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[Necro910]

What does [POPULATION_NUMBER:x:x] do? Is it the population limit of the creature, or... 

[Jeoshua]

That's a range for Min/Max of a creature type to be generated when it is, in fact generated... meaning the tag has no effect on how often the creature shows up, but rather how many there are when it does.

Not using it makes all spawns a spawn of one creature only.

[Necro910]

That's a range for Min/Max of a creature type to be generated when it is, in fact generated... meaning the tag has no effect on how often the creature shows up, but rather how many there are when it does.

Not using it makes all spawns a spawn of one creature only.

Ok. I thought it might have an effect of when it comes in relation to the fortress. (Like a monster coming at 50+ dwarves)

[Jeoshua]

You're thinking of [ATTACK_TRIGGER:a:b:c] where a is number of dwarves, b is exported goods, and c is created goods.

I think that's only ever taken into account for semi- and megabeasts

[Necro910]

You're thinking of [ATTACK_TRIGGER:a:b:c] where a is number of dwarves, b is exported goods, and c is created goods.

I think that's only ever taken into account for semi- and megabeasts

Oh, ok. Thanks! 

[Malorn]

Regarding the Population_Number, I've always wondered at its relation to frequency, since even when frequency is set to 100, there does not seem to be the expected increase in creatures arriving.  I guess I mean to say, I never see many creatures at my forts, any ideas how to increase this?  Yes, I have read the wiki's explanation of frequency and Population_Number, and logically 100 frequency should mean that a creature is present all of the year, if it is present at all.

Also, Population_Number does not seem to do what Jeoshua said:

That's a range for Min/Max of a creature type to be generated when it is, in fact generated... meaning the tag has no effect on how often the creature shows up, but rather how many there are when it does.

Having had numbers in the range of 10,000, the number of creatures does not increase in a fashion in keeping with this theory.  So . . . curious, anyone have any other ideas, or something to set me straight?

[Jeoshua]

I don't understand tho... that's what it's SUPPOSED to do.

Maybe it's broken like the tags in the entity files that control maximum civ size.

[Sphalerite]

When a site is created, each biome in the site has a population of wild animals created in numbers determined by the POPULATION_NUMBER tag in the raw file for that creature.

Wild animals are spawned from the map edge in groups, with the group size determined by the CLUSTER_NUMBER tag for that creature.  There is a limit to the number of groups of animals which can exist at any one time on the map, and new groups will not appear until a group leaves and makes room for them.  Caged animals don't count as still being on the map, so if you cage all members of a group, another group can appear.

FREQUENCY, unless I'm mistaken, is a relative tag determining how often that creature is picked when it comes time to spawn a new group of creatures.  For example, if your local biome has creatures with frequency 100, with frequency 10, and with frequency 1, the creatures with frequency 100 will be 10X more likely to show up than the creature with frequency 10, and 100X more likely than the creature with frequency 1.  I'm not sure what happens with creatures that don't have a FREQUENCY tag, I suspect they default to 100.

[Deon]

I think the default is 50.

[Grimlocke]

The cluster size token does pretty much what Jeoshua described.

As for the population size token, im not sure. I expect it to be the total number of creatures to be generated in a single biome.

Frequency I suspect regulates the likelyness of these creatures being generated in a biome at all, I base this one tradable animals from civs that should techinically have certain low frequency animals as they live in the same biome, but actualy dont have them.

Also fortresses that never saw a cave dragon, cave spider or other rare animal show up despite that thousands of dead crundles.


Not realy sure about any of this stuff though, its all rather difficult to test.

[Jeoshua]

Shoot... swing and a miss 

[Malorn]

Once again I head back to the wiki.  Population_number is described as follows:

The minimum/maximum numbers of how many of these creatures can show up on a map per year.

From my own testing, I know this is in no way true in any way.  If you set the minimum to 40, you do not see 40 creatures appear over the course of the year.  What I'm trying to get a handle on here is how Frequency and Population_Number alter the actual appearance likelihood.  I suspect that they both impact it, but I'm short on ways or means.  Increasing the pop_num does indeed make it more likely to see larger numbers of creatures, but not the extent that one would expect.  Frequency is even more confusing.  Any knowledgeable modders about to tell me some more about this?

[3]

POPULATION_NUMBER controls how many creatures of that species are placed per region(/biome?) at generation(?). Creatures wander in and out of the map in clusters pertaining to CLUSTER_NUMBER.

I'm almost certain that FREQUENCY affects overall populations in a general sense, so Grimlocke's probably got the right idea regarding that. I don't know how correct the wiki is on the matter when it states that the tag affects how frequently the creature appears on the map - that observation might just be due to lower populations.

[Naryar]

Population number seems to be the min/max number of creatures spawned per biome.

And it is certainly not per year. I think it is in total. My fortresses keep having no more animals when I hunt/catch/kill enough camels.

You can hunt creatures to extinction in fortress mode.

[Jeoshua]

Does anyone know if [ATTACK_TRIGGER] would work for non-megabeasties?  And if so, if it would happen in worldgen, too?

I mean, it might not make alot of sense for a normal animal to only attack big cities, but it could give a sort of "scaling" for growing difficulties to face.  It would be awesome for Fortress mode, and it would keep world populations from going exponentially out of control, like Megabeasts already seem to do, to a degree... only by slaughtering a city once it reaches a certain size, sometimes never to recover.