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[HollowClown]

So, right now, a young creature is specified in the raws as an attribute of the adult creature.  For instance, the [CREATURE:CAT] raw contains:
[CHILD:1][CHILDNAME:kitten:kittens]
The system uses this to handle cat breeding, and seems to automatically handle the kitten maturing, the reduced meat/bone from butchering kittens, etc.

I think it would be a cooler system to have a separate raw entry for each young creature.  This raw would contain all the attributes for the creature, and an attribute showing what adult creature RAW the young creature matured into.  The mature creatures would have an attribute showing which young creature RAW the mature creature gave birth to.  So, the CAT raw would have:
[BREED:1][CREATURE:KITTEN]
And there would be a new KITTEN raw with:
[MATURE:1][CREATURE:CAT]

Among other features, this would allow for:

• More interesting creature life-cycles;  for instance, a cave spider (currently vermin) which survived for 20 years could turn into a giant cave spider (not vermin, highly dangerous).  This would also allow for multi-stage creature lifestyles, like baby dragon -> dragon -> great wyrm.
• Different creature attributes for young creatures;  for instance, a baby dragon might need to mature into an adult dragon before it got fire breath.  When milking gets added back in, this would also support allowing milking of adults only.
• Better division of labor for dealing with creatures;  for instance, trapping kittens could use 'small animal trapping' instead of 'butchering', which would seem to make more sense.
• Breeding of tame vermin, like purring maggots.  This wouldn't be good for much except pure awesomeness.

Overall, this change would lead to more granular control of creature life-cycles and attributes, as well as moving a lot of the animal handling code from the program to the RAWs.  Any thoughts?

[alfie275]

So like castes but with different ages? Maybe when say an antman lavae gets older it has percentages for different castes? Maybe?

[HollowClown]

Yes, we'd need something like this in order to introduce antman castes, since there would have to be a separate RAW for each caste.  Instead of having the parent->child relationship be 1->1, the relationship would have to be 1->many with probability ratings for the decision.  Once that was implemented, we could implement all sorts of caste behavior (like only Antman queens and drones being able to breed, and most antman larvae turning into workers or soldiers).   I think it would be pretty cool.

[Silverionmox]

Then I'm going to mod in a huge charcoal golem, that becomes progressively denser and smaller with age, until it is a vermin-sized diamond golem.

There are also myths that would become possible to implement. Eg: frogs into swallows when they hibernate in the mud. Certain kinds of geese are born from mussels. There's a plant on which sheep grow. etc.

Not to mention proper larval and chrysalis stages for insects, of course, or the loose and fixed life phases of sea anemones.

[[NO_THOUGHT]]

This is a great idea! Do you think it would allow circular life-cycles? As in
mud puddle -> glop monster -> golem -|
^-------------------------------------------|
That would be cool, waiting for the un-defeat able golem to shed it's earthly skin so that it becomes weaker and your untrained wrestlers can rip it up.

[Bricks]

I feel like you are just inviting someone to mod in all the pokemon.

At first I was going to point out the potential tediousness of having to create a separate entry for each stage, but just the small number of ideas in this post has converted me.  I like.

One potential issue is how attributes transfer, which would be necessary for a number of reasons.  Perhaps the game could be made to handle simple moves like child dwarf -> adult dwarf, so if the kid loses an eye, it won't magically grow back when he is 'transformed' into an adult, and other particulars like height should carry over as well.  However, there are some creatures that don't have easy analogues.  For example, the life cycle of a moth.  You move from a larval caterpillar with a huge number of segments and lots of data, to a cocoon with hardly any differentiation, to the complex, fully-formed moth.  If the caterpillar had a missing leg when it went into its cocoon, would that trait carry over into adulthood somehow?  If the cocoon was bruised, what parts of the moth would be deformed?  The best fix, I presume, would be to add some tags handling the transfer of attributes to body parts, and then affixing ratios and probabilities for those attributes that don't transfer well but still should have an impact on the final creature.

[Funk]

can we keep it under the same entery but in sepreat life stage
i.e. butterflies
# Egg
# Larva, known as a caterpillar
# Pupa (chrysalis)
# Adult butterfly 

stages;larva,or nymph,pupa,adult
trigered by time?,kills?number of the oppersit sex?

[Bricks]

can we keep it under the same entery but in sepreat life stage

Yeah, that could work.  I was just thinking about branching systems, which would look messy if all under one entry.

[lordcooper]

This would solve EVERYTHING easily.

Kitten -> Dwarf

[Bricks]

This would solve EVERYTHING easily.

Kitten -> Dwarf

I can't imagine what horrible consequences that would have.  Especially weird when a kitten adopts an owner, and then matures, or when you drag a kitten to the butcher and it suddenly becomes a dwarf while you are dropping the knife.  Also, any kitten that has lost its tail should turn into a dwarf without a beard.

[lordcooper]

This would solve EVERYTHING easily.

Kitten -> Dwarf

I can't imagine what horrible consequences that would have.  Especially weird when a kitten adopts an owner, and then matures, or when you drag a kitten to the butcher and it suddenly becomes a dwarf while you are dropping the knife.  Also, any kitten that has lost its tail should turn into a dwarf without a beard.

Show me a mod better than that 

[Quietust]

This would solve EVERYTHING easily.

Kitten -> Dwarf

I can't imagine what horrible consequences that would have.  Especially weird when a kitten adopts an owner, and then matures, or when you drag a kitten to the butcher and it suddenly becomes a dwarf while you are dropping the knife.

Stray Dwarf (Tame) has been struck down.

I'd definitely play with such a mod.

[MC Dirty]

Secretly, you all just want kittens to grow into giant, poisonous war elephants with tentacles and fire breath...
Well, it's an awesome idea, but, like Bricks pointed out, handling wounds and such would be hell on earth.
Butterflies are a very special case, but seriously: Who cares about butterflies? I think that some kind of parameter or metatag called "ONLY_ADULT" would solve most problems. You could add it to a tag and the creature will only gain this property when it's adult.
So, only adult dragons will be able to fly and breathe fire and only adult cows can be milked. That wouldn't be exactly what you're looking for, but it would allow for some crazy modding.

[Silverionmox]

It's rather simple: bodyparts that have an equivalent carry over their wound status. Those that haven't, are ignored (since they either disappear, are rebuilt, or only appear in that stage). It's merely a link between two, for all other purposes, normally functioning creatures.

There have been experiments with caterpillars where they tied a tight thread around the middle of it. The result was that the imago (adult insect) had a dent in the middle where the thread was. So there is a certain carryover, but that's more detailed than necessary. (Where they tied the thread extra tight, the hormones couldn't reach that part of the caterpillar so it stayed in caterpillar form, while the rest of the body transformed into moth. Weird.)

[Bricks]

I can't really think of a super-compelling example for this, so you are probably right, Silverionmox.  Either way, it seems like the framework for the simpler cases could be adapted for the weirder situations.