Bay 12 Games Forum

Maybe a new building (not necessarily a door) that would be seen by the AI's pathfinding as a solid wall unless they possessed the [CAN_LEARN] token? My cats keep eating my cave spiders.

Currently in modern Df, it’s possible to identify a vampire by noticing their light green skin, regardless of wether they are hiding their identity or not. This defeats the entire point of the vampire. Their true appearance should only be revealed if they show their identity.

At the end of the day I don’t think Toady will ever be able to please everyone. Don’t change the UI, newcomers complain. Change the UI, veterans complain.

What the title says.

a giant has arrived carrying a slab engraved with the secrets of life and death.

Oh dear.

I didn’t know Toady added Amazon express shipping to dwarf fortress.

I disagree with you, but that doesn't really matter :-)  Everybody has they own preference.  However, I'm interested to know what you would replace them with. Would removing them improve the game in your eyes?  That would mean removing something you think seems generic, but getting nothing in return, which doesn't seem like an upgrade to me.  Would you replace them with static creatures, so now there would be exactly 5 different forgotten beasts, for example: deadly breath, deadly spittle, deadly dust, webs, fire?  You can just make a mod that adds the creatures you want now, so that's not something you need to wait for.  I'm struggling to imagine what would be better than what we have.  Possibly you actually *want* procedurally generated creatures, but you want them to be "better"?  What would make it better?

In the spirit of the "suggestion" section, what's your suggestion for improving the situation?  It's relatively easy to say, "That sucks!", but the interesting part is when you say, "Do this instead".

I think you misunderstood what I said (or maybe I just didn’t formulate it well enough). I’m not saying that all procedural generation is bad, but that the current procedural generation system is flawed, and you start seeing the recurring patterns in it pretty fast and it also lacks any sort of consistent theming, which often makes creatures out of place (or maybe I’m just really unlucky). I suggest adding more variety in the way creatures are generated, and also make the general attributes and structure of the creatures depend on the spheres that they are based on. For example, associations with fire or volcanos would give certain creatures the bodies of salamanders (they were often associated with fire in folklore), and give them fire or magma spewing powers. The sphere of death would give them the bodies of animals commonly associated with death, such as crows or buzzards, or even make them skeletal in nature. The sphere of deformity would give them extra features, or even make them hybrids of two different bodies. Being associated with metals would give them a metallic skin around an otherwise organic body, or make them out of metal entirely. You could also expand the pool of forms which they can take, like making a creature look like a serpent, rather than a specific type of snake, or adding more familiar creatures (including sapient one) to the mix. You could add more types of material emissions, like the ability to change to weather, etc. Right now it feels like most procedurally generated creatures are either random organic creatures with either 1 or 3 eyes, external ribs, a shell, wings and a couple of other random things stitched together, or a blob made on an inorganic material. Just something to avoid this pattern.

I’m sorry if I sound like I’m nitpicking or asking for too much in this thread. I mean the procedural generation is quite impressive from a technical point of view and I’m sure it took a lot of work to design it and put it into practice. I understand people may be a little mad at me for this, and that nothing is perfect, that procedurally generated stuff will always be inferior to the carefully crafted designs and concepts that a human can make, but I still wanted to get this off my chest. That said, I don’t really like the procedural creature generation in this game (You read the title, duh). No matter what kind of creature it is, they really all feel so… generic. It feels like each and every one of them is the same, no matter what variations are in place. Their ability pools are quite narrow and are often either ridiculously broken, or completely useless. Maybe I’m just unlucky, but they always feel like they lack any sort of proper theming or coherence. What I’m trying to say is that the procedural generation kind of fails at what it was aimed to do, which was to make every world have its own memorable and unique threats, and they instead just feel completely forgettable and boring. Again, I know that changes and updates to this are probably planned for the Myth and Magic update, but I still wanted to point it out. I’d suggest not relying entirely on procedural generation and adding some pre-made content along with it.