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[nwesterhausen]

I ran into an occasion where I was preparing carefully with a modded save (using vanilla expanded and the primal mods) and had no idea what some of the creatures or items were. So I wanted to have a way to look that up easily. That has led to my development of this utility, which currently looks through the raws in a save and presents a bestiary that can be searched. I'm slowly adding to what details it presents, but currently it covers my original needs of letting me read descriptions of things.

I started with a simple parser which created some JSON. Then I decided to use Tauri to make a GUI interface that could handle both choosing what to parse and searching. I welcome feedback from the community, maybe this is useful or maybe I'm the only user LOL 

Usage

To use, either install or run the portable executable. Then choose your DF install folder in the file chooser or drag-and-drop your gamelog.txt to the window. It will parse the raw module directories under 'mods', 'data/vanilla' and 'data/installed_mods'. Finally you will have a searchable manual which includes the [CREATURE] and [PLANT] tokens found in the raws. It doesn't include ALL information possible, but some of the most relevant and/or simplest to parse data.

I'm hoping to add little bits as I'm motivated to, but my biggest hangup has been turning the raws into something easier to display or manipulate.

Download Links:

Local user installer download on DF File Depot (the one dependency of this version is WebView2).

There's an MSI installer (which handles installing the WebView2 runtime if its needed), and Mac and Linux version on the releases page of the Github repo.

Changelog

[Salmeuk]

cool thank you!

[TheGoomba98]

This is a really cool idea! However, it has a bunch of issues that I think could be improved upon:

• The program won't recognize a DF directory properly unless there's at least one save that's not in a fortress game.
• The bestiary doesn't tell you what layers underground creatures are found on.
• It doesn't include any information on procedurally-generated creatures.
• It has very poor handling of creatures with multiple castes. For example, the antman - it only includes the general species name; and the growth patterns are badly marked, with only the first one given a specific caste, and even then it only says "Queen" rather than "queen ant woman". Aboveground animal people don't have it much better, because their male name is treated as their "species" name, and their female name is treated as their "general" name. At least regular creatures with different caste names, like peregrine falcons, are treated correctly. I think this is an important issue to fix beause some mods, like ZM5's mods, have creatures with a lot of castes.

I hope these issues get worked on, and I bet this isn't even all of them because I haven't tried it on a modded save yet. Otherwise, I think this could be really useful!

[nwesterhausen]

• The program won't recognize a DF directory properly unless there's at least one save that's not in a fortress game.
• The bestiary doesn't tell you what layers underground creatures are found on.
• It doesn't include any information on procedurally-generated creatures.
• It has very poor handling of creatures with multiple castes. For example, the antman - it only includes the general species name; and the growth patterns are badly marked, with only the first one given a specific caste, and even then it only says "Queen" rather than "queen ant woman". Aboveground animal people don't have it much better, because their male name is treated as their "species" name, and their female name is treated as their "general" name. At least regular creatures with different caste names, like peregrine falcons, are treated correctly. I think this is an important issue to fix beause some mods, like ZM5's mods, have creatures with a lot of castes.

Thanks for the report! I made issues to track these and will attempt solving them.

My personal use of the project (and therefore testing) was mostly around regular creatures, so I'm not surprised to learn that things are very broken for animal people!

I hope these issues get worked on, and I bet this isn't even all of them because I haven't tried it on a modded save yet. Otherwise, I think this could be really useful!

cool thank you!

I appreciate the positive feedback

[nwesterhausen]

Just published release 0.11.0 DFFD, Github

• The program won't recognize a DF directory properly unless there's at least one save that's not in a fortress game.
• The bestiary doesn't tell you what layers underground creatures are found on.
• It has very poor handling of creatures with multiple castes. For example, the antman - it only includes the general species name; and the growth patterns are badly marked, with only the first one given a specific caste, and even then it only says "Queen" rather than "queen ant woman". Aboveground animal people don't have it much better, because their male name is treated as their "species" name, and their female name is treated as their "general" name. At least regular creatures with different caste names, like peregrine falcons, are treated correctly. I think this is an important issue to fix beause some mods, like ZM5's mods, have creatures with a lot of castes.

In my testing, 0.11.0 clears up these issues. The castes are somewhat fixed but there might still be some issues. The naming is at least correct and I'm no longer only looking for certain hard-coded castes.

I need to look into ZM5's mods and install some to try and test it out with this new update. Also nothing yet for procedurally generated creatures.

[nwesterhausen]

Updated the download on DF File Depot. I've been away for a bit and missed the database corruption that happened. The listing has some temporary description now, and has an updated portable version of overseer's manual.

Biggest changes from the previous version listed here (0.12) and current (0.20):

• Support for DF 50.xx (and dropped support for 47.xx)
• Added a tab for plant information ("Botanicals")
• Added a theme toggle. It will default to your system theme (light or dark)
• Changed display to cards and a popup for full information (previously was a bunch of accordions)
• Improved feedback on what raws are being parsed and progress against all raws to be parsed

[nwesterhausen]

This utility has been updated recently to version 0.27.1 which is much faster overall (I moved a lot of the intensive work to the backend.. it's a bit of a shock that it took me so long to do).

The version on DFFD has been updated and of course the release on github are up to date as well.

The biggest changes are a new look and an improved backend. A lot more information is now available to the front end and I hope to add more details and features in the coming weeks.

[myk]

This looks like it would be really useful for modders who are doing graphics replacement to verify that all their changes look correct for each creature.