I've been playing around with the raws and Dwarf Companion and a whole lot of other stuff recently. Here's a few things I discovered that I don't particularly think are intuitive and surprised me.
1) A creature's size is static once it has been spawned. This is regardless of anything else you do to it. If a dog is listed as size 5 in the raws when it is born, it'll be size 5 its entire life, even if you use Dwarf Companion to turn it into a Dragon or go into the raws and change dogs to size 50.
There's plenty of fun ways to test this. The first is the way I just mentioned. Turn a dog into a dragon using Dwarf Companion and then designate it for slaughter. Watch as you get 5 pieces of meat, 5 bones, 5 chunks, etc. BUT WAIT, you say, maybe that's just a quirk of Dwarf Companion! Sure, that's possible. Open your raws, turn a dog into size 50, and reload, and designate it for butchering. Surprise! Still the same numbers of everything. Now, if that dog had children, they would be the proper size (upon growing up, of course).
The size of a creature is set upon its instance of creation. So if you're tired of your MegaBeasts getting curb stomped by your dwarves, don't think that going into the raws and doubling their size will make them tougher. Since MegaBeasts are created during world gen, they'll always be the same size they were when the world was created. The same with any local leaders or historical figures.
However, since most migrants and invaders are created only when they arrive at your fort, you could theoretically have size 50 dwarves living right next to size 6 dwarves, and fighting off size 80 goblins led by a size 6 local leader. I have no idea what would happen with clothing, armor, and whatnot made by differently-sized dwarves. Someone with more time should totally check it out.
2) [CAN_LEARN] and [SLOW_LEARNER] make a creature unbutcherable, because these tags make them sapient. However, [CAN_CIV] and [CAN_SPEAK] carry no such association. Of course, the sapience of a creature is ignored if it is tame and designated for slaughter.
3) [CAN_LEARN] or [SLOW_LEARNER] also gives creatures personalities. Personalities are given to all creatures as soon as they spawn, though usually you won't see them for members that aren't part of your civ. However, if you use Dwarf Companion to make them part of your civ, you can look at their profiles and see their personalities. They won't have any preferences or worship anything, however.
4) [CAN_CIV] makes creatures not spawn in the wild, even if they have biome tokens. If you stick [CAN_CIV] on Snakemen and embark on a tile with an underground river, it'll be free of snakemen. However, [CAN_CIV] is not actually necessary for a creature to have a civilization. A civilization just needs an entry in an Entity file. They'll work perfectly fine even if the creature tagged with them does not have a [CAN_CIV] tag AND they'll still spawn in their biomes. So if you want to have goblin wild animals wandering around while the goblin civ still attacks you, turn them from [INTELLIGENT] to [CAN_SPEAK][CAN_LEARN] and give them a biome token.
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Topic: Quirks of modding I didn't/you might not know (Read 696 times)