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[FantasticDorf]

A idea inspired by the conundrum that Toad-men cannot be made to exist from May's FotF replies because the biomes lie very much lie central on the interior of the map.

Biome Residency

A new method summarily taken from the movements of [CLUSTER_NUMBER] vermin who move in co-ordinated groups either with a objective or to always fly around in unison (better explained by the existance of 'salmon runs' ingame), where animals that have to travel to their biome further inside the map take a direct route, then remain 'camping' there until a suitable time to move on or all animals who were living there previously are dead/captured, perhaps even whilst the biome feature is unsuitable to live in, like empty of water or the wrong season for the creature to exist there.

This may mean, once you've cleared away a gaggle of giant toads, a new family of toads or other amphibious creatures will run to the availible pools and splosh themselves inside it, attempting to climb and navigate their way to them.

Applies to

- Ponds
- Lakes
- Rivers (Has multiple entry points overland and through the river itself, explained below in its own part)

Rivers

Rivers are especially interesting for this, because there are multiple types of creatures who can pass through and visit it. On one hand there could be the resident large animals such as otters, but fish would need a motivation to move and could possibly work in tandem to other large animals, rather than remaining static in rivers as they are now.

Finally a end to the threat of killer carp, or at least out of season significant carp-fry announcement spam.

[voliol]

+1

The solution has the downside of not working for purely non-amphibious, non-flying pool dwellers, but luckily there are none of those in vanilla.

As for those who can’t get out of the water, maybe they can spawn as newborn fry, handwaving they have been born from eggs hidden in the muck? It wouldn’t make sense for all creatures, but might do as a placeholder. The only problem then is them land-drowning in biomes where the pools dry out in summer, and getting encased in ice in winter. These are problems real-life animals have, too.

Real-life frogs and toads hibernate in the muck in cold areas, so I wonder if their giant and animal person (!) variants could do the same. It would be fun to dig up a drowzy giant toad, and have it munch down on your poor miner dwarves. Or they could just walk off the map, returning in spring. I have no idea how fish survive, if they do.

As for droughts, I think some animals depend on seasonal floods to take them to bigger bodies of water? But we don’t have those yet, and I imagine adding them would be more than a quick fix. I think real-life Lungfish can survive in the muck as well over summer? But those are weird fish to begin with, in DF I think they are straight-up amphibious so if they had a giant version they could just leave.

[FantasticDorf]

Real-life frogs and toads hibernate in the muck in cold areas, so I wonder if their giant and animal person (!) variants could do the same. It would be fun to dig up a drowzy giant toad, and have it munch down on your poor miner dwarves. Or they could just walk off the map, returning in spring. I have no idea how fish survive, if they do.

Both species of amphibians and alligators have the ability to hibernate in solid ice on the NA contintent, it could most probably be codified that freezing them in place doesn't affect them, but non-natural melting could significantly stun them until the season is over (apparently in ye olde times, people used to pull irate and very low energy alligators who were still perfectly alive with their ice stuck up through the ice-sheet right out of frozen lakes with the help of ropes and few strong men).

Though that'd be relatively scary to have forgotten beasts a with [ENCASE_SURVIVE] token be immune to those too, perhaps attempting to free themselves over time if put inside obsidian or ice. Without a map-rewrite to redo the logic of partial freezing with a brook like effect, fish probably will perish, yeah.