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[NW_Kohaku]

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:

---------

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.

---------------------------

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.

-------------

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...

------------

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!

----------------------

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.
   
--------------------

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!)

----------------------

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.

-------------------

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.

---------------------

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.
   
---------------------

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.

------------------

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)

-----------------

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.

--------------------

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...

[NecroRebel]

Such things have been attempted before, and sadly, they consistently fail for a few reasons.

First, it is impossible to smelt creatures other than vermin, which are treated as items and are size 1 creatures. Even if you use the proper reaction syntax to form a dragon, it will still be a size 1 vermin dragon.

Second, it is impossible to change a creature's size after it has spawned, so even raw editing can't change the aforementioned size 1 dragon into a "real" creature.

Third, vermin don't breed, so you can't get a pair and then breed up full-size ones.

Fourth, unrelated to the creating-creatures issue, is the fact that creatures other than your main race cannot be given equipment, cannot be given jobs, and, worst of all, if they're intelligent they apparently require food and drink (but cannot be given jobs, including "Eat" and "Drink," so they fairly quickly die of thirst). So, no golem haulers, though lizardfolk or plant guardians would be possible by simply chaining them near entrances, though that's not really what you want.



Now, there are some workarounds for the "no manufacturing creatures" issue, though they all require external utilities. Dwarf Companion can turn one creature into another (though it cannot change creatures' sizes), though this requires no ingame resources to do, so even if your lamias spawn nowhere you could turn, say, every seventh puppy into one. Spellcraft adds the ability to make statues that turn totems into living creatures, so you could add a reaction to make a totem of a golem-type critter's skull then animate it. Both utilities are in the community mods list.

[NW_Kohaku]

Hmm... I remember reading in the Cacame thread, however, that things like elves and goblins could be turned to his civ with Dwarf Companion, would they not be "Intelligent", and require food and the like, as well?

Anyway, I'm now wondering about making all the creatures I want "domestic" so that I can just import plant monsters.  It might be a bit odd, but it would make them a little easier to handle. 

I'm also wondering if there is any way to mess with a creature's "inventory" via one of those memory-hacking utilities.

What I was doing in my previous save was I had simply made Lamia similar to lizardmen or snakemen, and found an underground river... although it was taking a while for my fortress to get around all its other little projects to finally get around to the big project of creating a sinkhole for an underground river so I could strain the river with numerous cage traps and hope I could pan for Lamias, while just dropping the giant olms 20 elevations to their death.

Still, they would just be "pets".  I really want to try making, at the very least, a set of creatures which could carry weapons and gain military skills, the way that Holy Mittens got his elf king and goblin royal guard to.

[NecroRebel]

Hmm... Well, I'm the only one who's ever said I was infallible, and that of course means little.

Not having read the Cacame thread or knowing much about him beyond that he's a dwarfy elf dwarf king, I wouldn't know. I've simply heard stories of people who have acquired pet gremlins, which can learn and speak, and having them die of thirst. Perhaps I'm misremembering, or maybe the person I read of was mistaken.

There's really no reason not to at least try it. Maybe you'll find a way to manage that no one else has thought of yet; this game is deep enough that the community still hasn't plumbed all its depths, even given more than a year on the current version. You might also try asking the person who did Cacame how he did the royal guards. Can't hurt, after all.

[darkflagrance]

I've actually modded in a race of beings called Muses, designed to act as beautiful poetic inspiration for my fortress, that arrived in cages like pets, but were [INTELLIGENT].

They'd eat and drink on their own, and because of their [INTELLIGENCE] they gained skills, but these were solely social skills. They could not be assigned work.

I've heard that work can only be assigned to "slaves" if they are the same creature as your home civ: for example, dwarf slaves of dwarves. This is of course useless to you.

Neither Dwarf Companion nor any other utility can even examine creature inventories, let alone change them.

As far as we know, what you're attempting is impossible. I do commend your having rediscovered many facts about modding through your own independent experimentation.

[Grimlocke]

I remember once making a pet race that would aquire conversation and wrestling skill. It must have been some combination of can_speak and either can_learn or slow_learner. Probably the latter, I dont think a creature with can_speak and slow_learner is counted as intelligent.

The creature would also aquire strength/agility/toughness stats over time, supposedly having them roam the fortress for plenty years could make them quite strong. It could be assinged as war annimal once trained as one as well.

I also once attempted to have reaction produce malicious vermin that would bite and paralise everything in its wake untill trapped or devoured by a cat. It worked, except that I had to deconstruct the smelter for them to actualy roam around and stop being an item.

[Lofn]

If you can wait a few weeks/a month or so, you'll be able to do something quite similar to this with castes.

[Hugo_The_Dwarf]

Look at these utilities they might just have what you need
Friendship and Spellcraft (metioned before) are by Darius

Friendships topic is Slavery Enhancer pi* 4 or some such like that
It allows all (tame) pets to be given (my bad just hauling jobs) jobs and weapons. Say if you added COMON_DEMESTIC and PET to humans you can trade for them and pretend they ae slaves, then trade for weapons and armor draft them to military and arm them, I don't know what hes working on now but when he gets around to it, Darius is going to try to allow these "pets" to be given all jobs as you desire.

Spellcraft as mentioned with the animation spell works, but it just creates a creature that wants to leave right away (well thats what happebed to me) and giving it a hostility animation and perioctic rune was not a good idea. lets just say whole fort ran to were the creatures were killing each other, turned hosite and killed each other.

thus Spellcraft_tray and Friendship run in the slavery/example mode is best (when running example make sure your playing race and new races are in the Races.txt file)

[NW_Kohaku]

Hmm... I'll look into those mods after I've looked into making Dwarf Companion work for me.

As it stands, however, I think maybe waiting that month or so to see what comes of the next version may be best before doing anything but simply creating "pet" races.

Something I want, however, is for my own creations to be fairly unique - If I make "Mantrap" plant monsters chained to my entry hall, designed to poison stray kobolds or orcs who actually manage to survive my Entry Hall o'Death, I'd like it if they weren't being used as pack animals by elven merchants.

Speaking of which, is it possible for there to be a (natural) ranged attack that doesn't involve fireballs?  If there was one, I didn't see it in the creature tokens page.  I'd like to make said plant guardian capable of firing thorny barbs at range in case of bowmen.

Anyway, provided that doesn't work, I think I'm going to go on to making new furniture.  My original fort has an elf queen coming, and while it's too late to make new objects for her (unless I just restart the whole fort from worldgen... or would even changing the type of furniture alter worldgen?), I do have some ideas for giving my fort a more "elfeminine" touch.

I'm going to add in "vases", so I can make some glass (or stone or whatever) vases, and a "neverwilt" flower that is generally not useful, then make a reaction for a vase, water, flower, maybe some potash or something, and produce a piece of furniture "flower vase".

Hmm... since I'm still thinking about making more plants, what with that being the theme of this thread, I should probably make some similar plants...  Is it possible to make ammo that has a weaker damage rate than the 50% wood normally gives?  I could produce "menacing cacti" that can be "smelted" for bolts and arrows, and make them not particularly damaging.

[Lancensis]

What, half the damage of iron isn't bad enough for you? I guess you could have the cactii processed into a custom metal with low stats, and have that only usable as ammo.

At the risk of sounding like a broken parrot, a great deal of the limitations you're facing will be lifted next version. Not all mind you, but I'm sure you'll be pleased with what's possible. The main advantage is that you can create a single creature entity that has entirely distinct castes, for example lamia and harpies, and lizardmen. They'll be able to interbreed, and will have same biome/entity information but they can vary as much as you wish in terms of tags and body details. You can even use the burrows to keep the different species separate to prevent miscegenation if you're a cruel monster who enjoys getting in the way of true love.

You can get creatures to spit solid materials in the next version, but I doubt they'll end up being very deadly unless there's a hilarious bug. Still, it might make a ranged attack.

You can make entities the only one that can use a given pet by making that pet [GOOD] or [EVIL] and making the entity the only one that has the appropiate [USE_BLANK_ANIMALS] tag. They need particular flags to be able to pull wagons/carry trade goods, so if you leave those off, the elves won't be using them to bring stuff anyway.

[NW_Kohaku]

A broken parrot?  Would that be a parrot that says things nobody has ever said to them before?

Yeah, I guess I'll just wait until next release, and focus on trying to create new furniture for now. 

I'm actually thinking that maybe having some sort of "garden" as a definable room (obviously, that would need to be a suggestion), with non-economically useful growable plants that don't get harvested might be a good idea, for use in... well, basically, vomitoriums, but also some noble's housing.  Picked flowers could be made into those potted flower furniture (haha! Can't mod in furniture, apparently, I can just make more "craft" goods), and maybe we could get a nice shrubbery growing underground.

Aside from messing around with making more crafts and dyes (which people have already been doing, so I won't worry too much), I guess the best way to go is to make harvestable raw gems.  I suppose a plant could have a "special sap" that lets it be turned instantly into something like amber or a new, lower-quality gem.  Something like that would certainly help on sandless maps, where green glass isn't an option, and if I give it a very slow growth rate, it should force larger farming operations to really get the gem cutters going in full force.

Actually, maybe I should make a few variations... some different colored "gem bulbs".  If I make it only useful for gem creation, I'll also need to make seeds a side-product, as well.  I need to come up with a name for this, though...  both the plant and the resultant gem.

[ShadowLuigi147]

For your marvelous attempt at making a new epic creature, I present to you...

The Dwarven Science Department Award!



Lol, I didn't make this, I don't remember who did, but its cool, and it fits the situation.

[Deon]

Oh my, man. We need a separate thread for such images .

[Lancensis]

Oh my, man. We need a separate thread for such images .

Would it include your dashing new avatar?

[Deon]

Sorry Lancensis, I really didn't get it. Do I have a dashing avatar and why should it be there?