Bay 12 Games Forum

Finally, v3.0.0 is released! This is the 'I'm sorry I'm lazy" release. Most of the new additions are from the Modest Mod and Vanilla-Spice Revised. This has been a serious amount of work. I can somewhat confidently say I finally grok everything Revised does.

Future Revised updates shouldn't need to be quite so massive now that I've stabilized things.

Sometimes I've been too much of a minimalist, so here's some compensation.
• modest bodies has been fixed up and mostly integrated. the body parts are much more nicely named now. In a few cases I felt the changes read weirdly in combat, so I didn't include them.
• the Modest Mod announcements modifications have been brought back.
    • citizen deaths will pause and recenter.
    • mid-combat births will appear in the combat log
• toads and lice are carnivores.
• birds with taloned feet now kick with them.
• more giant creatures can kick. Also desert tortoises.
• moon snails also live in the tropics.
• ducks don't have sharp beaks.
• hippos are angry again.
• hippo bites are now "bites" again.
• flies, elephants, warthogs, chimpanzees, gorillas, muskoxen, orcas, sperm whales, and elephant seals aren't benign.
• orcas are large predators.
• moose and deer can be trained as pack animals.
• giraffes can bite.
• giant tortoise bites are edged.
• elk can be trained as (exotic) mounts and pack animals.
• hungry heads aren't large predators, they hunt vermin instead.
• dingos and anacondas aren't large predators either.
• giraffes can be trained as pack animals. Intended for elves.
• kobolds can use some creatures as pets. They like the poisonous ones.
• unicorns are war trainable.
• dwarven milk and cheese is available on embark.
• creatures made of inorganic materials will produce a boulder, bar, or wood block when butchered.
• hoof injuries can be splinted and need to be fixed by bone doctors.
• dwarves will no longer pick strawberry plants whole, nor try to eat them whole.
• animal people gain the SUPERNATURAL tag, preventing them from mutating into were beasts.
• some animal people have grasping tails.
• new creature attacks from vanilla-spice revised. For example, fly people and giant flies vomit acid when they bite.
• rhesus macaques, cyclops, minotaurs, yetis, sasquatches, stranglers, ogres, and blind cave ogres will steal booze again.
• rewrote reaction descriptions again to improve readability.
• golems and plump helmet people will reform if injured.
• added wooden training maces and hammers.
• brought back improved baby and child names for humanoids and extended it to all of them.
• gendered minotaur names.
• good-aligned grass will heal grazers.
• gave leech people genders.
• golden salve now heals, so it's no longer useless.
• cabbage, garden cress, lettuce, onion, spinach, taro, lesser yams, long yams, purple yams, white yams must be processed to bag first, not eaten whole. This provides seeds or growths.
• taro plants and lesser yams have roots.
• shrubs with unobtainable seeds can be picked whole and processed to bag like quarry bushes. This provides seeds or growths.
• due to bug 5812, all dwarves can equip longswords one-handed. Fixed that by increasing the size required to one-hand them.
• to compensate for this, longswords slash a greater contact area.
• short swords have a smaller contact area and penetrate better.
• scimitars were almost identical to short swords, so now they're a bit larger and are better suited for heavy slashes.
• grains are referred to by their proper names, not as "seeds."
• elves have greatarrows again.
• elves are TRAPAVOID. They step lightly.
• beak dogs now have special mottled skin. Their vanilla rainbow skin is pretty weird and never depicted in fanart.
• chitin and bone are no longer edible by vermin. Bodies in the open won't rot away completely anymore, but should leave bones strewn here and there.
• camel people, kangaroo people, and tapir people were missing fixes for bug 5105.
• cleaned up scale leather: it's now implemented much more simply and works with mod-added or randomly generated creatures. Thanks to Wannabehero.
• replaced NATURAL_SKILL with SKILL_LEARN_RATE for all animal people. The starting skill number was directly translated into a hundreds-place percentage. For example, toad people had 3 in climbing and 3 in stance_strike, so will now learn both skills at a rate of 300%. Some of these are inherited from their base creatures: in those cases I've ignored the problem in the interest of minimal RAW changes. A starting skill of 1 was translated to 150% skill gain in that skill.
• chitin is now properly considered bone for the purposes of armor crafting and doesn't yield leather, which I'd forgotten to take out (oops).
• goblins style their hair now.
• toughened chitin, nerve, muscle, cartilage, and sinew again.
• injured cartilage is painful.
• teeth injuries are no longer painful, just like vanilla.
• fingers and toes don't have muscle.
• adjusted the coverage of a few shirts: they were covering hips unnecessarily. Similarly, vests don't need to cover shoulders.
• sver material changes. Skin is toughened against force transfer, throats won't bleed during strangling. Organic tissues are tougher. Wood is stronger, mostly to buff elves. The temperature changes were not imported and are vanilla.

I'm still a minimalist, I can't help myself. Send help. Here follows the cleanups and banhammers.
• giant animals are no longer tamable by default...because they already were. Literally every single giant variation in the game has the PET_EXOTIC tag, making its addition in c_variation_default pointless.
• removed pointless comments. Revised changes are still indicated with curly braces, there's just no accompanying text if I didn't have anything useful to say.
• incorrect comments were fixed. Many of them were rewritten.
• giant toads, giant spiders, and giant bats now hunt all vermin, not just insects. This let me remove the EDIBLE_FLYING_BUG creature class additions.
• if I'm only adding things to a vanilla file, I now use a new file instead like a good modding citizen.
• reverted added SOUND tags from humanoids.
• humanoid leather is no longer named hide. After removing chitin leather I got a flood of errors from carapaced animal people when their creature variation tried to rename said leather. I didn't want insect animal people to give errors by default and didn't want to add dozens more lines supporting this manually to all the other animal people.
• I no longer remove NOTHOUGHT in the animal people variations, because the only animal it would apply to (sponge people) explicitly already remove it.
• biting and scratching is enabled again for beastly and savage humanoids. So pretty much everywhere but the civilized races.
• removed unarmed attack changes. I'm not in the business of trying to re-balance unarmed combat everywhere anymore. It's thankless, inconsistent, and mostly untested.
• kobolds lay eggs again. This behaves poorly in gameplay and is kind of weird IMO for a human-shaped creature, but unlike the animal people kobolds can't live in your forts.
• clarified comments on why I cap UBSTEP at 3, not MAX.
• for now, animal people don't vary in height and broadness anymore, just like vanilla. I've been experimenting with the descriptions for the next release.
• removed the new, buffed blood sucking attacks. Buffed the original attacks instead and tested: this is a cleaner way to do it. Vermin don't use attacks so it won't buff them.
• most or all of the primary/secondary attack changes have been removed. In most cases it wasn't intuitive to me how the animal or animal person should behave and in some cases it was a noisy change.
• renamed the _SMALL_ body detail plans to _NOLEATHER_ and _NOYIELD_. This is more descriptive and lets me eliminate many useless comments.
• throats unfortunately are now very vulnerable again, just like vanilla. This whole situation is messed up and complicated, it deserves a paragraph. The raws (fecking EVERYWHERE) define major arteries as very definitely being inside the skin, and throats are ONLY made of skin in vanilla. Sver fixed this by making the skin very thin and covering it with muscle, fat, and cartilage. It's an elegant solution that protects the throat much better at the cost of making combat logs read weirdly sometimes. In testing it felt really weird to have my goblin tear through cartilage to bruise the skin underneath. You can technically just add muscle, cartilage, and fat underneath the skin as normal and while that's very accurate of you, the arteries will still be in the skin. A proper fix would be to tell the creature raws that throat arteries are below the skin not in it, but that would add hundreds of changes to Revised to fix one combat issue. Instead I'm giving up and adding this one to the pile of things I hope Toady fixes someday.
• cleaned up facial part positioning.
• joints are no longer much larger than vanilla. This was inherited from Sver's mod, which inherited it from Grimlocke's, and I can't find any comments from Grimlocke explaining the feature. This is a particularly noisy fix that I don't think I ever actually understood until this obsessive cleanup round: my comments claim making joints bigger makes them stronger, which is a bit of a bold claim. Surely it just makes them more of a target? I thought of messaging Grimlocke but for now I'll revert the feature. I don't want to delay the release further and this helps to clean up body_default, which is still one of the most tedious files to compare against vanilla.
• revised added a lot of GOBBLE_VERMIN_CLASS:MAMMAL. Remove most of it. In almost all cases it was on aquatic creatures (there are no aquatic mammal vermin for them to eat) or on creatures too large to eat vermin, IMO. It was kept for snakes, though.
• removed the added sounds for the fish in creature_large_riverlake. These were the only fish that had added sounds (inconsistent) and it mentioned violent splashing, which felt a little odd.
• removed added sniffing sounds for many creatures, because I felt it wasn't loud enough to be worth including.
• reverted the 'no perfect armor coverage' changes. Felt like something I should probably test out better.  If I had the other balancing Sver did to the files I'd have kept it, but in isolation it didn't feel right to keep it.
• turbans, head veils, face veils, and headscarves in Revised were worn over armor, not under it. Turbans were shaped to prevent wearing more of them. This was all reverted. A few of these didn't make sense (face veils over armor) and the others could go either way. Also, reverting this meant I no longer edit item_helm. A small victory for compatibility.
• MATERIAL_SIZE on whips was reverted to vanilla. Whips have still been weakened, but they're now cheap to create again.

Sometimes I make mistakes too.
• animal people are no longer immortal (oops).
• monitor lizard women were missing their CASTE_NAME (oops).
• fixed a typo, eagles now cry like eagles and not falcons (oops).
• cleaned up some remnants of the old simplified names (oops).
• moon snails no longer have child names because they have no children (oops).
• restored missing GO_TO_END in the mantis person definition (oops).
• blizzard men can have HUMANOID_RIBCAGE_POSITIONS again, which I'd incorrectly deleted (oops)
• hair has ITEMS_HARD again. Not sure why this was changed from vanilla in Revised, mistake or uncommented feature?

After writing all of that I've just realized the description still needs fixing up, because I've missed some things. Feck it, I can do that later.

Powering through this lately. There's quite a bit of cleanup I want to get out of the way, but I finished much of it. No ETA, but I've cleared most of my major to-do items. As always, you can visit the repository to track my progress.

After adding quite a bit into Revised, I've since been in cleanup mode, re-implementing noisy features in a cleaner way and deleting many useless comments. The Revised comments are now more helpful and less frequent, so if you see one it's more worth your time to read it. I'll also add a little blurb to the opening paragraph about the Revised comment style, because it's often misunderstood and is IMO quite helpful to anyone casually reading my files. Literally every change Revised makes is noted where I made the change, and it's not hard to reconstruct the original file even if you don't have it handy.

My hope is to get Revised into a rock-solid state next release. Line-by-line comparisons between v2.3.0 and v3.0.0 will be rough: I want noisy cleanups out of the way now to make future comparisons easier.

Taffer, are you good in syndrome coding? I have interesting idea for Revised.

I haven't made one but they don't look difficult. What's the idea?

(response to removed post removed)

* humanoids are mortal and are gendered, unless they're automatons. (Taffer)

I'm Canadian and I'd really like to avoid discussion of politics.

II personally dislike this change of mod not because politics, but just because this don't suits mythology base of this creatures and even not needed for realism reasons. Immortal creatures are real, like pool hydra, also exist female-only lizards, male-only species also exist (mostly, plants, but not only: isogamy of motile cells, androgenesis of silk moth).

As I've mentioned earlier in the thread I do enjoy reading my illustrated books on mythology. The problem is that the original myths vary and can be a little vague, and modern fantasy has built on them quite a bit. Kobolds, elves, and dwarves are very different from the original myths and nobody seems to complain about that. I think you've just read different fantasy books than I have, to be honest. I'm very far from the first person to envision alternate-gendered mythological creatures.

Your mod makes the latest peridexis installer version crash.
As soon as I removed it, it worked again.
Crashes when embark.

Thanks for the report! Unfortunately I can't provide any support for PeridexisErrant's Starter Pack as I've never downloaded it. I don't notice any crashing issues in vanilla or errors in the error log, so I'm not sure what's going on.

The woolly limbed dwarves from v1.7.0 are returning! I stumbled into this again in my art collection and got inspired. Apparently the original artist took it down, which is a shame because I think it's an awesome interpretation of dwarves. Very non-canon (and therefore controversial), but if I'm honest I've always found dwarves kind of boring and this helps with that.



Not sure at the moment if it'll be an optional extra or not like it was last time. It's such a small change and pretty easy IMO to interpret as just dwarves being really hairy rather than literally the above image, but maybe it's too controversial. Let me know.

Re: above conversation, i would kill to have these changes put into the vanilla game.

Im so addicted to this mod I cant play any fortress without it, which means I essentially cant use other mods that ever touch vanilla files LOL. it would save me a lot of effort if most of this would just be vanilla! This plus your latest tileset is the first thing I look for after an update.

Really though thank you. The descriptions are wonderful, the slight changes to combat are fantastic, the bugfixes are much needed. how can i go back to forts without feather tree eggs after tasting the forbidden fruit?

Thank you so much for the kind words! You can thank the modest mod for the feather tree egg change specifically, I just inherited it.

Hey there! This is definitely my favorite mod, ever, I would kill to have it added by Toady, but as a developer myself, I can understand how he doesn't want to stray from his own creative vision of the game.

That said, there are some things that kind of irk me and that I wish that I could turn off, like having hyphenated or words with spaces in names, for example. World names especially end up looking really funky with the expanded dictionary in my opinion, though I agree that it definitely adds more variety than just having "The Windy [Blank]" every time!

All in all, love your mod and I wish you all a lovely day/evening!

Thank you! I go back and forth on the expanded dictionary myself. It's probably the most controversial part of the mod. I really like the expanded word selection, I really like that lewd words actually exist, but I also agree that it can make things hard to read sometimes. I already spent a few weeks helping GoblinCookie clean up the expanded dictionary. I could give another go, but I've been hesitant to for a few reasons:

• New versions of the expanded dictionary randomly re-generate all of the words, making comparisons between versions impossible. I'd have to re-create any cleanup myself.
• I don't want to do a hard fork and keep it maintained myself because I honestly think GoblinCookie does a better job of it than I could.
• I can't simplify the upstream mod because GoblinCookie (for the most part) likes the word lists as they are, hyphens and occasional obscure words and all. I respect that, just pointing out that I already tried this option.
• I'm not sure myself what all to remove. There's a special word for each animal and animal person, but some of them are long (like peach-faced-lovebird-person). There's all the geology, gem, and stone related words, which are dwarfy but often obscure.
• If I simplify extensively the next Expanded Dictionary update will be painful (for reasons 1 and 2).

I think I like it too much to remove, so maybe I should simplify anyways? I'll think about it. I'm not going to worry about it for now because I already have a lot on my plate for the upcoming release.

Will be restoring most of the materials changes, with full apologies to Sver. Just a few pages ago Sver already gave me the details I needed.

Material changes, aside from cloth (thread plant, silk, hair), chitin and wood, are all about the force transfer mechanic and work just as well with vanilla weapon velocities.
There are also temperature changes, but those stand on their own: makes it slightly harder to settle freezing/scorching biomes (but also slightly easier to wait out sieges there) and makes creatures catch on fire more realistically (in contrast with how fat is the only thing that burns in vanilla, and fatless creatures become immune to fire). Whether to keep it or not is a matter of taste.

Tissue changes are a different matter. It's probably best not to go as far with pain and bleeding increase on organs as my mod does while keeping vanilla weapons. On the other hand, changes that increase the durability of creatures (such as layer changes in b_detail_plan_default.txt) would work alright.

...

It is possible if you stick to only buffing the shear (edge) values, as all training weapons are blunt. That said, it will affect wooden trap components with edged attacks.

I've yet to test out the elves with "fake stone" weapons, but that is on the list. Might be a more elegant alternative to new wood types.

Thank you! Still a very useful post, months later. I'll go back and re-read the comments and PMs people have made to see what else I'm missing.

Shouldn't this mod be part of the main game?

Thank you! I actually e-mailed Toady a long time ago offering that, mostly because I spent an obscenely long time improving the creature descriptions and I thought he might want to use them. He said he didn't want any creative contributions from others. (Although now we do have people contributing art to the game, so I guess he had a change of heart about "creative contributions").