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You can find a list of mannerism strings in the string dump, though they're somewhat fragmented and disordered. Search for "has a habit of" to find the right section.

Also, there is a small amount of customization that can be performed. The mannerism tokens that take a body part as an argument (the last two-thirds or so on the Creature Mannerism Tokens page) can have their meaning changed pretty significantly by selecting a different word. For instance, if you give a creature

[MANNERISM_LIPS:elbow]
[MANNERISM_EYES:dice]

you'll see mannerisms like "She has a habit of licking her elbow when thinking hard" and "He constantly rolls his dice".

Sure, that's cool. By all means, make it your own.

Seeing a list of changes and reverts like that makes me want, more than ever, to get a proper gui for opting in or out of the everything. If only there were more time...

I was frustrated by the large number of changes made to the files, with a few notable minor changes generating a LOT of diff noise for little gain. This made me not want to use the Modest Mod for a while, because I just found it tedious to update it or merge it into other mods. I view Modest Mod as a base for further modding more than anything, so some changes were reverted for no reason other than to make integration easier.
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 • Every "changed by modest mod" comment has been removed. If you want to know what has been changed, download DF 0.43.05 and compare the RAW folders yourself in a diff utility. Not only do the comments generate a lot of extra diff noise, but the comments are inconsistent: Modest Mod already made many "undocumented" changes.

That's a good point about the diff noise. I started the Modest Mod before I knew diff utilities were a thing; I suppose that the "changed by" tags aren't needed any more. And yeah, like you said, being a base for other mods is one of the major uses of the Modest Mod, so ease of use is significant.

• Helmets are no longer shaped, deferring to the vanilla RAWs. This seems to have been a deliberate change, and it was the only item_* file being edited: unnecessary conflicts with mods that edit items (such as Grimlocke's work).
 • Giant creatures now live just as long as their originating species again as all MAXAGE changes have been removed. These changes are pervasive and, due to a bug, difficult to apply, for very little gain. This was also inconsistently applied across the Modest Mod already: some giant creatures removed the original MAXAGE tag, some did not.

Huh, those are pretty strange changes we made. I guess I can sort of see the point of us lengthening the lives of very short-lived creatures, but how often do those even get used?

• Pandas now graze normally again: I couldn't find this bug in the bug tracker nor did I find discussion of it anywhere.

It's mentioned in the wiki, and there's some old discussion here. Maybe it's less of an issue now? I remember Toady changed grazer behaviour recently...

• Broken finger/toe bones should not make people pass out, so these bones have been removed. This is borrowed from DF Wanderer.

The drawback to having no bones is that people's digits get chopped off really easily, if I remember correctly? Plus, didn't Toady fix this a while back?

Quote from: Button on May 23, 2016, 12:10:04 am

Though that does raise the question of whether giant & person version of bugs with giant compound eyes should have their eyes resized to be easier to hit.

Personally, I'd rather err on the side of not introducing a new major weakness to giant creatures and animal bugmen: many of them are pushovers already. Realism isn't always preferable, in my opinion.

Could have a separate, less pain-sensitive eye tissue for insectoids, maybe? Since their eyes aren't exactly soft and squishy. This page has some good info.

All right, here's the repo: https://github.com/Igfig/ModestMod

All I've got in there so far is the latest DFFD download (with the Pheobus version as a branch), so if you could get the things you're working on right now in a branch, Button, that'd really get things into gear.

One thing I'm not sure about: should each module be a branch, or what? I don't know if that'd cause awkwardness when it comes to trying to compile the full package for release. Right now I haven't even taken them out of their zips...

Taffer, that's a great idea! A thought: could you perhaps put all the descriptions in a Google Doc with comments enabled? That would make it really straightforward for people to offer suggestions on and tweaks to what you've got there, or help fill in any descriptions you find yourself stuck on.

As a tangent to the HEIGHT/LENGTH/BROADNESS situation, I've been thinking for a while about filling in some new numbers for all of those, to better represent how creatures are actually shaped. I mean, I'm pretty sure everything is treated as roughly spherical right now. Ideally, humanoids should have larger height and smaller broadness and length, beasts should be longer instead of taller, snakes should be all long and not much else, and so on. In some cases I might refine those figures even more, so that elves come out as tall as humans but thinner, and dwarves come out short and broad.

That said, I'm not sure if that's a small enough change to put in the core Modest Mod or not. Any thoughts?

• Consider making a Module for Photuris predator fireflies
• Should make firefly+ flesh inedible

What do these refer to? Did I miss something earlier in the thread?

Thanks for continuing to keep the mod up to date!

You may want to make your assumptions in metric instead of imperial units, because DF uses metric.

Neat idea though!