / save corruption currently. I'd advise strongly against using this reaction until this problem is fixed in a later DFhack version.
UpdatesRelease 2While going through the floran raws to copy paste some stuff on a new project, I noticed that there was a typo meaning florans didn't get proper walking speeds. Oops. All this update does is add in the missing [ to fix that.
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Topic: Floran Garden - Grow your own fortress (Read 4373 times)