Inquisitive nature enabled, and commencing. Here we go. QUESTIONSTOOOOOOORM!
What's the deal with attributes in Adventurer Mode? Will I ever notice some minor difference in playing with a character with a high Social Awareness instead of one with a Below Average? And Musicality? Are they just placeholders? And what do the Observer skill really do? Do I increase it by oogling engravings? How does the attributes increase by training your skills? They only go up once for me, and then there's no change whatsoever after that.
Can someone please explain the concept of "souls" for me? (Not the IRL equivalent, the one in the game! )
What do [EXTRAVISION], [BENIGN], [INTELLIGENT], [HOMEOTHERM:xxx], [MANNERISM_LAUGH], [PREFSTRING], [BONECARN], [SPEECH:dwarf.txt] mean?
Thanks in advance!
Extravision means they can see without light, Intelligent means they are capable of learning (skill point gain) [sic],Homeotherm I believe is the body temperature that a creature can cope with, speech:dwarf.txt just refers to the languages the creature can speak thus communicate to (Megabeasts often have Elvish,Human,Dwarf.txt attached to them)
Correct me if I'm wrong whoever.
INETLLIGENT implies CAN_LEARN (which is the skill gain portion) and CAN_SPEAK (which should be fairly obvious), iirc, and maybe CAN_CIV, but I'm not sure on that last one. BENIGN has the defined creature appear in tame biomes, I think, along with some other stuff. PREFSTRING is [PREFSTING:Whatever], and is what other things think of when said other things think of the critter described; i.e. cats 'for their aloofness', etc. You can have multiple of them just fine. BONECARN means the creature will eat bones. They've got some chance to choke on them when doing so (possibly resulting in death?), apparently.
Check the wiki. The majority of the 40d stuff that's still being used in 2010 is mostly unchanged.
Observer's got something to do with spotting sneaking creatures, to the best of my knowledge. Some of the other ones are just placeholders, at least in adventurer mode; social awareness and junk affects friendship gain and suchlike in fortress mode, but musicality's not doing much at the moment, so far as i know. For the soul stuff, I'd suggest asking over in the Mod forum or checking Toady's devlog entries. At the moment, it's mostly a placeholder, from what I understand, but there's plans for it in the future. S'far as I know, it's basically just the mental side of the critter at the moment.
For the seiges, you can try embarking further away from hostile civs, possibly. Going into the entity file and adjusting which seasons they attack in can also space things out. Deleting some of the [ACTIVE_SEASON:X] stuff should work... I think, anyway. Heh.