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[JoRo]

While I haven't actually seen them, the large world I genned recently supposedly has 120,318 warthogs, no mudmen, 631 satyrs, and 7 kinds of gibbon, most of which have ~26,000 pop except pileated gibbons which have just under 3k.

[ToonyMan]

Where do Mudmen live?

[Footkerchief]

Where do Mudmen live?

Subterranean water, apparently.

[Willfor]

Where do Mudmen live?

... in the mud?

I'm sorry, that was just too easy to resist.

[ToonyMan]

Where do Mudmen live?

Subterranean water, apparently.

You mean underground rivers or lakes and such?  Does someone have a world with mudmen?

[Mel_Vixen]

Are you sure they arent just an engraving thing like Centaurs and Wizzards?

[Footkerchief]

Are you sure they arent just an engraving thing like Centaurs and Wizzards?

Nope, they aren't fanciful, they're real creatures with proper bodies and a biome and all that.

[Sean Mirrsen]

There's a problem with Tropical biome creatures in the later versions. Specifically, since world sizes became customizable, and the Medium size became standard. Medium-size worlds NEVER have Tropical biomes, at least those generated by default. Only Large worlds have Tropical biomes by default.

[G-Flex]

Even messing with worldgen parameters never seems to get a Medium (now Standard) sized world with tropical biomes.

I suspect the game has a really weird/kludgy way of determining whether or not a biome should be tropical or temperate, resulting in things like my good ol'fashioned worlds full of freezing-cold jungles bordering glaciers and tundra, with elephants wandering off and getting hypothermic, and snow-covered mango trees all over.

[Sowelu]

I was just looking at this:

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/spoilers/101908.txt

And saw a lacking.  Specifically there's a lack of "dexterity".  I always disliked seeing 'run fast' and 'shoot well' being combined, and dexterity is also important for crafting stuff.

While dexterity is -partially- a mental thing, involving kinesthetic sense and focus and maybe spatial sense...  It's also largely physical.  Someone whose hands shake is going to have crummy dexterity.  If a goblin hacks at your muscles, it's going to hurt your strength and maybe impair your ability to control your arm well.  Certain nerve diseases and just plain aging, dexterity is something they'd hurt pretty badly (though they'd hurt agility too)...but if you get bit by a spider with a mild neurotoxin in your arm, it's your aiming that's going to be affected in the next few seconds, not your running away.

So I'd like to see a split there.  Some dwarves just have shaky hands; they stay out of the craftsdwarves shop and out of the archery range, and they are given big hammers to hit bad guys with.

[umiman]

I always saw agility and dexterity to be more or less the same thing.

[Footkerchief]

^^^ That's my instinct too, but I think this changed my mind:

I always disliked seeing 'run fast' and 'shoot well' being combined, and dexterity is also important for crafting stuff.

[Neonivek]

Dexterity is almost always used in games to represent physical speed and control. (which is represented in the game as Agility). It has always ignored the mental aspects even when it otherwise makes little sense.

Dwarf Fortress however does present the mental aspect of Agility seperately. It just isn't all that obvious.

[Sowelu]

See, for me, 'agility' is a combination of lower body strength, endurance, kinesthetic sense, athletic training, ability to shift weight effectively, and being low-mass in general.  It's generally big moves, performed rapidly (moving legs fast to run, twisting body quickly to dodge).

Manual 'dexterity' on the other hand is almost exclusively upper body, fine control with hands, in general small moves performed slowly.

Taking a snap shot with your crossbow at a goblin who just jumped out from behind a tree ten feet away, that would conceivably be agility.  You're making a big movement, twisting at the hips and shoulders as much as anything.  Your skill helps you know where to bring that crossbow up to firing position, but the key is to get it there fast and then shoot.

Aiming at a goblin a hundred feet away--even if he's charging--is a long term action, though.  For one thing, your crossbow is probably already drawn, so there's no big actions there.  It's not all that time critical...it's not a matter of "will he hit me before I can shoot".  Instead, it's "How long will it take me to aim as perfectly as I can".  It needs small movements, and it takes nerves of steel--that's mental, sure, but physical training also keeps your hands from shaking.  That's dexterity.

I'm not sure what I'd say about a task like, oh...kicking a football.  Clearly that has a lot of agility.  Clearly it has a lot of kinesthetic sense.  I'm not sure if a task like that would need dexterity, though...probably not.

Sitting at a workbench and slowly chipping away at a rock mug, on the other hand--You really don't want your hand to slip.

Hunh.  The more I look at those definitions, the narrower my description gets.  At this point I have to say dexterity is almost exclusively "ability to keep hands from shaking/slipping".  But there's a lot of tasks that make that important!

[Neonivek]

Lets try to stay away from "How I define these words" and focus a bit more with how they are presented inside Dwarf Fortress outside what you would normally call them.