Bay 12 Games Forum

So a bunch of miscellaneous findings, mostly from trying to get yamanba to work in my feudal japan mod:

Making something multiple differnt types of "megabeast" (night creature hunter, semimegabeast, etc) will make that creature spawn in every possible category.

Turning people into vermin is REALLY WEIRD

Because legends mode will not track vermin, it will also not track people being turned into vermin. This includes people turned into vermin during normal gameplay, legends mode will just pretend they were their original species.

People turned vermin are not treated like normal vermin and instead are just treated as normal creatures. Basically you cannot Grab them with g in adv mode and they don't blink around.

I managed to crash the game by trying to throw a guy I turned into a snail with wrestling. However I can't reproduce this.

If creatures have multiple specialattack_interactions they tend to use them all at once during worldgen

specialattack_interaction interactions actually occur BEFORE the attack that inflicts them (important enough that I already added to the wiki). Also how I got around the weirdness with turning people into bugs, because they can't act weird if they're 100% guaranteed to be squished the instant after they turn into a bug!

worldgen battles seem to be decided mostly be size and material composition (of the armor, weapons, and creatures) that take part in them. Not sure about skills (aside from things like military tactics for group engagements), but if skills do matter 10 striking is not enough to make any noticeable difference. Notably, the properties of actual attacks used don't seem to matter that much. My yamanba, despite being insanely dangerous in actual gameplay, are such chumps in worldgen that they almost never manage to get names and only seem to """win""" most of their engagements because units are programmed to flee from megabeasts instead of fighting. They tend to die as soon as someone "confronts" them. The thing this say the most to me is that velocity of attacks probably isn't considered, since the way I got my mountain hags to break the skin with their nails to inflict their curses was to make them scratch really really really fast.

Adventurers cannot be made to eat bugs, even if you give them the gobble_vermin tag. Sad

Megabeasts seem to be able to become the enemy of something without interacting with them. I had multiple creatures with literal screens worth of enemies who had done nothing aside from spawn in a mountain somewhere.

Something I realized recently is that none of the past almost 100 worlds I've generated have had minotaurs in them. Like, NONE. No labyrinths either. I do mod things a lot, but I've looked through the legends of at least 3 different fresh raw restarts and I think it's unlikely that I'd have managed to accidentally make a whole race incapable of spawning 3 times in a row. Did labyrinths get nuked alongside dungeons and I just didn't notice or is there some very very specific set of circumstances that must arise for them to be created.

On a similar note I don't think I've ever seen those new ghouls we supposedly have either. Am I the only one who doesn't have these in their game anymore (or at all in the case of ghouls I guess)?

Also my bad for accidentally posting this in the wiki subboard at first lol.

It seems to me like just increasing  the frequency/expanding the scope of named "non-artifacts" would be a good step that would satisfy both people who want as much info as possible and people who want some lore consistency, as well as not requiring the game to track every useless sock. Maybe also letting fortress players designate items to be named like you can in adventure mode. (kinda silly how the axe my dwarf used to singlehandedly fight off over 30 necro experiments is just treated as a normal axe because he died of his wounds before he could name it).

Honestly though I feel like a lot of this could be improved a lot without actually changing anything but the interface. Making the rumors screen in fort mode more like it is in ADV (well, ok, better than in adv. probably more like the tell story menu) and just letting the player examine tracked/legendary items through it. As it is there's plenty of knowledge that the player in fort mode is not privy too despite even the mason in making blocks down in the mines supposedly knowing it as common knowledge in adv mode.

nah thats the expedition leader/mayor. Most people make them fill both rolls cuz it's easy and keeps them around their office but you don't need to.

hmmmmm, well thats harder to figure out without the raws. Losing to kobolds is pretty hard though, so I'm going to guess they either had some problem that kept them from fighting at all, or there was something in the entity raws that caused them trouble. Wooden weapons, lack of livestock, or lack of materials to make weapons/armor out of could have done it.

Easy way to narrow down if it was the entity or the civ would be to add them as an additional creature token to say, humans, and see how the perform there.

pointless trivia fact, accidentally making a spouse converter into a spouse conversion target through creature variations, then doing it AGAIN by using the NEW_TAG instead of REMOVE_TAG causes the game to crash in worldgen somehow.

I really thought it was turning people into worms and trying to eat them that was doing it but nope.

So this is a pretty small suggestion and while I know this is sorta related to the next update on the table after intrigue/villains get ironed out, there are a few of what I guess I'd call baby steps that don't actually add to the behavior of towns in any meaningful way but would make attaining positions in adventure mode feel way more impactful. Specifically a bunch of features and flags that are already in the game but could be combined or expanded really easily. And by "easily" I mean everything here is something I've been able to do myself with gm-editor that also has some form of input (dialog option, shift-i option, etc) already built in that does something very similar.

Secede: probably limited by loyalty or if you hold a "duty bound" position you cannot give away, but being able to purge your entity links to join up with bandits or even start your own entity like bandits/necormancers do would be neat.

More [RULES_FROM_LOCATION]: Don't really get why its limited to so few sites. Most sites have "throne rooms" of some type, but the only type you can seize through the "claim" option are hamlets (maybe castles? I've heard you can do that but never bothered. I know towns dont work). Claims also seem to be the only things this tag even effects given pretty much all rulers seem to have preferred locations.

Inviting people to become residents: Basically enabling a version of the "invite to become hearthperson/lieutenant" for noncombatants. They wouldn't necessarily do anything, but they'd move in to your town. Maybe if you invite refugees or something your rep goes up with them like if you reunited them or something.

Make adminstrator: Basically once you build/conquer your first location new ones you conquer may become holdings just like in fort mode, and in place of the "offer your position as lord" option you can offer to make someone your administrator so you still technically own the site.

Declaring war, making peace, etc: War I figure would work like insurrections. Maybe when discussing an army on the march or someones ascension to position after saying "It must be stopped with violent force!" you either automatically declare war on them or have the option to, at which point the game just does whatever it is it normally does when two civs are at war without you doing much else. Likewise if you make an enemy ruler yield you should be able to force them to surrender and become a tributary. Kinda dumb how currently you can slaughter all of someone's retainers, break both their legs, force them to yield, have them marked as "terrified of you", get bully rep with them, and they still won't acquiesce to any demands. Also allied units and companions actually respecting peace agreements and yielding would be nice. Even bandits wont normally kill someone who yields, but your companions will almost always escalate the fight like nothing happened.

adoption: This one is the one that least fits my requirements as stated at the start (notably because I don't believe that there is a legends mode string for this event occurring already, while everything else has one), however it's also the most important IMO because it would solve the issue of "spend time with family" being in the game but impossible to complete without modding for adv mode as well as solving a role playing issue. Basically if you encounter an orphan (and have somewhere for them to stay AKA fit the requirements to have hearthpeople) you can offer to adopt them at which point your relationship flags are set as family members and they go live in your base. Now you actually have motivation to return "home" to get your needs filled and you don't have to feel bad about abandoned children with nowhere to go.

Again, I know all these suggestions fall under a few of the near term arcs, however all of them are already possible to do through memory hacking and I feel like would make great small additions to adventure mode without actually requiring any new features.