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[D_E]

Figured out something cool with interactions and body parts.  Haven't seen it around the forums yet, so I wanted to share.  Anyway:

1) The ANIMATE effect can be used to raise anything with a grasp or a head
2) Once a body part is animated, it can be transformed into any other creature
3) A creature will animate it's own limbs.
4) You can make limbs that fall off as soon as the creature is created, using a material with a low melting point.

I've tested it, and it works in the arena and for the PC in adventure mode.  I haven't tested to see if it plays nice with historical figures, which I believe includes bandit leaders etc?

I haven't been able to get it to play nice with Fort mode.  It seems that animated bodyparts will attack anything that doesn't have an OPPOSED_TO_LIFE tag, even if that tag wasn't added to the raised bodypart by the interaction (and if all you're dwarves are OPPOSED_TO_LIFE, the fort ends as soon as it begins).  There may be some way to get it working using a vampire-like setup, though.

Also, animated creatures don't seem to use their interactions, so .  I haven't tested injected syndromes or similar yet.

Stuff to try out:
1) Creatures can be completely healed by a brief transformation, including lost limbs.  Therefore a transformation interaction on a timer could be used to create a monster that spawns more than one set of creatures.  Megabeasts use building destroyer to pathfind.  Could create a zombie apocalypse monster that sits on the edge of the map due to lack of a building destroyer tag, but periodically spits out a horde of zombies.

2)  More generally, megabeasts should be able to use it to spawn followers.

3)  Create arbitrary companions in adventure mode, by briefly turning the hero into an incubator.

4)  Create arbitrary friendlies in fortress mode, assuming we can get that working.  Bodypart-creatures seem to be flagged as "Friendlies" rather than pets, though, so what we can get them to do may still be very limited even if we can get them to stop eating their creator's face.

Examples:  My test cases are part of my zelda mod-mod, and there are too many files to post here.  However, I will post the working copy of the zelda mod on DFFD.  [link]

My zelda mod currently has two examples:  the Stalkin Titan, in creatures_zelda_intelligent (Alphabetizes as "Ikana" in arena mode) and Gohma, in creature_zelda_mega (alphabetizes as "Gohma"  ).  The Gleeok also has an interaction that raises just his decapitated heads, which is kina related.  Also in creature_zelda_mega.

The Stalkin animates anything, just like a necromancer, but brings along some friends to get him started.  Gohma produces a single batch of smaller gohmas, and doesn't reanimate them when they get killed.  Gleeok only animates his own heads, but keeps reanimating them when they die.

EDIT:  Bodyparts are flagged as friendlies only in fort mode, so they are extremely limited.  However, a blood-magic/alchemical system is possible, using ingested potions and specially bred targets (see second page).

[Meph]

I had friendly undeads from my necromancers a while back, can unfortunately not tell you exactly what line of code was required, but all the civilians fled in terror from them. Made running a fortress rather difficult. So even friendly spawned creatures wont help much.

Cant you just transform the corpse into a new creature, instead of animating it ? It works for dwarves, see the spellbook thread, or Forlorn Realms for example interactions.

EDIT: Wait a second.

Make a workshop, add boiling stone syndrome, transform dwarf into limb-loosing creatures, transform him back afterwards. Add syndrome to resurrect (not raise) one corpse nearby, resurrect corpse (his dropped arm or whatever) into a fully healed, new creature. Tada, create creatures from scratch in a workshop.

[narhiril]

I had friendly undeads from my necromancers a while back, can unfortunately not tell you exactly what line of code was required, but all the civilians fled in terror from them. Made running a fortress rather difficult. So even friendly spawned creatures wont help much.

Cant you just transform the corpse into a new creature, instead of animating it ? It works for dwarves, see the spellbook thread, or Forlorn Realms for example interactions.

EDIT: Wait a second.

Make a workshop, add boiling stone syndrome, transform dwarf into limb-loosing creatures, transform him back afterwards. Add syndrome to resurrect (not raise) one corpse nearby, resurrect corpse (his dropped arm or whatever) into a fully healed, new creature. Tada, create creatures from scratch in a workshop.

Unfortunately it still suffers from the problem that we still don't have a good workaround for - the inconsistency of boiling stones.  Nevertheless, an interesting idea.  I'd been using the animate-and-transform for spirit binders in LFR to summon a whole bunch of banshees.  Rather entertaining.

More interestingly, this could perhaps be used to create creatures that reproduce by dividing.  I doubt worldgen would like that much, but it could be interesting to create them.  Off the top of my head, you could have a gel-like thing with a "nucleus" head transform itself periodically into another gel with an extra external nucleus, have it fall off, then make it re-animate the extra nucleus and transform it into another gel.  The only problem is that this created gel would be unable to reproduce due to already having an active transformation., thus being unable to drop any more nuclei, but you could set up a nice little "broodmother" sort of thing.

[Meph]

So a friendly necromancer would be possible, just by using resurrection of custom creatures, instead fo raising the corpses... like a guy running around making bone golems, instead of raising specific skeletons. Nice.

A lot to play around with again... ^^

[D_E]

Unfortunately it still suffers from the problem that we still don't have a good workaround for - the inconsistency of boiling stones.  Nevertheless, an interesting idea.  I'd been using the animate-and-transform for spirit binders in LFR to summon a whole bunch of banshees.  Rather entertaining.

I plan to try ingested syndromes on custom booze.  Once the booze is created, SOMEONE will eventually drink it, and you can get fancy will locked rooms etc if you want to select who or speed up "eventually".

Cant you just transform the corpse into a new creature, instead of animating it ? It works for dwarves, see the spellbook thread, or Forlorn Realms for example interactions.

Make a workshop, add boiling stone syndrome, transform dwarf into limb-loosing creatures, transform him back afterwards. Add syndrome to resurrect (not raise) one corpse nearby, resurrect corpse (his dropped arm or whatever) into a fully healed, new creature. Tada, create creatures from scratch in a workshop.

I tried using resurrection instead of animation.  In arena mode it results in nameless hostile creatures that attack everything.  If I understand how things work behind the scenes, animation creates a new creature with new info whereas resurrection restores an existing creature's info.  So resurrected dwarves keep there old allegiances, but a "resurrected" limb, which has no old creature info to restore, results in a nameless, hostile placeholder monster.

I never tried the resurrection version in fort or adventurer mode, though, so maybe it works differently there?

[Meph]

I came as far as creating friendly custom creatures in fortress mode, directly from workshops. The problem is that they just hang around, not doing anything.

Havent found a way yet to make civ members or pets.

[D_E]

What's the trick to making friendlies?  I still haven't been able to do that much.  They would at least guard your halls, right?

[Meph]

[INTERACTION:MORGAN_FREEMAN]
   [I_TARGET:A:CORPSE]
      [IT_LOCATION:CONTEXT_ITEM]
      -IT_AFFECTED_CLASS:GENERAL_POISON-
      -IT_REQUIRES:FIT_FOR_ANIMATION-
      [IT_FORBIDDEN:NOT_LIVING]
      [IT_MANUAL_INPUT:corpses]
   [I_EFFECT:ANIMATE]  <<<=== friendly corpses (dwarf peasent corpses in this case)
        -I_EFFECT:RESURRECT-  <<<=== friendly dudes (peasents in this case)
      [IE_TARGET:A]
      [IE_IMMEDIATE]
      [IE_ARENA_NAME:Animated corpse]
      [SYNDROME]
      [CE_BODY_TRANSFORMATION:START:0]
         [CE:CREATURE:DWARF:MALE]

[Lycaeon]

In that case, would it not be possible to create some sort of amorphous "blob" pet creature, chain it near the workshop in question, the give the working dwarf a temporary interaction that will automatically target the nearby blob and transform it into the desired entity? I'm not sure if an already tame pet will retain its tameness, but if we make the blob vague enough to hand wave away, it could be a way of making creatures "spontaneously" coming into being.

[Meph]

Pets will stay pets, so you could create only transform old pets into new.

I just run some tests, putting all the accumulated science I know into it and... nothing. I tried a dwarf-caste that drops the extra limb (to make the limb an entity member) and resurrect/raise/transform it in fortress mode into a dwarf. Narhirils double-transformation trick crashes the game with this, and using my slave-trick with different castes and pet tags does not affect this. It is maddening.

This is how far it gets:


I already made the workshop and everything for it, but I just cant get rid of the "friendly" tag. Only other way would really be using pets, but they would never do work. And I already have pet upgrades in my mod.

[D_E]

Have you by any chance tested what happens when a body-changed creature reproduces?  Does it make more of the new creature, more of the old creature, or is it just sterile?

[Meph]

Body changed creatures reproduce as the new creature. I can transform a male cat into a male dog, and breed dogs, if I have a female dog around. Offspring will be normal dog.

I use something like this for my slaves, you can buy PET-tagged slaves that give only birth to NON-PET-tagged offspring that has a secretion that automatically transformes them into a slave-dwarf-caste. This way one can buy pets that do labors... in a way.

[D_E]

If you transform an entity member such as a dwarf into another creature, will it's offspring be considered entity members?

What I'm currently thinking is this:

1)  Create a breeder creature which spits out lots of offspring, but that are useless for practical purposes.
1b) There max age can be set to a year so that they die off quickly so you don't get swarmed.
2)  Transform an entity-member (a dwarf, although I'm planning for Illithids) into this breeder creature
3)  The breeder pumps out lots of useless entity-members.
4)  Create reactions-interaction pairs that promote useful creatures from this pool of useless entity members
4a) Reaction bestows an interaction on the invoker
4b) Invoker uses his new interaction to promote one of the creatures. 
4c) The syndrome granting the interaction times out before the end of the interactions cooldown, meaning that only one creature gets promoted per invokation

(The useless creatures can be called homunculi or faeries or whatever you want.)

[Meph]

To be honest I did not quite catch your meaning.
EDIT: Read it again, is clear now. Is exactly the system I use for slaves, with one change: My offspring transformes immediatly, and not by reactions.

But you can already do entity member breeders, by just making a second female pet caste. They dont do labor, (since they are pets) but the breed without marriage and can be bought at embark/caravans.

I havent tested, but am fairly certain that a entity member that has been transformed into a non-entity creature and produces offspring with another non-entity creature will create non-entity offspring as well. About 99% sure. ONLY dwarves can be entity members, or at least creatures defined in your entity raw.

[D_E]

Just tested by transforming a fort full of illithids into dwarves, then again turning them into dogs, and both forts kept going.  This strongly suggests that entity membership is held across creature changes!  I haven't tested to see if it is passed on to the children of transformed members.