Bay 12 Games Forum

I do not recall how poltergeists currently work when picking up items in fort mode...  do they items go through walls or does it change their path model?  Don't remember.

As of 0.34.something when I last had a ghost carrying stuff, they had to use proper pathing when carrying items.

Speaking of which, the context for that was a ghost who was continuing to perform his Animal Trainer duties from beyond the grave: he was carrying meat to tame a caged creature. Do you intend to preserve/formalize the previously-unintentional Helpful Ghost behaviors in fort mode, or are those on the chopping block?

You don't even need to wash them off: once you've wiped out the first wave of HFS, any further HFS arrive and depart like any other wandering cavern creature.

OK so I wouldn't normally ask for this since it's only to support modded functionality, not in-game functionality; but Thanks FantasticDorf for reminding me that this applies to vanilla Gremlins, as well as to modded animal-people! So this is a perfectly valid vanilla suggestion.

If I'm correct this should only take a single if statement and maybe half a dozen lines of code.

Background

I have modded my animal people to be [PET_EXOTIC] since 0.34. I started doing it in order to slaughter them and use their bones, since they weren't good for anything else and they were filling up my cages; but since the advent of visitors, trained wild-caught animal people have essentially functioned as fortress permanent residents, including claiming rooms at the inn, and petitioning for citizenship after two years.

I like this, but there are some problems:

The Problems

First, although they act like permanent residents/citizens in every other way, wild-caught animal people's [v] description always just gives their species description and wounds. I know they have thoughts because I can read some of them with Dwarf Therapist - we just can't see them in game.

Similarly, their labor-setting dialog is the pet labor dialog, even when they're citizens. Since I know that (modded-to-be-tameable) animal people who joined civs in worldgen and then petition for citizenship later are able to have their labors set, I know it's not simply a matter of tameable creatures automatically getting the pet labor dialog.

Third, since they're wild-caught, they need to have their training kept up; but as productive members of the fortress, they assign extremely low priority to getting caught up on their training, which leaves the animal trainers waiting around for them while they Perform in the tavern, for example. This ties up trainers for ages and lets their other charges get out of hand. However, since they're now citizens of the fort, the animal people no longer show up on the Animal screen and their training assignments can no longer be changed!

And if you pre-empt the citizenship request and turn off their training just before they become citizens, you have another issue: once their training decays back to Wild, although they continue to behave as normal citizens, your traps and info screens now treat them like any other wild animal.

So, the solution I would like to propose:

The Possible Solution

An extra "if" statement in the code for accepted citizenship requests. If the person making the request has training levels, then set the flags and linkages necessary to resolve the above issues. If I'm correct, it should be a matter of setting their training levels to 0 and then moving them from a "pets" array belonging to civ X to a "person" array belonging to civ X.

Also if they don't have a name you might want to have them adopt a name at this time, but that's not a big deal.

Yeah, I know it should be coming eventually but as a low priority fix - I was just hoping there might be some memhacking we could do in the meantime to make the game go "Oh, that's a person."

Making them stop needing training with DFHack is an easy fix, just a matter of flipping a boolean flag. It's the other bits that are a problem... like giving them names so I can actually tell them apart; or choosing who to try to marry to whom so I can see what the second generation is like.

They don't act like slaves. They won't contribute at all to the fort until/unless they petition for citizenship, which will only happen after years of them hanging around at your fort, eating your food and drinking your alcohol. And at that point, they're not slaves - they're just citizens of another race.

If you're still interested, all you need to do is add the following tag at the bottom of both the ANIMAL_PERSON and the ANIMAL_PERSON_LEGLESS variations in c_variation_default.txt :
[CV_NEW_TAG:PET_EXOTIC]

I posted this on Reddit but I really should have come here instead. Obviously updating for 44.03 is higher priority but I have a Question.

Has anyone identified how to make the game's Resident info screens show up for creatures who were initially created as Animals rather than as Persons?

I mod animal people to be PET_EXOTIC.

Animal people that I catch and train eventually petition for citizenship and are assigned default peasant labors; they can also be assigned labors through Dwarf Therapist. However, they maintain the Animal in-game labor assignment screen and the stranger/animal-style description screen, e.g. "This is a person with the head of a peach-faced lovebird. His feathers are green. His skin is ecru."

Any pointers you could provide would be appreciated.

I've checked all the unit flags, including the unknown ones, and none of them seem to be what I'm looking for.

Alternatively, a script that forces a unit to petition for residency might also work? Trained animal people never petition for residency - they become de facto residents when you first train them, and skip straight to petitioning for citizenship. If you could force an animal person to petition for residency it might perform the description screen conversion as a matter of course.

I look for a cliff, canyon or lone hill that I can base my fortress design around.

If possible I like to start off at war with any nearby elves, too, but this is really down to worldgen luck.

Personally, as a programmer, I think what you should do is scrap it and start over. I know it always feels terrible to "abandon" what you've put so many hours into, but I've also seen firsthand the un-maintainability and general crappiness of PoCs that get expanded into final products.

Also, with a complete re-write, you can create a solution that allows you to use hand-made new words and fill in the blanks with dictionary! Win-win!