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[Rumrusher]

In Griffon the Brush Off, Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash are pulling pranks for the whole first half of the episode, which is the full extent of the logic behind it. But mostly I did that so world gen wouldn't be sparkles and rainbows.

I thought only the good region had that kinda of stuff. Man picking up this mod might lead to diabetes.

[Nidokoenig]

Bumping with new version: Zebras, pies, big tasty stews, handkerchiefs, bandanas, massive weight loss. Link added to first post.

[Jordrake]

This is beautiful and sparkly.

I wish I had other things to say.

[Nidokoenig]

I'm currently working on the evil ponies; does anyone know if [SPOUSE_CONVERTER] and what goes with it works on a civilised creature, or am I just going to have to put a blood-sucking bite on the vampire pegasi? In fact, does anyone have any info on how various tags behave on civilised creatures, like [FLIER], [SHEARABLE_TISSUE_LAYER], [MILKABLE] and [WEBBER]? I know [FLIER] just plain don't work, what about the others? Oh, and giving a specific caste different body size data works, right? Cave ponies castes are going to be a bit odd.

I'm also wondering about adding rare pegacorn and equivalent ponies. At a rough guesstimate from seeing Celestia next to Twilight Sparkle in Fall Weather Friends, I'd guess they'd be three to four times regular pony size, putting them between 750 and 1000 kilos. I think I'll make them about 1 in 30 of all ponies, which is rare enough to be special and balance their obvious power, but not so rare that people will be slaughtering migrants because they aren't pegacorns. After all, there are plenty of reasons to slaughter migrants already.

[darkflagrance]

Spouse converting is only for night creatures.

Shearable tissue works fine for civ members. I've heard of dwarves shaving their breads using that method. Though many people talk of milking elves, I think it only works on domestic-type creatures.

Webber also works; Deon's dwarves in Genesis can be webbers. Fortress Defense has an enemy civ of giant cave spiders.

Flier sorta works; flying creatures only path to where they can path by walking, but will use flying shortcuts; so even though I have a a massive wall around my fort with a three-tile gate on one side, my hunters fly everywhere like there were no obstacles.

Yeah, you can have castes with specific body-sizes. You might want to go about this by defining body size by caste only and not defining a species body size for that species.

Flavor-wise, since the "pegacorn" ponies seem to be semi-divine, you might even want to make them rarer. My civ has a race of 1/100 immortals and I still have 5 of them in a fort of 80.

[Nidokoenig]

Do you mean it needs the [NIGHT_CREATURE_HUNTER] tag, or do you mean it just won't work in a civ creature because it has to be a lone stalker type thing?

So they'll shear there own beards, rather than a shearer carting them off to the farmer's workshop? And will they trade thread and cloth made of their own hair and webbing?

I had wondered how luck of the draw would affect pegacorns(maybe I should call them royal or thoroughbred, so I can be consistent across the species), but really, if they're too rare, it does become sort of inevitable people will slaughter migrants to get more of them. After all, sieges are partially population based. What I'll do is I'll use obnoxiously big numbers for population ratios, so pegacorns and equivalents are 200 out of 6000 as standard or something, and people can easily tweak the pegacorn numbers to suit their taste. In fact, I'll probably be rolling out the duplicate caste system for forcing genetic diversity soon(after evil and cave ponies), so I'll probably roll the two out together, so the numbers are easier to manage.
 You'll notice that each caste of ponies and zebras tends to have one set of colours, because I've defined them all individually, so all female ibis zebras in a world will be striped carmine and puce with black wings, for example, but all male ibises will be black and cream with pearl wings, because the colour genetics is linked to that specific caste because I've defined them separately. What I'm going to do to force diversity is have a [CASTE:FEMALE_IBIS01], [CASTE:FEMALE_IBIS02] and so on, and give each a duplicate of the descriptor guff at the end of the file, so the basic castes will look more diverse because they're being tracked as half a dozen separate strains each under the hood. They'll still be randomised, but we'll be getting half a dozen random results per caste instead of just the one, which is better than crowds of five or six samefriends in the show. I know it looks horrible and high maintenance, that's why I've been putting it off. Any better ideas would be greatly appreciated.

[Monkey King]

One thing you have to watch out for on the pegasus ponies: For some reason, they keep getting stuck on rooftops. I'm guessing that one of their pathing nodes is being placed on a rooftop as they try to fly straight to their destination, then when they try to recalculate their route (using foot paths), they can't find a path and get stuck. Since it's a bug with the [FLIER] tag there's probably no way to fix this, so make sure to install fire escapes on all your houses.

[Fayrik]

The only time I would actually want the Royal ponies to turn up at my fort, would be if the King/Queen was arriving. In fact, I'm quite tempted to suggest this as a case for adding it as a feature to the game.
It would work fantastically for something like an "ant fortress".

But, what's this about.. Cast Duplication? It's a little late, and I'm kind of tired. I'm finding it a bit difficult to understand why exactly you want to duplicate the casts.
Is this for genetic simulations, or am I missing the point?

Also, I downloaded this mod just before the last update. I've got to say, the Pegasi make an incredible dynamic. I was confused at why half of my builders kept getting stuck in weird places, but once you get your head around it, they can speed construction up so much.
It'd be even better if they could path places other ponies can't normally go. I want to build clouds for them to sit on!

So, to conclude: I am definitely enjoying Slaves to Celestia: My Little Fortress. And I shall also definitely be watching this thread!

Ninja-edit: Yeah, I looked into this, Monkey. I think what it is, is that the game uses a "foot-path" pathing system to tell if you can or can't go somewhere... So, they won't fly around on their own, yet will fly when paths are available - but if they dodge upwards, they can get stuck. A quick kick with Runesmith tends to get them flying again.

[Nidokoenig]

About Caste Duplication: Yeah, it's basically forcing genetic diversity, colourwise. Look at your ponies' descriptions sometime. Keep track of their gender, which type of pony they are(the description at the bottom will tell you), and their colours. You'll find that almost always, every male pegasus will be one set of colours, every female earth pony another set of colours, and so on. Each member of a caste will be exactly the same in terms of colours. Caste duplication is where I double, triple, n-ple up all the castes, so that while you still see six castes in game because they have the same gloss or displayed name, a male pegasus pony could be [MALE_PEGASUS_01] and have one set of colours, or [MALE_PEGASUS_07] and have a completely different set. It's a way of forcing variety. I'm asking if anyone knows of a neater way to do it, since this method is pretty much brute-forcing it.

I'm not sure there's a way to force a noble to be only one caste, and certainly not for that caste to only appear when a noble shows up. It doesn't really make sense for it to be physically impossible for pegacorn to be born unless it's royalty. Maybe I'll put up a pegacorn and non-pegacorn version.

[Fayrik]

The only trouble I see with that is that every time you duplicate the castes, you're going to end up with the raws growing by the same numbers.

I'm not sure there's a way to force a noble to be only one caste, and certainly not for that caste to only appear when a noble shows up.

I don't think there is a way to force Noble Castes, however, that was the feature I was suggesting, I was just unclear about it. Thought presumably the noble castes would breed, so the latter shouldn't be out of the question just yet.

Well, I guess that means I'm back to the test fortress! Though, it's horrendously overpopulated now. Keeping track of my ponies' types are hard enough, I've not even gotten around to gender or colour!
But, such are the hardships of a fortress manager!

[Nidokoenig]

Yeah, but the bigger the raws are, the more there is to go wrong if I try to change things around. But yeah, it's pretty safe, I'm probably worrying about nothing.

One thing you might notice if you look at the descriptor files is that I've implemented almost 500 stripe patterns for use in pony and zebra hair, and there are garish and earthy one coming with diomedian and cave ponies. That's the main reason I want to force diversity, I want more than six hair colours/patterns to show up at a time. It happens occasionally, but DF genetics does tend towards homogeny. That's why colours are defined individually by caste rather than at the creature level, early builds would have everypony looking the same.

I usually use More Embark Dwarvesx224 to check diversity. That way, I can do it from the embark supplies screen by pressing [v] on the ponies menu. This is great for checking that you're giving skills to someone who learns them quickly, too.

[darkflagrance]

Do you mean it needs the [NIGHT_CREATURE_HUNTER] tag, or do you mean it just won't work in a civ creature because it has to be a lone stalker type thing?

Won't work in civ creature

So they'll shear there own beards, rather than a shearer carting them off to the farmer's workshop? And will they trade thread and cloth made of their own hair and webbing?

I haven't done it myself, so I don't know who does the shearing. But there should be no problems trading stuff made of hair; but on the other hand I'm actually not sure if dwarves will make crafts with their own hair.

[Nidokoenig]

Thanks. Soon as I'm done defining some suitably earthy hair stripe patterns, I'll be checking them out. I'll get an embark with some wildlife on it, so I can check pony web usage while I'm at it.

[Nidokoenig]

Good news and bad news: I got parasprites working! Those little perishers...

Cave ponies are perfectly happy to weave slippy pony webs into cloth(and you'll have plenty of it if you lure some parasprites in with a little food), but I haven't gotten a draltha pony to shear itself or others as yet, but we'll see how it goes. 7 cave pony recruits against a herd of skeletal giraffes will result in a herd of extra dead giraffes and four just plain dead cave ponies.

I've decided to add a few new "plants" and a new grazing animal: wheat worms, cave wheat worms, angel hair worms, sweet worms, blood worms and grave worms, and the reptilian herbivore admired for its resemblance to a pony in formal attire, the tank. The worms are split between above and below ground and along good to evil, are damn near worthless and need to be processed into a bag, and the tank is basically a reptilian water buffalo, but slightly bigger to offset it not giving milk, a lot slower, and it gives a shell when slaughtered. I'll finish testing and tweaking and upload the next version in a couple of days.

With the addition of the cave and diomedian pony hair patterns, this mod now adds no fewer than 1179 descriptor patterns. Cave pony hairs are based on mineral deposits, for example, there's a selection of dark red hair patterns with bright blue or red spots, resembling bauxite. Diomedian hairs are just meant to be horridly garish mixtures.

[Nidokoenig]

New version is available for download.