I'm looking into it but I'm hopelessly terrible at this stuff plus I can't find any helpful pages in the wiki.
Does anyone have any helpful links?
EDIT: One idea to help prevent 'cheating' is to only make stone BLOCKS so they can only be used in construction and nothing else.
All I looked at when I started out was the wiki, the pages on materials tokens and reactions, and looking at the raws. This probably isn't ideal since it tends to make a large part of the programming work trying little tweaks until the errorlog calms down and the game's actual behaviour vaguely resembles what I wanted, but it seems to be enough.
The stone blocks trick would work, but it strikes me as inelegant and kludgy. After all, if you really need to smelt those iron bars into steel before the next diomedian invasion, what's going to stop you throwing in a marble block? And anyhow, I like the cloudstone idea so that's what I'll be doing.
Started drawing a tentacle pony and partway through I realized his mane & tail were the same style and color as Twilight Sparkle's.
Wow, that is amazing! That's pretty much exactly how I picture tentacle ponies.
I was also thinking about maybe adjusting the pony size and stats a bit. That's probably going to have all sorts of problems for a while. I keep picturing the ponies as more human sized overall...
And is it possible to set attributes like agility on a per caste basis? Looking at the mod's raws it's not entirely clear, but that can be done with the SELECT_CASTE: tag I'm guessing? I was toying with the idea of making earth ponies stronger than the other castes by a pinch, but I don't know. And I toyed around with the idea of making males stronger than females, but I feel sexist even thinking about doing that, so I probably won't.
I am looking forward to a simplified version though, maybe I'll be able to pick and choose bits from both versions that I like (the simplified conjured wood looks very nice).
Pony sizing is quite a knotty problem. On the one hand, the size of rabbits implies something around human size, but Winona is about that size, too, which implies a more normal pony size, and that the rabbits are those big Flemish breeds or whatever it is that are the size of a large dog. So whichever size is most fun is the right one.
As for setting attributes by caste, it almost certainly works. Try adding [MENT_ATT_RANGE:MEMORY:5000:5000:5000:5000:5000:5000:5000] to one or two castes and see if they have perfect memory every time. I recommend using a More Embark Dwarves hack to check that, having a sample size of 256 is pretty definitive for simple tests.
Physical strength by gender is certainly a thorny issue. I'll probably add increased toughness, strength and endurance to both Earth pony genders, since we really don't want either the unfortunate implications or to have to keep track of which gender ponies are on top of everything else to have "efficient" forts.
Just realised something about the animal ponies, and more specifically their civs. Some of them might be carrying tags like [BONECARN] over from the root creature, which could be why they're having trouble in worldgen. I'll add a line to the variation template to remove that. Hopefully I won't find that was the only thing keeping honey badger berserkers from spreading Fun all over the world.
