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[3]

For example, your spiders are described as "giant daddy long leg spiders" yet they use the default relsizes for the SPIDER body, which are quite tarantula-like. The problem is that the vanilla game doesn't account for the fact that a cat has different dimensions to a dog other than its volume.

Of course, this is really just detail, but I'll do it even if you don't, and it has enough effect on things to warrant inclusion.

[AdeleneDawner]

Truth spiders do have their bodies defined as being very small - relsize 100 for the upper body and 200 for the lower body, compared to 400 or each leg and 100 for each foot. I may have missed a head part, though; I'll check.

In other news, I've been checking out the poison worm ooze mechanics a bit more. I discovered two important things. One is that they don't leave ooze trails all the time - only when they touch water. If they crawl over a square with a puddle in it, they leave a puddle of ooze. If they have a bucket of water dropped on them, they spray ooze in a similar pattern to how a normal creature will spray blood when sliced. Getting rained on also washes their ooze off into a puddle on the ground, which can then be washed away if another drop of rain hits the same tile. This is why I thought they left ooze all the time - I was embarking into flat, rainy, woody places to test the reactions, and saw that 'eventually' there was a puddle of ooze where they'd been.

The other thing I discovered is that creatures don't seem to pick up ooze coverings when they walk through puddles of the stuff, now, or even when it's splashed on them. I have a yak and 6 worms in a 3x3 room, and have just about drowned them twice over dropping water in there, and the yak has no ooze on it at all and no signs of poisoning, even though the walls are pretty well covered with the stuff.

So, I guess the ooze is mostly just flavor for now.

[3]

Wait, damn, they do. I don't know how I missed that.

[AdeleneDawner]

DFFD file is updated with poison worms. I also fixed a typo in the truth spiders' poison - it now briefly causes dizziness before the victim passes out.

A question of flavor: How should the various creatures be named? I made sure they all had names that sound good in
dwarven, but they show up in English right now; I could easily make them show up in Dwarven, or in a combination of Dwarven and English. (I do like the idea of thidas lizards and setar bats running around...)

This is easy enough to mod on the user side, of course, but do you have preferences for the default?

[3]

A fairly minor thing: Your creatures don't use skill tokens for their natural skills; they use labour tokens instead, which is causing error spam.

Edit: Not worth making another post about this, but don't be surprised if the SIEGEOPERATE token doesn't work. I can't figure it out.

[AdeleneDawner]

Whoops! I thought those errors were because I'm still running .21, which doesn't support skill tokens at all. (One of the slightly later versions does. I'm waiting on the LNP to upgrade, tho.) Anyway, I'll fix it with the next release, which should be tonight, unless I decide to play with attributes for the existing creatures first. Boulder birds are done, though, and have the full suite of attributes, and thanks for the suggestion that I use them, 3. I wanted the boulder birds to have a particular personality, and now they do. :3

Edit: Siegeoperate isn't there because I actually intend to have a critter be a siege operator. (That would be kind of silly.) I intend to make sprites for these guys, too, and I want the frill lizards to have different sprites for different colors, which means that they need to have natural skills giving them different jobs so I can use the workaround that allows that. So if siege operator doesn't work, and if I'm still using that tag when I get around to completing that, I'll just switch it for something else.

[AdeleneDawner]

DFFD now has version 0.3.

Boulder birds are in, though I haven't added grazing behavior to them yet. I'd prefer to check out how the personality data affects their behavior without needing to make sure that they have enough grazing space as well. All of the creatures now have attribute and personality information, and the error message spam relating to natural skills is gone.

I already tried to tackle gem crabs once, and didn't understand how bodies were put together well enough to make them work. I'm still not confident that I can, so next I'm going to go through the existing creatures and fiddle with them, both to optimize them (Relsizes! Relsizes for everybody!) and to see how they're put together and how I can do the weird kind of bodies that I want. Long story short, it's going to be a day or two before I add another creature; perhaps even longer if I set up a proper fort in .25 to see if the fellowship rats' social skills work how I hope they do, or if I get bit by the art bug and make some more sprites.

Hopefully that will give you guys a chance to get some playtesting done on the existing ones and let me know what you think. 

[isabuea]

posting to keep an eye on this.

it seems EVER so dwarfy

[AdeleneDawner]

Fun fact: Vanilla giant bats have the same arm and leg proportions as regular humanoids, like dwarves, and tails, like dogs.

Honey wing bats now do not.

LNP is probably going to update tonight, so I'm going to work on sprites now, and playtest later.

Spoiler: Teaser: frill lizard sprite (click to show/hide)

Row 1: Common, dark, drunken, dyed, dirty, stony, and blue
Row 2: Brass, copper, bronze, silver, gold, royal, and baby

[AdeleneDawner]

Playtesting is going well, and I'm pretty satisfied with everything. I also have cave coral done, and there's a poll now regarding them. I'm using the unusual egg mechanics to have them give stones, and it's a bit of a pain to set up proportions of various stones, so I'd really rather only do that once, but I'm not sure which setup will be best.

I'm currently playing with an incomplete regional setup - I made cave coral for metamorphic, igneous intrusive, igneous extrusive, and sedimentary stones, and each one gives an approximately proportional sampling of a subset of the stones available in those regions - mostly layer stones, but with a decent chance of large cluster stones and a smaller chance of vein or small cluster stones, and no gems. So far, that's been pretty neat, though I wouldn't want to rely on it for any industries, even with the 20%-per-coral-per-season chance of getting flux stone out of the sedimentary ones. If I go with that, we'll need some more reliable way of getting ore and other useful things, probably either with specific-stone-giving coral or coral that are based on the various large-cluster stones and give a higher proportion of the stones that would be found within those clusters. (Say, a 20-40% chance of getting a stone that's usually found in veins or small clusters or singles, and a 60-80% chance of getting the base large-cluster stone.) (Yes, this does mean that magnetite coral would exist, though they'd be pretty insanely expensive.)

Another option would be to have a coral for each layer stone, with a somewhat higher chance of getting non-layer stones but a smaller selection in each one compared to regional coral. I could also go with my original idea of making one coral species per stone type, but there are a lot of stone types, and that might clutter up the buyable-animals list a bit too much. (Taking out the existing aboveground ones will help, though.) This may also make it a little too easy to satisfy that rutile-loving mayor, though with the current state of the caravans I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

Left to my own devices, I'll probably go with the region-plus-specific-stone version, but I'd like some feedback on this one.

[irdsm]

I picked "One species per region type plus species for each large cluster type that contains interesting things e.g. ore/gems." because if I'm reading that right that means that there'll be a caste for each metal like you hinted at earlier. I think that's a neat idea.

[AdeleneDawner]

These are species, not castes - I definitely don't think that you should be able to breed an igneous extrusive with a sedimentary to get a metamorphic, or a slate with a microcline to get a native platinum. Though if I did each region as a species, I could do the stone types within that region as castes... that's an interesting solution, though from a functional and modding standpoint it's mostly the same as the one-coral-per-stone idea, with the same upsides and downsides but the added upside of being able to have a native aluminum coral spawn from base-stone parents once in a blue moon and the downside of native-gold coral being unlikely to breed true - and not necessarily being able to breed with *each other* since native gold occurs in several biomes. (I'd have to mark which biome such coral count as, somehow.)

The original region-plus-large-cluster idea would generate a magnetite species, but no other metal-specific species. Your best bet for non-magnetite metals would be the large cluster versions: For example, an Olivine Coral would have a decent chance of giving native aluminum, chromite, garnerite, kimberlite, cobaltite, and native gold, plus a small chance of giving some of the small-cluster stones that occur in olivine and gabbro. (Eg. 40% chance of getting olivine, 8% each chance of getting one of the six mentioned vein stones (total 48%), and the remaining 12% would be split between the rarer stones.) The region versions would have a lower chance of getting a vein stone - perhaps 3-4% per stone.

Edit: Added poll options for the stones-as-castes idea and for allowing vein stones to be species (which would also give the small-cluster stones associated with those veins).

[Scaraban]

nice work as to the poll IHDFKWTVF

[AdeleneDawner]

IHDFKWTVF

Translation?

[Scaraban]

I Honestly Don't Fucking Know What To Vote For