Well, I suppose I should start out saying, "Hello, World everyone, I'm new here." (Then checking for "kick me" signs on my back.) I haven't been into Dwarf Fortress for too long, lured in by tales of Boatmurdered and mermaid butchery and Cacame, and after having played with making a fortress for about a week after reading the wiki for about three days, I got down to the business that I was really after: trying to mod this thing to give me some of the things I really want to see in a fortress.
Specifically, I want... let's call it a cosmopolitan fortress, shall we? I am interested in creating a small city where numerous different species live side-by-side. I don't mean humans and elves in some hippy harmony, either. I mean that I want moats filled with axe-weilding, champion-level lizardmen riding cave alligators swarming around my fortress, and crossbow-weilding harpies circling the skies. I want "gardens" of plant-monsters that lash out and poison and devour passerby. I want golems doing my hauling jobs. Basically, I want to make a city where my cowering dwarves live in fear of my next chemistry experiment, and which looks like a mad scientist's rejects bin. Well, I guess it WOULD be a mad scientist's byproducts, but not rejects.
Anyway, what follows is what you can consider a diary of my experiments to date. Sorry if someone else has already actually tried something like this, but I wanted to just put this up here before I completely get beyond remembering to do so.
I was going to set this up as an in-character journal, but for now, I'm just too lazy, plus I put in too many specific details about the way that the raws were being manipulated... And I forget what game dates I did all these things on...
Oh, right, and I chose this nick and this subject title in honor of Tsukihime's Kohaku - the maid who played with poisonous plants to manipulate everyone around her.
I started off by making farmable "Mandragora" plants, which exist in real life, but are just poisonous relatives of the tomato and potato plants. In alchemical myth, however, they grew in the shape of a man, had a shriek that could kill, and could potentially be used to actually create new human beings. It's the last of those that I latched onto - mandragoras were farmable plants that could be used as a "life source" for "smelting" new living creatures.
I also had "lamia" put in... they're basically just snakemen, but with more intelligence and some other small benefits. I am planning on doing more with them later, as I want them as intelligent co-habitants with the dwarves, as well as a civ race. I'll mess around with them and their own civ race more later, however.
The rest of the game is pretty much vanilla DF.
What follows are basically soemthing like the journal entries of what I was doing at the time:
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Day 1:
OK, by editing the raws, I can create a new crop if I want to do so. (Honestly, I'm not sure if I want to right now, though, because as it stands, I'm actually in trouble because of my farms. I went a little crazy setting up my textile mills, and have 5 each of farmer's workshops, looms, dye shops, and clothier's workshops, which ran me out of rope reed VERY fast, so I went and expanded my farms, and now my farmers are planting more seeds around the clock (even after adding half the last migrant wave to my farming population), and nobody but the children and nobles are actually picking them, so half my crops are withering on the vine! Granted, I guess if my worst problem is that I might have to cut back my farm production or the fact that every immigrant wave seems to bring AT LEAST THIRTY MORE DWARVES, I have one hell of a smooth-running fortress, but still... And holy shit do I get myself off topic or what?)
Thing is, they won't really be much besides crops with a funny name, unless I can figure out some kind of really kooky trick to pull where I can make a plant a pet or something.
Real question is what to do with them. I can edit in the "reaction" raws to make them used as components in creating some intermediate or final product. I'm going to assume it would be in poor taste to make Alraune thread and +<<*Alraune thread socks*>>+, much less *Mandragora pulp Biscuits* (She likes Mandragora for the screams they make when mashed in the millstone!)
Hmm... maybe they could be used as a trap component? If I can give them stun venom, and the inject venom tag (although those are animal tokens), it could be theoretically possible to make a trap that stuns anyone who walks on it, or as part of a weapon trap.
Maybe I should just look into making a "farmable pet", if at all possible, and give them that "stun venom" to be their shriek attack. Probably be a hell of a combination with a wardog or five for keeping my lumberdwarves safe.
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Day 2:
OK, I've actually managed to get them to spawn in the game... finally.
Apparently, I have to just create a whole new world to do it. Who knew you had to do that, just like civ creatures? I thought they just spawned.
As it stands, I made them an underground plant so I could just plain buy them at embark, as dwarves can buy any underground plant.
Still, I'm not sure if I'll be using them much for a while... having to restart after I'm already in Autumn of year 5 is too much a kick in the Jimmy to consider for now.
As it stands, I can either go forward with my golem plans, since that should just be constructing something with things that already exist, or working on oddball projects.
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Well, I just harvested my first mandragora... I had to start a new world, which was a "Smaller" world, just to make it go fast...
Actually, now that I think about it, even though this was just a test, I was building some large walls (it's a forest stream map, so no mountains to really make defenses made of solid stone), but then I remembered that the world was SO small that only dwarves and humans managed to spawn - there's no goblins to even wall myself out from!
Anyway, I'm fairly sure this mandragora will wind up a alraune nectar, and it took me an entire season just to harvest these first three...
Well, now that I know that it works, I can go on to my next addition...
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OK, today begins my experiments on the smelter and the reactions.
If this works as well as I hope it will, this will give me a VERY powerful tool to make darn near any monster I want. I'm going to start with making a reaction that will let me turn regular plant seeds into mandragora berries, so I can start farming them on my other fortress. If this works, then it won't matter that I didn't create them at worldgen, I can just "manufacture" more mandragoras.
Next, I will try making mandragoras into creatures. If I can make non-vermin creatures, it's jackpot. I could, potentially, make a "Cabbage Patch Monsters" farm, and simply make it so that Smelters become "Transmogrification Chambers" - You can shove in a cardinal and some other reagents, and it will spit a harpy out the other end. Likewise, you could get other monsters, ready to become pets on demand, by using collections of common or esoteric ingredients.
Ahem, BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
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day 3:
EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING NEWS on the reactions front: after basically copying everything but the name of the darn reaction, it appears that I have to generate a new world every time I change anything in the Reaction_standard.txt file. This means that any time I have to check something, I have to generate an entire new world, build a new (fledgling) fortress, and then build the smelters/infrastructure to actually start playing around with these things.
I'm setting Mandragoras to have a growing cycle of one friggin' day.
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day 5
Hmm... Failure.
The dummy reaction, a simple copy-paste of the formula for making bronze, worked just fine, but when I tried my lamia-creating reaction, for some unknown reason, it created an explosion of magenta-colored smoke that the k-look identified as "Boiling leather". The smelter operator fled the scene quickly, but a curious cat came nearby, and was, of all things, frozen.
I'm going to keep on trying other reactions. Maybe the fairy-making reaction will work, since it was only going to create a vermin (which is carryable, like the bars these things are supposed to create are...) (Since I have to make a new world and fortress every time I change anything, I spent much of my free time today building about eight different test cases...)
On the plus side, I'm getting used to making new fortresses really quickly. I'll press onward... FOR SCIENCE! (BWAHAHAHA!)
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Day 6
Further experimentation:
While I cannot add or remove reactions from a created world, I can change the exact formula of reactions however I want, so long as the exact IDs never change. (New IDs, or old IDs that are changed are unrecognized, while old IDs that cannot be found present an error message that prevents the game from loading. Changes made to the raws while the game is in progress are simply ignored, as they are only read when the game is being loaded into memory.)
I tried making the "transmog to harpy" reaction make a fairy instead, without changing anything else about the reaction except it's in-game reaction name (to be "transmog to harpy no wait fairy"), and this created a fairy. This means that I can simply create a huge list of dummy reactions which require, say, a metal I can make up called "Unobtainium" as its reagents, and then switch them in a single game save to make whatever reactions I want.
Another note: when I first made this set of reactions, I included one to make a large roach using the same syntax as the embark profile used, just in case pets would require some kind of special kind of syntax. This large roach reaction not only produced nothing, but also dissapeared from my list. This implies that some reaction IDs can be "crossed off the list" if they produce errors.
Further, the fairies produced so far have been invisibly sitting in the inventory of the smelter. I thought they would require an animal trap or a cage to be put into before someone would scurry along and put them in their proper place in a cage, perhaps, but this didn't occur. As such, I marked them for dumping. The dumped fairies then returned to semi-normal behavior, but were creatures marked with "forbidden" tags. Since I can't forbid a creature, I can't un-forbid a creature, either. This caused me to wonder about how, exactly, I could un-forbid a creature, when along came a cat and killed the fairy, ending that line of thought rather promptly.
I am currently experimenting with another means of "gaming the system"... I'm replacing the lamia's tokens (basically, it's creature information) by copy-pasting the fairy's information over it. These "flying pygmy lamia" will then be counted as carriable vermin, and hence be producable. I can then change their data back to normal lamia information, turning them into large creatures once more.
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Frustration.
Altering the lamia's data to make them fairies does nothing useful, they still explode upon creation.
Fairies will not be picked up by dwarves unless I task them with dumping. Fairies that are dumped are forbidden, and don't appear on the animal lists, and hence can't be adopted, but start behaving normally, otherwise, except that cats will kill them. Fairies that are marked for dumping, but which are unmarked for dumping before they get there are immediately killed once they hvae been dropped for some bizzare reason.
I'm going to try to see if I can put Lamia data into the Fairy block, and see what that does.
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Hmm... I can change the in-game name of a fairy to "asdf", but it doesn't seem to have much other effect.
It still creates a creature that nobody will touch unless instructed to dump it, and the creature will be killed by cats as soon as it hits the dump.
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Ugh... total failure. Even disassembling the smelter without altering the state of the fairires will have them marked as vermin to be exterminated.
The only way this seems like it will succeed is if I somehow manage to make a cage already holding an animal, since cages are carriable.
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Experiments on altering the reaction raws have produced nothing of value. I tried different things, like the following:
[PRODUCT:100:1:ANIMALTRAP:NO_SUBTYPE:WOOD:GIANT_SHROOM:PET:NO_SUBTYPE:FAIRY:NO_SUBTYPE]
or
[PRODUCT:100:1:ANIMALTRAP:FAIRY:WOOD:GIANT_SHROOM]
They all just produced a tower cap animal trap, not having any apparent bug for having bizzare syntax. Apparently, the game doesn't even check the subtype of an animal trap, and any number of arguments beyond the number the game is programmed to accept is ignored.
Oh, and I found out I was actually doing something wrong earlier with the lamia. A typo in the reaction made it try to create an animal ID that didn't exist. Fixing this lets me create lamia instead of creating exploding freezing clouds, but these lamia are still just vermin that blink around and get eaten by cats. (stupid cats)
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day 6
Some limited success.
I managed to make a non-tame (VERMIN instead of PET) fairy, dump it, and then have my animal trapper trap the fairy, and put it in an animal trap.
I'm going to try working it with a larger animal, but I'm not sure it will do anything: it seems like even a larger animal is treated like vermin.
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I... I did it... I actually did it! Well, almost...
OK, here's what happened:
I had to first make a kennel, and put a garbage dump near the kennel and the smelter. I also was lucky in that none of the cats, somehow, had adopted anyone, so I could just throw them in a goddarn cage, and quit letting them eat my creations. (Jerks.) Anyway, once I made an untame lamia, it counted as normal vermin. I marked it for dumping in the nearby garbage dump tile, but only after I had a dwarf grabbing an animal trap with orders to catch a live land animal. The trapper went looking for an animal to trap, and zeroed in on my freshly dumped lamia... right after nabbing a lizard out of a nearby stagnant pool. ANYWAY, I forbade the lizard, and got him taming the lamia. (This is where the caging the cats is imperitive, they ripped apart the last creation WHILE IT WAS BEING TRAINED.) Now, once the lamia was caged, it started appearing on my units roster, and it then started appearing as a tame creature after being tamed, and I could send it to a cage, or I could put it up for adoption. (Too bad nobody has likings for lamias.)
I'm going to let the cats back out, see if they STILL want to eat the lamia...