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[Kipi]

Thanks.

I have begun making my own creatures. The first one is ready, called Bhederin. For those who doesn't recognize the name, I was inspired by the Malazan Book of The Fallen, created by Steven Erikson.

The best description of bhederin is creature resembling cattle, they can usually be found in savanna or grassland. Those can be captured and tamed, providing good source of meat.

I used the cow as basic template, modifying several parts. I changed the population size to 20/50 and removed the MULTIPLE_LITTER_RARE tag, which should refer to the huge packs described in the books. I also gave them bigger size, as they are described as huge creatures. I also removed the ability to milk them. I also made the males quite aggressive, giving them LIKES_FIGHTING tag.

Now, I made some testing in arena mode, and the bhederin seems to work perfectly (no problems in creature templates, graphics nor anything else I was able to determine). First I put one bhederin bull against black bear. Bhederin won. Next I created male dwarf, equipped in iron axe and iron shield, to fight against the same bhederin. Again the bhederin won, disarming the dwarf by smashing his spine with kick. Next I created a dwarf equipped in full iron, and again pitted against the same bhederin. Bhederin won.

So, you should be well prepared if you are going to hunt these creatures down, which is quite good idea for the meat those produce. Just note that they can be very dangerous.


EDIT: I pitted one bhederin bull against dwarf equipped on steel equipment (normal shield and axe, not blessed versions) and the bhederin won, though the battle took quite long. There was over 150 pages of reports, last 100 pages or so were how the bhederin systematically broke every bone of the dwarf before killing it.

Next I pitted fresh bhederin bull against dwarf with steel equipment, with blessed shield and axe. This time the dwarf won the battle, though just barely. In fortress mode I believe the dwarf wouldn't have survived to hospital.

[Kipi]

Okay, few new features has been added, though I'm not releasing another version yet, perhaps tomorrow.

Two new colossuses have been added, iron and steel one. After running some testing in arena I've got following results:

• 10 iron colossuses beat 10 bronze colossuses without losses.
• 10 steel colossuses beat 10 iron colossuses without losses.
• 10 dwarves with steel equipment and expert level in all fighting related skills can not even scratch one steel colossus
• 10 dwarves with steel equipment, expert level in all fighting related skills and blessed axes and shields can not damage steel colossus
• 10 dwarves with adamantine equipment (normal, not blessed) with expert level in all fighting skills can kill steel colossus, though at least half of the dwarves will die.

I set the requirements of iron colossus to 90 dwarves and for steel colossus as high as 100 dwarves. This is to delay the possible attack, since the colossus is kinda hard to beat.

One new insect has been added, called bloodfly. Again, as was the case with bhederin, the creature was inspired by the work of Steven Erikson. The new insect has low frequency and population number, and can be seen in all marshes and swamps. The interesting part is that the bloodfly has ability to bite, injecting poison to victim. The poison causes the following syndromes:
Blisters, pain, swelling and oozing. All syndromes have 80% chance of happen, and severity is also 80. In the books the bloodflies were very dangerous, also causing necrosis, but that's something I wanted to leave out for now. Also, some testing is required to see if the bloodfly is still too dangerous and if the poisoning happens too often.

I have also added two new minerals: goethite and siderite. Both minerals are iron ores, goethite can be found sedimentary and soil (10%). Siderite appears in sedimentary and metamorphic. The hardest part was to find out the density of those minerals as well as melting point. Some hard calculations and reading geology articles was required for that. Never though I would be reading so intensively article about ore types, especially since the article was in german, which I barely understand.

[Deon]

Actually http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethite has most data you ever want. Why would you want specific values though, because the result is still iron?

[Kipi]

Actually http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethite has most data you ever want. Why would you want specific values though, because the result is still iron?

Just for the heck of it? 

But yeah, I used that site for starters, but it doesn't have density nor melting point, which I had to hunt elsewhere. Also, it was not the info about goethite that was hard to find, but siderite. In this case "hard" is rather relative term, as I used about hour or two for the task of finding the data, then about ten minutes to recalculate them to Urist scale...

[Deon]

What? It DOES have the density, and what's more important, Moh's scale hardness. Search the page for "Specific gravity". It's the density value.

P.S. Also Wikipedia is valuable not for the info it has, but for the links it produces .

On the same page:
http://webmineral.com/data/Goethite.shtml
http://www.mindat.org/min-1719.html

[Kipi]

Too confusing, when I can use tables like this. After I calculated the ration between the goethite/siderite and hematite, I was able to easily calculate the density in Urist as well. Also, what I learned, the Moh's scale was too vague for my liking, at least I wasn't able to figure out how to turn them numbers fitting for my calculations.

And I still had to find out melting points, though the site I linked didn't have that data neither...

EDIT: oh, and the links in goethite were quite good. The real problem was siderite, which had quite poor article and links.

Still, it was quite entertaining learning process... which in itself is quite scary...

[Deon]

Damn, hang out with geologists for a few summers and you will find standard variables to be confusing .

The goethite melting point is 1000 C. P.S. I've found it in Google.com by typing "Goethite melting point", the first or second link gave me a full table on goethite from some geology site. Try the same with siderite .

[Kipi]

Yeah, used the same site as you did for goethite. For siderite that site had no info, tried it already, so had to use some vague article I found with googling. What I found was that siderite's melting point is 1565 C.

Oh, and didn't notice before that the www.mindat.org had all the densities I would have needed. I think I was looking totally different thing then so missed something that obvious...

So, just to clarify, I actually have all the data for both minerals ready, so no need to look for them anymore.

[Deon]

Are you sure? Y/N.

[Kipi]

Are you sure? Y/N.

Umm...

*bonders*

Y *press enter*

but seriously, I think I'm heading to bed soon, or at least when I have finished the palladium ore and metal... 

[blaize9]

I have a question, Do i need to make a new map? also In the read me it says you can turn on the aquifers back what do i change to turn it back on?

[Kipi]

You need to create new world to play this mod, and there is no backwards compatibility to older versions (0.1.1 or 0.1.2).

To change aquifers back you need to edit three files, found in raw/objects/ folder: inorganic_layer.txt, inorganic_mineral.txt and inorganic_soil.txt. From these files search for wors AQUIFER, and change them to [AQUIFER]. So, just add the brackets [] around the AQUIFER.

In next version I will turn the aquifers back, and provide separate files with those turned off. I think that's the best.

[Kipi]

New version is uploaded!

Few new creatures, one new workshop, three new minerals and one new metal has been added to this mod.

My next goal is to produce alloys using the several metals with gold to produce even more valuable metals for crafting. I have also been thinking of creating totally new creature type, golems! Also, I've plans of expanding the crematory to use wooden crafts as burning material as well (finally some use for those wooden crafts elves tend to leave behind after slaughtering the caravans). So many ideas to do, so stay tuned! 

[Deon]

Just a note: iron man, mud man, fire man etc. are in fact golems.

[Kipi]

That's true. What I was planning is to use the iron man as the basing of the whole creature type, remove it and mud man from the creature_standard.txt file and create the golem creature, which has all the different types as castes. Magma and fire man I leave as they are, I think those can be considered as elementals rather than golems. I was thinking of the distinction between those two more like in Dungeon & Dragons. This way I could also make the elementals entities as well, leaving the golems as just creatures.

Also, when it becomes possible, I was thinking that dwarves could create golems from proper materials and skills, though that is still in distant future and requires Toady to improve the modding capabilities.

Also, I think that elementals should have pain and fear, they are living things after all. Golems, on the other hand, are just humanoid shaped things created from certain materials, brought to life magically.


EDIT: Also, elementals should not be allowed to be tamed, while golems definitely should. Perhaps even allowing the import of golems via trading, though in very high price...