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[madrain]

Ugh.  The randomization of animals is deeply disturbing.  One of the clearest signals of hack fantasy writing is the author creating a bajillion new species with nonsense names that mean absolutely nothing important to the story.  I hope that idea goes the way of the buffalo and he sticks to letting players mod in whatever craziness they want.

And I agree, the boatmurdered thing is a terrible idea.  Might as well make every dwarf named Urist while you're at it.

[Bricks]

Ugh.  The randomization of animals is deeply disturbing.  One of the clearest signals of hack fantasy writing is the author creating a bajillion new species with nonsense names that mean absolutely nothing important to the story.  I hope that idea goes the way of the buffalo and he sticks to letting players mod in whatever craziness they want.

And I agree, the boatmurdered thing is a terrible idea.  Might as well make every dwarf named Urist while you're at it.

Yeah, you are already out of luck.

Spoiler: HFS (click to show/hide)

Toady has announced that the underground will contain horrible monstrosities.  He has also said (though I'm not sure whether this is for the next version or in the near future) that giants (or maybe titans, can't remember) will be less human and more crazy randomness.

Either way, it's something that is bound to be optional.  With a system as moddable as DF's, it would be a shame not to include some sensible randomization.

[madrain]

HFS != animals

Unless you have some very, very strange farming practices.

[Granite26]

It's all a matter of scale.  Sure there should be SOME random critters, but you need to have a certain amount of knowns in order for the random stuff to be appreciated.

[lucusLoC]

i think it is a matter of tast. Toady did say he intended that you be able to run a stock world (straight from the raws) or a compleatly randome world, with probably a great many gradiants in between. after all, the game is not always going to focus on dorfs (even in vanilla). eventualy even the elves will be a viable race.

if you are going to have a randomness generator, it only makes sense that you would be able to scale how much randomeness there is. this satifies players who only like playing only with the known and also those who want to be suprised by everything.

Toady will have to be very creative with the descriptions though, and they will all have to be proceduraly gennerated, or you will not know what that crachen is without looking at its raw file.

[Dwaref]

HFS != animals

HFS is hidden fun stuff. It might be anything not just 'HFS'.

[madrain]

HFS != animals

HFS is hidden fun stuff. It might be anything not just 'HFS'.

That was in reply to Bricks, who specifically did not mention "anything."  He mentioned a very, very few things, none of which were normal, real-world aboveground animals.  So no, in that context, it cannot be "anything."

[Bricks]

Although it did imply "possible" and "already working on" and "not gone the way of the buffalo, kemosabe."

[madrain]

It didn't really imply either, actually.  It implied that a handful of things might someday be affected by the idea - and Toady has also announced things in the past that he later decided he didn't want to do.  So, yeah.  I still hope it goes away.

From a logical viewpoint it makes no sense to do completely random animals.  Ecosystems are extremely delicate and very easy to upset.  Why work so hard to mimic real world conditions only to later scrap it all to make nonsense worlds?  If people want the option, that's cool to make it available, though.

Edit:  I'm giving up discussing this, so responding further to me specifically is a waste of your time.  We stopped discussing the OP's suggestion a page ago and I don't want to contribute to hijacking any further.   

[Superlagg]

Or at the very least, a chance of finding an abandoned single-story fort surrounded by hostile elephants.

[BradB]

Magmaphants. Don't try to fight it for you don't have a chance. You are dead. Everything is dead.  The world has crumbled to an end.