Gooood morning, thread!
I actually noticed the 'cage blinking skeleton' bug, but I wasn't aware it was a bug—the first time I saw it, I was terrified that somehow I had murdered whatever I had assigned to the cage (I think an extra breeding pair of peafowl, in case the loose pair went afoul of the plagues of giant gargoyles that periodically fell upon that fort).
Oh, Kat. How is it you embark with dragon raptors, anyway? Do you set your embark points really high? I ask because it's like 1,000 points per raptor. I embarked with 2k more points than normal for my glacier attempt, and I ended up with like five mastiffs, two bulldogs, two spaniels, and those together are less than a single raptor.
I do sometimes set my embark points pretty high on certain worlds (mostly when I'm feeling depressed and need a quasicheaty pick-me-up), which is the only way I was able to take along dragon raptors. Regular raptors I've altered for my personal raws (which I can upload if anyone's interested, though I can guarantee they're not as awesome as Tomi's) to be [COMMON_DOMESTIC] and I believe I lowered their petvalue a bit (to around ~100), since I love embarking with like a million critters and setting up breeding/war-training programs.
Speaking of my personal raws, I've also been trying to beef raptors up a bit skill-wise. I'm not sure if I've gone overboard, but I'm also not sure if that's really undesirable.
These xkcd strips pretty much exemplify the nature of 'raptors' I was trying to invoke in their creation, and mine tend to die pretty easily despite being able to level up their skills*, so I think it's acceptable for the moment.
*I am not sure what did it exactly but for a little while there while I was tinkering my raptors kept trying to
start parties. (Un?)Fortunately they were tied up outside my fort entrance and so I would get 'Stray War Raptor cancels Attend Party: no space' or something like that.
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[pre-post edit] Hi, Elone! Welcome to the Genesis thread.
To answer your question, the most current version does 'force' a special graphical tileset, but both the creator (Deon) and his 'assistant' (Tomi) are working on an ASCII version, and it might be out tomorrow-ish.
Until then,
I think you can check the older versions (linked near the bottom of the first post) for the last ASCII update no actually I just checked and the last ASCII version was 3.19, and it's linked very near to the top of the OP, so not that far behind updatewise if you're dying to try out the mod now.
[edit2] Aaand ninjered by KarolineDianne. Oh well.