Anyone else seen a crystal dragon, yet? Or a cannon beetle? Interesting creatures I have never seen before 
I just started a map on the newest LoFR release (after first a break from DF, and then playing a community game of vanilla DF, oh, how I missed the things I'd come to love through the mod!).
I have no idea if it's still rare to see the critters you were asking about, Pan, but as I checked the local critters about a month after starting play, ahh, there some cannon beetles are.
The biome's a mix of mountains, rocky wasteland, and temperate savanna, temperate range seems to be mid to high, in case others are still seeking the (no longer rare?) beetle.
Edited to add, these beetles are awesome. They behave exactly how I wish my dwarven ranged troops would. So I have 2 war tigers and 2 war dogs, and all my dwarves but one are gathering plants along the edge of the map where they grow, the one is making picks. As plants get picked the random dwarf runs back to store it... sometimes followed by a war beast, each one was trained by a different dwarf.
The cannon beetles have wandered across much of the map; the war beasts IGNORE them. Even when they get shot by the stones. The beetles shy away from my dwarves and animals, like other harmless wildlife does. This is sad; I'd hoped the war beasts would attack them on sight... I really expected them to fight back once they started getting bruised.
As a dirty save scummer, especially as I check out new game features, I knew just what to do; I'd already saved the game, so I saved it again, in case these stones were capable of doing more than bruising. They were; so I reloaded and drafted everyone to move near a beetle.
Hah. They ignored it, it shied away from them, and continued to lob stones at them from a distance, which they ignored even as they got wounded.
Nothing for it then; kill it guys!
It's fast. And it doesn't slow down to fire the stones, and it apparently has eaten a LOT of them, because it just keeps shooting and shooting. My warbeasts are perfectly happy to follow their trainers; perhaps they could catch the beetle quickly but they're not trying to, they think it's a game I guess...
One of my starting 7 is -just- barely fast enough to close the distance. He dodges a couple stones, gets smacked by a lot of them, mostly bone bruises, though quite a few muscle bruises and a gut bruise too. He gets close enough at last to attack it; of course he's not at all trained, it dodges him and seconds after fires another stone at him, breaking a finger.
Fascinating creatures. I want my dwarves to be like them.
Fire, wanna make a playable cannon-beetle race?
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Topic: *=*=* Legends of Forlorn Realms (LFR 2012) v0.21a *=*=* [DF 0.34.11] (Read 406002 times)