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[Xen0n]

So after accidentally completely intentionally releasing clowns into my caverns a few years back, I noticed I wasn't getting any new cave creatures.  After enough sieges and badger-tussles on the surface I noticed the once mighty Rhino herds were absent as well. 

Did some research, learnt and animal populations and extinction, and I want a way out.  I've never even tried Hunters before, but with the current state of things I'd be too scared to try, for what seems like a very brief supply of meat at the cost of no more animals. 

Basically, it seems odd that as my fortress has grown larger and stronger, the threat and challenge of the wildlife gets weaker and smaller.  While having penalties and consequences to over-hunting etc. is a good idea, I just don't like the ghost-town my fort has become; it's kinda boring without beautiful wildlife to butcher.  Even some method of allowing repopulation without that micro-management of always allowing at least one from a herd to escape offscreen. 

So I'm looking to edit some raws, maybe bump up a bunch of POPULATION_NUMBERs, but want to check first. 

1.  Would increasing all the animal populations to say, 500, effectively keep them around for the lifespan of a typical 10-year fort?

2.  Is there any negative effect from doing this?  (Poor FPS due to lots of animals on-screen, weird effects to the animal limit on the map making it have only 1 type of animal at a time since all the slots are filled up etc.)

3.  Does anyone know an easy way to perform a change like this?  Currently I'm using a batch text editor, Replace Text, to edit my raws but it seems more difficult to change a whole bunch of different entries at once

4.  Similar question for goblin siege mounts; any way to make it so they don't permanently go away after you kill the general?

[Girlinhat]

Population numbers determine the number available per biome.  If you embark on the border of 2 tropical shrublands, you'll have twice as many elephants available because it comes from both biomes.  This does NOT change the number on-screen.  CLUSTER_NUMBER is how many will appear at any time, POPULATION is the total number available per biome.  For instance, the cave dragon has 2-3 per biome, I believe, and a cluster of 1.  Therefore, there are 2-3 total, and they appear one at a time.  If you kill one, then there' 1-2 left, and that dead one is not replaced.  Setting the population to something absurd like 9,000 will cause no more to appear at any given time, but when you kill them, there's a much larger pool of animals that can still appear.  Not infinite, but you'll be dead before you run out of animals.  Vermin used to have this trouble, which made fishing impossible because after a few years the waters would become empty.  Toady added some code that makes vermin multiply endlessly, making long-term fishing possible.  I suspect that future releases will include some sort of [RENEWABLE_POP] token, so that cave dragons can still be rare and groundhogs will be able to breed and repopulate.

As for the goblin general, this is more of an entity issue.  The general is basically the dungeon master, he has the job of taming the beasts and giving them to his men.  When the general dies, there's no one left to make tames.  You'd have to toy with the civilization tokens, I'm not sure exactly what would need to be done but I assume there's a way to do it.  Ask the modding forums, they probably know.  But, in my experience, mounts only cause trouble.  I had elves riding grizzly bears, which sounds awesome until you realize that the bears just loitered around and my militia commander could pick fights one at a time, turning a 200 vs 1 battle into a series of leisurely duels.

[Xen0n]

Okay, awesome, thanks.  Think I'll beef up the Population number while leaving the Cluster numbers alone, so as not to interfere with that "only so many slots for creatures on the map at once" limit I heard about.  I do like the idea of certain things being rare, but when it's also only for a limited time only, I get antsy.

And yeah now that you mention it, this seems more relevant to the modding section, maybe I'll re-make this thread over there and see if anyone has ideas on the goblin general. 

[Girlinhat]

The slot limit is per layer.  The surface, all 3 caverns, magma sea, and HFS all have one spawn of animals, for a total of 6 possible groups at once.  You can have badgers, crundles, trogs, blind ogres, magma crabs, and clowns all at once, but you won't have badgers and giraffes at the same time, because they're on the same level.  If you bump up the cluster number of surface animals, you can have a siege-sized herd appear, but it won't effect the other layers at all.  This can be interesting, if you want something like a buffalo herd of 30 creatures, or a terrifying non-siege invasion of 50 giant badgers (modded to breath fire and fly).

With my own experience with large numbers, it doesn't lag as much as you'd think.  Dwarves care about food and mood and directed pathing and whatnot.  Invaders and wildlife care about their health and their current path, making for a much smaller FPS impact.  I had 400 invaders on screen during mod testing, with 25 dwarves, and had as much lag as if I'd had 100 dwarves.  You'll notice the FPS drop if you get massive herds, but you won't notice it as much as if it were the same number of dwarves.

[Xen0n]

Hmmm, interesting...  I do like the idea of having high-cluster, low-frequency herds of, say, elephants, in a low-food biome to give the sense of "Oh!  The annual migration is here, now's the chance to get meat!" / "Now's the time to seal the entrances and pray!" depending on playstyle and modding. 

[Xen0n]

As an update, I just spent the bulk of the last hour finding and downloading an old program to allow Windows 7 to view obsolete Win32 help files so I could read the instructions on how to use a discontinued batch text editor, leading me to learn how to write regular expressions so I could change how many virtual rhinos lived in my entirely ASCII videogame.




I love Dwarf Fortress.

[darkflagrance]

I've heard that if you breed wild creatures and then release them, the releases will "repopulate" the populations that the game keeps track of. This allows a manner of harvesting breedable wild creatures like elephants and unicorns.

[Girlinhat]

In theory, because wild animals have no unique feature and are saved as a floating point of data.  There's just "some" rhinos out there, it doesn't care where they came from.  If they enter the fort, it removes from the total.  If they leave the fort, it adds.  This could also allow you to transplant non-native species, like seamonsters in an arctic lake that you carried from one fort to another via adventure mode.

Also, take the zombie route of animals.  A frequency of 2 for a hordes and hordes of monsters to arrive, with BUILDING_DESTROYER:2 added for Fun.  You'll get a very rare invasion of native creatures.

[DuckBoy2]

In theory, because wild animals have no unique feature and are saved as a floating point of data.

My map has 0.2579 badger, the remaining badger was crushed under my drawbridge. 

(Computer science joke ftw!)

...

I'm sorry.

[Girlinhat]

I was actually very aware that joke would happen, just not so sure.  The "floating" refers to "not really pinned down" in this case.  Either way, I'm going to start SegFault-ing your badgers for good measure.

[Cthulhu Inc]

*Adds in passenger pigeons, flocks of 10million* *computer breaks*

[o_O[WTFace]]

This could also allow you to transplant non-native species, like seamonsters in an arctic lake that you carried from one fort to another via adventure mode.

*Adds in passenger pigeons, flocks of 10million* *computer breaks*

Like a tidal wave of pigeon... brb modding

[Sphalerite]

*Adds in passenger pigeons, flocks of 10million* *computer breaks*

Like a tidal wave of pigeon... brb modding

[CLUSTER_NUMBER:1000000000:10000000000]?