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[Taffer]

Well, there are only around 600 creatures or so.

I'll do some more work today, I'll let you know if I spot anything else.

If you don't mind, I might write a few longer descriptions myself afterwards, which you might or might not use, as you like.

Thank you kindly for the comments! I'll review and edit any contributions, and will give credit in the opening thread. Cheers!

Edit: Saw the "[SIEGER] Revision: elves will now siege.". Is it possible that you misunderstood that tag? It changes the siege AI, with the sieger-tag the invading elven armies will make camps and starts camp-fires and wait outside for months and months... instead of pathing straight in or leaving, if that's not possible. They will not act like a goblin siege, but like a human siege. Together with the ambush tag, that makes elven sieges pretty hard to deal with, because their army is both invisible at first AND camping outside.

Apologies for the poor comment there. I'll rewrite it. Thanks for the comments and the clarification! I'd misunderstood the tag when I first added it, but corrected myself later when I looked it up and neglected to fix my comment. I review and try to justify to myself every change (across the entire mod, with diff utilities) every major release, specifically to avoid having random tags lying around that I don't understand or have forgotten about. Even then, I mess up (as you've pointed out a few times).

Both the ambush tag and the siege tag make sense to me for elves here, but I'll add testing this to my todo list. Worth noting that unless you happened to start at war with elves, players usually bring war with them upon themselves, so I don't feel particularly bad about making elf sieges quite dangerous.

Edit2: You do simplify the black mamba to just mamba... why exactly? To quote Wikipedia: "Four extant species are recognised currently; three of those four species are essentially arboreal and green in colour, whereas the so-called black mamba..." People wouldn't know if the mamba is a black mamba or another mamba.

Edit3: Same for king cobra to cobra.
Edit4: Same for buffalo and water buffalo... as someone who rode through Africa and had to hide from damn cape buffalos, while petting tame water buffalos in India, I'd say the distinction is quite important.

Your travels sound fun! To be fair I understand that the distinction is important to us as players, but from an in-universe perspective there's only one species of buffalo, only one species of mamba, and only one species of cobra. It doesn't make sense to me why my dwarves (or the elves, or anyone in universe) is calling them "water buffalo" when there's only one kind of them. I tried to split the difference by mentioning their original names in the description.

This change also helps animal products: "buffalo leather pants" is nicer to read and easier to say than "water buffalo leather pants". (And again, from an in-universe perspective, it makes no sense why Urist is angrily insisting that everyone call his finely crafted leather pants "water buffalo leather pants" when there's only one kind of buffalo around).

Still, if people dislike the creature name simplifications I can revert them, at least for creatures where the distinction is more important (like the ones you specified). Up next is integrating the tiered and simplified leather from Wanderer, so the leather name problem will go away by itself.

Edit5: Thrips... It says "[CREATURE:THRIPS][DESCRIPTION:A tiny pest insect. It feeds on both crops and other bugs.] Revision: rewrote description." But the description is exactly the same as in vanilla DF.

I could have sworn I wrote a description for thrips. Perhaps it got lost in the git history. Thanks for pointing it out, it'll get fixed!

Edit6: Giant Moon Snail have [MOUNT_EXOTIC] in vanilla, in your file versions they do not. No note about removing it though. On other snails/slugs you removed it, with a note saying that they are too slow to be used sensibly as mounts. Guess the same should be true for moon snails.

I'll fix that! This was a victim of my big cleanup for 1.5: I used to prevent slow creatures and creatures that curl up when threatened from being mounts, but I reverted these changes as being an unnecessary deviation from vanilla. I'll add MOUNT_EXOTIC back to giant moon snails.

Thank you for all the comments! It really helps!

There are different kinds of clubs, though. Something like this, for example, looks slim and elvish enough and is still called a club:
...
Also, quarterstaves seem a bit pointless. The elves already have what is essentially a wooden quartertaff with a (slightly) pointy end. Alternatives like Fijian "totokias",
...
Irish "shillelaghs"
...
and "African" knobkerries
...
are relatively long and bashy, but their names are way too exotic for an average user like me to recognize. Therefore, I suggest the laziest solution possible: renaming the clubs into "elven war clubs" and letting the player use his imagination.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is the club I had in mind when I first integrated the elven clubs You're right that they already almost have a quarterstaff. I'll try to name the elven weapons better. Perhaps "carved war club" or might convey a bit more refinement, and dispel the "elves with big caveman clubs" impression they gave Meph. That's definitely not what I have in mind for their weapons.

EDIT: Along with fixing some of Meph's concerns, I've renamed atlatls to spear-throwers, atlatl darts to throwing spears, clubs to carved clubs, and giant clubs to carved war clubs. There's some oddness, however, with elven adventurers starting with "hardened copper spears". I tried adding the TRAINING tag to the wooden weapons to keep them wooden, which didn't help. Will have to test elves in fortress mode and adventure mode, and see if this is a one-off bug I can overlook (hardened copper spear is at least plausible sounding), if it affects all elves not just adventurers, if I can fix it, or try to work around it. I'd prefer to keep the better elven weapons.

[Taffer]

I just wanted to make a quick aside to thank Toothspit, who helped the description work by contributing changes. Thank you! That was 2 years ago, actually. Boy, it took me a long time to finish the damn descriptions. I've corrected the opening thread to add your name as a credit, where it should have been when I released the work. Cheers, and apologies for the delayed credit (and the long delayed work!)

[Taffer]

After some thought, I think that I've been too strict about mod changes. I've been going through my cleaned up Modest Mod fork and re-integrating most of it, so long as it makes sense and can be justified. I've reverted far too much, and (as Meph discovered) Revised already has a huge set of changes over vanilla, may as well add to it. In theory I still want to avoid unnecessary changes, but I've changed my mind as to what constitutes "unneessary". Commenting everything alone is already a great way to avoid bloat, as it means I'll always have an idea of why I made a change. For users, this means you'll be getting more fixes and more features going forward. Modders will have a more painful list of changes to merge in (sorry!), but it's not like merging in Revised was an easy task already.

I still don't intend on adding tons of civilizations, new creatures, new weapons, etc. The scope of the mod hasn't really changed.

I felt this deserved a post both because the next few versions will be adding a reasonable changelist, and because I'm adding back things I've already removed.



With that out of the way, here's the todo list for the next release, in case anybody has a comment on it.

Warlord255 contributed some very nice changes, so I'm almost done merging most of those in. Thank you! I want to make sure that GOBBLE_VERMIN_CLASS:MAMMAL won't result in these predators attacking creatures far larger than themselves and I'm hesitant about the MISCHIEVOUS tag resulting in raccoons and snakes pulling your fortress levers, so some testing is in order. Definitely a clever way to add some stealth to creatures. If anybody has an answer for those questions then please let me know, it'll definitely speed up the next version.

As mentioned I've been adding many of the Modest Mod's fixes back in, including things I reverted recently. The training improvements, for example, are back in. I'm also going through my cleaned up Wanderer, making sure I haven't missed any combat improvements, and integrating tiered and simplified leather. There are some other changes already made, and I'll be removing the stray macroreduce file I accidentally left in.

All other work has been punted to my next version's todo list, to try to get this out a little faster. I won't have time to test tiered leather much, so that'll need a balance review at some point.

Help is always appreciated, as are contributions or critique!

[ThoMeuhGal]

That's good to hear! I'm a big fan of the leather change 

[CarpBiter2000]

If you're slightly increasing the scope of allowed deviations from vanilla, I'd suggest doing something about underground animal tribes. I understand they are not supposed to be strong, but the poor guys are constantly getting wiped out by troglodites and crundles every time I see them. Maybe some kind of "thick bone" armor would help, since there are a lot of stuff in the caves that might have those kind of bones. Or simply give them better poisons and better innate skills.

I'm hesitant about the MISCHIEVOUS tag resulting in raccoons and snakes pulling your fortress levers, so some testing is in order.

I can definitely see raccoons being raccoons and pulling levers just because. Not sure about the snakes, although I like the idea of "A (snake)! Drive it away!" messages.

[Warlord255]

GOBBLE_VERMIN_CLASS:MAMMAL only targets vermin; it never results in "large" creatures engaging each other more than they usually would, which is disappointingly rare in my opinion. If you were super paranoid, you could replace CLASS:MAMMAL with CLASS:EDIBLE_VERMIN_MAMMAL or something.

On the MISCHIEVOUS snake thing, in my experience the little bastards never get far enough into your fort to pull any levers unless said levers are literally on your front doorstep, so the "drive it away!" message is the primary effect. In fact, I've never seen Gremlins get far enough to do anything, either... maybe they should gain NATURAL_SKILL:STEALTH:15 to have a higher success rate.

Either way, I'm just happy to help!

[Taffer]

That's good to hear! I'm a big fan of the leather change 

Hopefully I can get an update for you soonish, then! Please let me know how the balance is, once the update is out.

If you're slightly increasing the scope of allowed deviations from vanilla, I'd suggest doing something about underground animal tribes. I understand they are not supposed to be strong, but the poor guys are constantly getting wiped out by troglodites and crundles every time I see them. Maybe some kind of "thick bone" armor would help, since there are a lot of stuff in the caves that might have those kind of bones. Or simply give them better poisons and better innate skills.
...
I can definitely see raccoons being raccoons and pulling levers just because. Not sure about the snakes, although I like the idea of "A (snake)! Drive it away!" messages.

Almost the entire modest mod is being merged back in, with the exception of the modules and a few small changes. A simple fix for underground populations is in there: population is just double for the tribes. I'm considering fleshing out animal people more in the future, but that will do for now. Thank you for the request and for the mischievous feedback!

GOBBLE_VERMIN_CLASS:MAMMAL only targets vermin; it never results in "large" creatures engaging each other more than they usually would, which is disappointingly rare in my opinion. If you were super paranoid, you could replace CLASS:MAMMAL with CLASS:EDIBLE_VERMIN_MAMMAL or something.

On the MISCHIEVOUS snake thing, in my experience the little bastards never get far enough into your fort to pull any levers unless said levers are literally on your front doorstep, so the "drive it away!" message is the primary effect. In fact, I've never seen Gremlins get far enough to do anything, either... maybe they should gain NATURAL_SKILL:STEALTH:15 to have a higher success rate.

Either way, I'm just happy to help!

Thanks for the information! I'm really liking all of your mods that I've found, including the new driftwood mod, your bugmen mod, and your old bonfire mod. Adding the bonfire mod is on the todo list for the version after this one. Keep up the great work modding!

[Warlord255]

Thanks! Sadly, the driftwood mod seems to be having some problems - chief among them, BEACH _FREQUENCY isn't working.

On the Bonfire front, however, you may find it's been updated...

[Taffer]

After I release v1.6, one of the things on my todo list is looking at DF Accellerated/simplification, to see if there's value in reducing the amount of creatures, gems, stone, and more in the game. I'm also interested in possibly merging almost identical creatures into one, but with different castes (like shortfin and longfin mako sharks). I'll have to see. I think there's potential for that to need a review when the myths and magic release is out, but that looks like its years away.

I'm not sure about this though, which is why I'm giving a heads up. If you like, dislike, or have input on this, you have some time to let me know.

Thanks! Sadly, the driftwood mod seems to be having some problems - chief among them, BEACH _FREQUENCY isn't working.

On the Bonfire front, however, you may find it's been updated...

Thank you kindly for the update! The new changes look great! I have a fair amount on my todo list before I can get to Bonfire, but I'm looking forward to looking into it.

[ThoMeuhGal]

Well, I personnally used Masterwork with many additions disabled to benefit from the accelerated features for years (I think?). So of course I would be happy. I'm still twitching when I prepare my embark and open the meat or wood pages...  I feel your vision for Revised is exactly what I am looking for in a DF mod.

[CarpBiter2000]

If you like, dislike, or have input on (DF Accellerated/simplification), you have some time to let me know.

I've used Modest Mod before Revised, but I never noticed a huge performance boost from Accelerated submodule, and I like my *giant bat leather pants*. I like them a lot. Would it be too much of a hassle to maintain the simplification as "extra", like the wooly dwarves are right now?

interested in possibly merging almost identical creatures into one, but with different castes

Would it have any impact on taming and breeding?

[Taffer]

Well, I personnally used Masterwork with many additions disabled to benefit from the accelerated features for years (I think?). So of course I would be happy. I'm still twitching when I prepare my embark and open the meat or wood pages...  I feel your vision for Revised is exactly what I am looking for in a DF mod.

Thanks for the show of support, and for letting me know your preference! There's definitely a lot of wood in DF. I admit it does trigger my perfectionism to have a dwarf with a pine bed and an oak table. Micromanaging what wood is used in furniture creation and where that furniture goes based on wood type has never exactly been something I'm w illing to do, so I just end up feeling annoyed looking around everyone's rooms.

I've used Modest Mod before Revised, but I never noticed a huge performance boost from Accelerated submodule, and I like my *giant bat leather pants*. I like them a lot. Would it be too much of a hassle to maintain the simplification as "extra", like the wooly dwarves are right now?

I'm sorry in this case, but I'm not sure you'll want to continue using Revised going forward, then! While I'm on the fence about simplifying materials, I've announced many times my intent to integrate Wanderer's simplified and tiered leather, which will do away with giant bat leather pants. There's several tiers of leather with varying strengths: while leather armor is a little silly as far as realism goes (especially stuff like the "tough leather" tier and higher), this provides some badly needed (in my opinion) differences between creatures. Dwarf Fortress provides no real reward for capturing fantastic and difficult creatures: pig leather is as good as anything, and pigs don't even need grass. Providing leather tiers is (to me) a fantastic gameplay addition, and it has the side effect of simplifying leather. There'd be "dragonscale leather pants", "leather pants", "chitin pants", "tough leather pants", etc. Mermaids will have dragonscale, so mermaid farming is back! (Well, theoretically. They're still intelligent. And they'll breathe on land in the next version, so you can't even air drown them. So it's a bad example). I'm already pretty sold on tiered leather, so apologies.

I'm not willing to maintain it as an extra. I'm sorry. I'm already spending almost all of my free time modding Revised lately, and maintaining a second set of files more than doubles the amount of work I have to do. Woolly limbed dwarves is just a difference of a few lines, and is comparatively easy to maintain. Plus, the more extras I provide, the more work I have to do. Any future extra that edits creature_standard needs two versions: one for woolly limbed dwarves, one without. This just gets worse, the more extras I provide.

I spent years maintaing ludicrous amounts of tilesets. For a year or two, I manually updated 64 tilesets for every release of my tileset pack, simply because I was too generous with options. I've finally brought my tileset pack down to a manageable amount of work, I really don't want to do it all over again for the next few years with Revised.

Sorry! Not intending to be rude, just honest. Old versions will continue to be available on the repository, though, you'll just need to update them for new versions yourself. Thank you for being interested, and for posting your preference!

What do you think about fewer gems? A few less stone types?

Would it have any impact on taming and breeding?

Well, taming shouldn't be affected. Breeding would be affected. Almost identical species would be able to form breeding pairs. If you had a giant red squirrel male and a giant gray squirrel female, they could breed and have a child of a random type. The downside, of course, is that if both parents were red squirrels, there'd be a chance that the offspring would be a "gray squirrel". That being said, there aren't all that many creatures that I'd merge this way, so it wouldn't be that common. I consider it a nice compromise between removing species and keeping them in. DF doesn't really need four base species of squirrel (not counting the giant and animal person variations),

In this case, both the gray and red squirrel would be called "squirrel". Their descriptions would indicate the difference. All tags that were previously unique to gray squirrels would be faithfully moved to their castes, and the same with red squirrels. Nothing is really lost, per say. Really, it's just an elaborate way to continue simplifying names: masked lovebirds and peach-faced lovebirds become just "lovebirds". Gray squirrels and red squirrels become just "squirrels". (Although it's worth noting that foxsquirrels and flying squirrels would still be separate creatures).

It's just a thought. It was done in Essential DF, and I like the idea. It might not happen. It makes sense for a few creatures, but not for others. I'm not likely to merge goats and mountain goats, for example.

[CarpBiter2000]

I'm already pretty sold on tiered leather, so apologies.

Don't worry about it. It's a sensible change from a gameplay perspective, and I can always mod leather back myself.
It's going to be an epic battle, though: me wanting to make batdwarves vs me being a lazy ass.

What do you think about fewer gems?

Kind of nice, because encrusting could be a pain. I mean, it'd still be a pain to make a dwarf encrust what you want instead of a random piece of furniture, it'll just be slightly less of a pain, because it will indirectly lead to less job cancellations.

A few less stone types?

The main thing to consider with a non-economic stone as it stands right now is its color and maybe - if you're really min-maxing - it's value. So until Toady goes through with the geology rework, I don't see any harm in cutting down the stone types.

If you had a giant red squirrel male and a giant gray squirrel female, they could breed and have a child of a random type. The downside, of course, is that if both parents were red squirrels, there'd be a chance that the offspring would be a "gray squirrel".

Interesting. It would make sense, I think: you trade some edge-case variety for gameplay convenience.

By the way, I don't remember, but do giant ticks breed in revised? It's initially was one of the reasons I went for modest mod: I had a fortress, and the only wildlife around consisted of giant ticks. So, of course, I ended up throwing them around at everything, but they couldn't breed properly, which limited my ammo. I just have been thinking about picking up Warlord's bugmen and giving the insectopults another shot. It would be even better to shot giant ticks into tickmen.

[Taffer]

Don't worry about it. It's a sensible change from a gameplay perspective, and I can always mod leather back myself.
It's going to be an epic battle, though: me wanting to make batdwarves vs me being a lazy ass.

Well, I should warn you: the leather changes are invasive, and not trivial to change back.

By the way, I don't remember, but do giant ticks breed in revised? It's initially was one of the reasons I went for modest mod: I had a fortress, and the only wildlife around consisted of giant ticks. So, of course, I ended up throwing them around at everything, but they couldn't breed properly, which limited my ammo. I just have been thinking about picking up Warlord's bugmen and giving the insectopults another shot. It would be even better to shot giant ticks into tickmen.

Giant ticks breed in Revised, even in the current version. They have the CHILD tag added. The modest mod added eggs for insects, though, and Revised doesn't. This was one of a few (in my opinion) problematic changes in modest. They often laid far too many eggs, and egg laying is an FPS drain, even if it's not much of one. The game has to keep track of those eggs. The only real point to eggs in DF is for eating, so that was one of the first things I removed. It doesn't even appear in my cleaned up Modest Mod variant.

I'm considering Warlord's bugmen mod, actually. Not this version. Possibly not the next, but it's somewhere on my todo list. I haven't really looked at it yet. I want to maintain good gameplay balance, however, and I also don't want to give bugmen lots of cool perks but leave all the other animal people with nothing, so I'm not sure I'll integrate much.

That being said, I really like the animal people in DF, and I want to improve them where I can.

[Warlord255]

FWIW, Taffer, I've been thinking of taking a crack at other animalmen, so I may be able to save you some work. I wanted to add Crab Men to the Better Bugmen mod, but as far as I can tell spawning civs in ocean biomes doesn't make beach towns like it ought to.

The biggest issue is that there's only a few non-magical avenues to spice up animalmen; venoms, interactions, and NATURAL_SKILL, plus things like AMPHIBIOUS. I'm ambivalent about [FLIER] because it's so absurdly broken, and I can't find any way to cleanly implement temporary flight without a lot of work involving transformations, and multiplying that work across tons of birdmen is likely to be a right pain. It also appears to be impossible to make herbivores, except perhaps with a meat nausea syndrome affecting CREATURE_CLASS:HERBIVORE.  It may be more valuable to excise the coolest animalmen and promote them to civ status, possibly even making lots of non-hostile/non-trading types that you can provoke through raiding if you want.

 If I do a second pack, it'll probably be reptiles - there's a lot to work with there. Alligator/Anaconda men with NATURAL_SKILL:WRESTLING, Snake Man venoms, Chameleon stealth, Axlotl/frog regeneration... we'll see where that goes.