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[vexxice]

I do not understand the process by which an animal person goes from a primitive tribe member to a bard at my inn. What seperates the raven woman at my inn from the savage bushtit men outside?

DF spawns creatures using the frequency as a weight and the change frequency is used to divide up the creature into subcastes that can be spawned with different frequencies, right? So then why, when I change the CHANGE_FREQUENCY_PERC to 100 in the c_variations do I not see them everywhere? The creatures they are castes of usually have frequencies of 100, so I figure they should spawn like rabbits.

Once spawned, how do they merge with a civ during world gen and become intelligent? And is there a way to modify how often this happens?

I just dont understand, and I want some spider girl citizens

Please tell me what you know about animal men.

Finally, is there a way to view the civilized animal men in legends viewer? This way I could see about how many there are.

[PatrikLundell]

Animal people drift to civs during world gen, but I don't think they do during world activation and they never do in fortresses, at any rate. I am not aware of any way to modify how often animal people drift to civs.

"Wild" animal people are currently "useless" unless modded because they can be caught, but not be used for anything (except target practice). It's possible to mod them to have the PET_EXOTIC tag, which, according to the forum, will cause them to have the same wonky behavior as gremlins do: captured ones can be trained, and will petition to join the civ as members after a year or two. However, they'll remain "animals" that require retraining, and once civ members they are a pain to get to show up for training. Additionally, they can't be assigned labors using DF itself, nor can you view their thoughts (bad idea to have them emit mandates, especially if you have an active injustice system). I use DFHack to change gremlins to be fully tame once they become citizens, and it should be easy to do the same with animal people.

There should be at least two ways to view civilized animal people with Legends Viewer: one is to look at the civs and see how many there are in each civ (since they're listed). Another is to use the map and enable the filter for the various spider peoples you're interested in. Each site where they're present is show with a multi colored blob indicating numbers, and enabling sites allow you to see how many there are in each site (again, one at a time). I assume it would be possible to write a separate program that parsed the XML data to give you the total numbers as well.

If you want to "recruit" animal people the gremlin way I think you can load the dice by hacking them into the biome(s) you will eventually embark to and use region-pops to tweak the numbers post embark. I've had some success with adding plants to biomes (for The Booze Quest), but animals are trickier because you have to decide on numbers (plants are always "innumerable").
I'm not sure that hacking will work to increase numbers recruited by civs during world gen, though: adding missing ogres to the goblin's biome prior to accepting the generated world did not result in them getting ogre monster units.

I don't know how DF decides which creatures/plants out of the potential ones to add to a biome, nor how the creature numbers are generated.

I've tried to get civilized animal people visitors with very little success (a total of 2 or so over all fortresses: one was a plump helmet man), and have had zero petitioners. My approach has been to try to generate biomes from which humans and elves can recruit animal peoples, and the most numerous versions number in the thousands in the current world. Thus, I'd go for the PET_EXOTIC route.

[Weizen1988]

Animal people drift to civs during world gen, but I don't think they do during world activation and they never do in fortresses, at any rate. I am not aware of any way to modify how often animal people drift to civs.

"Wild" animal people are currently "useless" unless modded because they can be caught, but not be used for anything (except target practice). It's possible to mod them to have the PET_EXOTIC tag, which, according to the forum, will cause them to have the same wonky behavior as gremlins do: captured ones can be trained, and will petition to join the civ as members after a year or two. However, they'll remain "animals" that require retraining, and once civ members they are a pain to get to show up for training. Additionally, they can't be assigned labors using DF itself, nor can you view their thoughts (bad idea to have them emit mandates, especially if you have an active injustice system). I use DFHack to change gremlins to be fully tame once they become citizens, and it should be easy to do the same with animal people.

There should be at least two ways to view civilized animal people with Legends Viewer: one is to look at the civs and see how many there are in each civ (since they're listed). Another is to use the map and enable the filter for the various spider peoples you're interested in. Each site where they're present is show with a multi colored blob indicating numbers, and enabling sites allow you to see how many there are in each site (again, one at a time). I assume it would be possible to write a separate program that parsed the XML data to give you the total numbers as well.

If you want to "recruit" animal people the gremlin way I think you can load the dice by hacking them into the biome(s) you will eventually embark to and use region-pops to tweak the numbers post embark. I've had some success with adding plants to biomes (for The Booze Quest), but animals are trickier because you have to decide on numbers (plants are always "innumerable").
I'm not sure that hacking will work to increase numbers recruited by civs during world gen, though: adding missing ogres to the goblin's biome prior to accepting the generated world did not result in them getting ogre monster units.

I don't know how DF decides which creatures/plants out of the potential ones to add to a biome, nor how the creature numbers are generated.

I've tried to get civilized animal people visitors with very little success (a total of 2 or so over all fortresses: one was a plump helmet man), and have had zero petitioners. My approach has been to try to generate biomes from which humans and elves can recruit animal peoples, and the most numerous versions number in the thousands in the current world. Thus, I'd go for the PET_EXOTIC route.

Related minor question, sorry for momentary derail but I was about to make a thread about this, what is this command to make them tame in DFhack? Ive gotten some creatures that seem to lack a child phase to tame them in using up valuable trainer time to keep from rampaging through my fort, id like to just make the damn things tame.

[YetAnotherLurker]

The following single-line command should do the trick, with the unit you want to change highlighted ingame:

Code: [Select]

:lua dfhack.gui.getSelectedUnit(true).training_level = 7training_level runs from 0 to 7 (Semi-Wild to Masterfully trained to Tame). Mind, I believe that attempting this on a creature that's still fully wild breaks things, but I think that as long as the animal already has some training level, it should work with no problems.

[vexxice]

Thank you for all of your information, I appreciate it! I understand that we are all taking stabs in the dark. Nobody (except Toady) seems to understand exactly how this animal men thing works.

I want to make sure I'm doing this right. Is this the filter your talking about?


In many worlds there are only a couple of civilized animal men ANYWHERE. And the chances of them migrating from their civ to mine is low. I was honestly hoping for them to labor, so I don't want to make them gremlin-esque pets.

[PatrikLundell]

No. It's not the one I'm talking about (don't know what yours does). Click on the map, use Overlays at the top, go down to Site Population... and select in that list.

Well, as I think I said, gremlins work just fine as long as you use DT to control them. The functionality as all there in DF, but the UI does not provide it. As long as you hack them to tame (which I do only when becoming citizens) training works fine as well.

If you want to get them in the world through fortress visit, and then apply for residency, I'm not really the one to ask, given my total failure in that regard (though not for lack of trying). However, there are some things that can probably stack the odds:
- Animal people appear only in savage biomes, which means you need to have those. They also somehow migrate to civs from there, so I assume you should have civs in close proximity to the savage biomes.
- The larger the number of savage biomes of the type appropriate for your animal people you have the larger the odds for them to show up. I have no idea how numbers are calculated.
- I would guess that removing the RAWs for all other animal peoples of those biomes ought to increase the odds for the ones you want. This is just a speculation, of course. (And I assume you backup the RAW files before hacking).
- It ought to be possible to pump up the number of a desired animal people once a civ (and sites) has them through DFHack, but I have no idea if that translates into the generation of hist figs that can visit you, though. Examining the goblins with DFHack before accepting the world generated seemed to indicate the number of trolls and beak dogs available to them hadn't been set yet, but animal people are not "monsters". One thing you might want to try is to add a large number of your target animal people to a target civ's site (or multiple sites) very early in world gen (pause, hack, resume). Again, I have no idea what will happen, if anything.
- You could also go further along the modding route and simply introduce Jumping Spider Men (or whatever species you want) as a DF race by plugging them into entity_defaults.txt (I've never done anything like that, but I assume that's how mods like Fortress Defense adds races). I assume others will know how to do that. That ought to give you a civ that can send you caravans (I'd probably go for winter as the trade season), and presumably provide visitors as well. If going in that direction, I'd spend a fair deal of time trying to tweak what plants, equipment, animals, etc. they have access to. I believe there's a mod sub forum if you need help in actually doing anything of this.

Some ideas to burn your time that might otherwise be spent uselessly on "Real Life"...

[mikekchar]

It might actually be easier (depending on you point of view) to export the data from legends mode (press 'p' from the main legends mode screen).  This will write 2 useful text files in you .dwarffortress directory: <region_name>-<time_stamp>-world_history.txt and <region_name>-<time-stamp>-world_sites_and_pop.txt.  It's the second one you want.  It lists all of the sites and what their populations are.  Probably if you are using legends viewer, it has already exported these text files and you can just look at them.

[vexxice]

So I was looking at the RAWs and I noticed the following tags on most animal men.
[POPULATION_NUMBER:5:10]
[CLUSTER_NUMBER:2:10]

Modifying these tags for EVERY animal man would take a while, so I was wondering if there was a way to modify the c_variation_default for my needs. From what I understand, DF goes through this file to add common tags to every animal_man variant. So, is there a way to use this to change all of the animal man POPULATION_NUMBER's to 50:100 for example?

[Melting Sky]

CHANGE_FREQUENCY_PERC is the token that controls how common a creature is within the biomes that can support it. In the case of animal men it is only savage biomes that they can appear in. Raising this to 100 will indeed increase their likelihood of spawning in an embark tile. The ubiquitous tag makes creatures spawn in every biome that can support them so if you want animal men everywhere that is a good tag to add. Be warned it will flood your world with them.

[POPULATION_NUMBER directly controls how large the population on a given map tile can be. The lower number is the lower bounds of the range and the higher number is the higher bounds. So [POPULATION_NUMBER:5:10] would mean between five and ten would live on a given map square where they have been determined to spawn.

[CLUSTER_NUMBER:2:10] determines how many animal men will appear in a group when they spawn on an embark map. So in this case they will spawn in groups between 2 and 10 individuals.

I do not know if messing around with population numbers and their frequency will make more animal men join civilized society as a whole, but it certainly will flood your world with these creatures. Before toady fixed the bug that made many animal men spawn like the extremely common creatures they were based on it was normal to see worlds with animal men populations that were astronomical, far exceeding those of dwarves, elves, goblins etc. In savage biomes all you ever saw were animal men instead of normal animals.

The token that makes animal men join civilized society is LOCAL_POPS_PRODUCE_HEROES

[PatrikLundell]

Thanks for the useful explanation, Melting Sky.
A possible thing to try would then be to make the desired animal peoples ubiquitous and hero making during world gen and then change the raw copy in the save back to normal pre embark to try to get lots of joining animal people without flooding the world with the wild variety post embark.

[Weizen1988]

The following single-line command should do the trick, with the unit you want to change highlighted ingame:

Code: [Select]

:lua dfhack.gui.getSelectedUnit(true).training_level = 7training_level runs from 0 to 7 (Semi-Wild to Masterfully trained to Tame). Mind, I believe that attempting this on a creature that's still fully wild breaks things, but I think that as long as the animal already has some training level, it should work with no problems.

Thank you so much, I was nervous going into the files to try and add child phases to the things that lack them, which was what i feared I would have to do, this is much easier, and so long as I dont abuse it, doesnt make the game significantly easier. *goes off to build giant cave toad farm.*

[Fleeting Frames]

http://i976.photobucket.com/albums/ae250/Vexxice/animal%20people.png

If you see something like that, I think it is probable the animal men have immigrated in from elsewhere - check your legends for stuff like "in T, 100 wren men joined <X>", or just other sites at various times. Ex, Sweptpaged in this world gen has 411 animal men of various stripes (I had some show up and iirc at least one petition to join as well on few test embarks, but that's far cry from spidergirl fortress of course.).

Sometimes I see immigrant population overwhelm natives in big sites due taverns or whatnot - stereotypically, goblins moving to human town. However, I've also seen 800+ gorlacks in dwarven fortresses on rare occasions, and I know Max™ has mentioned flymensplosion in elven sites.

[vexxice]

If you see something like that, I think it is probable the animal men have immigrated in from elsewhere - check your legends for stuff like "in T, 100 wren men joined <X>", or just other sites at various times.

Where would I find this information? I've searched through the XML and world_sites_and_pops files, and can't seem to find anything that looks like what you mentioned. Should I use DFhack and dump the expanded XML?

[Thisfox]

....flymensplosion in elven sites.

Oh. My. God.

This has given me such a mental image right now.

[Fleeting Frames]

Well, nobody takes cleaning jobs aboveground. If you have fly men instead of flys show up, well...elves ain't complaining - just more food to eat

@vexxice: It's under both sites -



- and regions, which are scattered (compared to the single town - also note that the hateful desert had complete sea gap separating it from town), but have far less events:


Of course, it's much easier to find this if you can use search function - I used Legends Browser and searched for "joined" under Sweptpaged, which also got me the numbers - 34 and 546/160 and 125 - but not species, oddly. Don't remember if I used expanded xml, but probably did.