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[Veetor]

When a world is generated, I understand that many pops will be abstract; a select few will become historical figures, which will have events in their lives logged. My question is about when a normal figure becomes a historical one. In the example below, I see that a human farmer was a non-historical figure. However, he participated in a battle and slew a bunch of elves. I understand that in this moment, he became a historical figure.
My question is, before he became a historical figure, was he just an abstract number, and the moment he became a historical figure was his birthday, name, etc calculated, or did he always somehow existed, a human, with at least a name, a birthday his lineage, and he was conscripted, and fought in a war? Because he actually has ancestors for around 5 generations. Basically, are the non-historical figures completely abstract, or how are they tracked? How alive is the world?

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[PatrikLundell]

As far as I understand, non hist figs are completely abstract, i.e. a pool of nobodies with a single number representing how many they are. Without knowing, I suspect the ancestors were generated at the time the non hist fig became historical, but it may well be that the process works differently in world gen than after world gen.
There are "unimportant" hist figs, with an advanced world gen setting allowing you to determine if DF should cull unimportant hist figs, which means wipe the records of the ones that didn't achieve anything during their lives, leading to Legends info of X who had two unknown (i.e. culled) hist figs as parents (and thus no ability to trace the lineage further backwards), was married to an unknown hist fig, and had 3 kids, two of which were unknown hist figs and the third one actually did something noteworthy. I think this switch does nothing in play though, given how my saves have had a tendency to bloat out.

[Shonai_Dweller]

You'd have to ask Toady to be sure, but I imagine it's lots of different pools of numbers corresponding to the different entities. With entities expanding, that info might be getting more granular. It might include families too, which are tracked apparently, but not sure to what extent.

I don't think we know how much information about each pop in the pool is recorded, but Worldgen seems to know some facts about who's in there, such as the percentage of a certain religion in a specific town.

[Sver]

IIRC, it's something inbetween. For instance, in Adventure Mode, many of the people you meet are not histfigs - yet they have a profession and an assigned age. When the player does as little as greets them, they get a name and become a histfig. This mechanic has been used to great effect in Kruggsmash's "Honeystoker" to turn abstract dwarves of the hillocks into requestable migrants.

[Loam]

Since this guy has ancestors, as you say, he was never not a historical figure: all children of already historical figures are tracked, and no non-historicals pulled from the general pop will have ancestries generated. The issue here is that he was only twelve years old (check it: b. 376, d. 388), the age at which children grow into adults. Children don't do anything in worldgen (other than get attacked by monsters or snatchers), so that's why nothing shows up until he turned 12. Turns out he was  really a Cuchulain-esque badass the whole time.

As far as when non-historicals are historicized, I'm not sure. I always suspected that it was just whenever the history needed a new historical figure - to fill a certain position, say (I often find kings who were "just born" histfigs, when the previous king died heirless).

[PatrikLundell]

If I remember correctly, Toady has said DF elevates non hist figs to hist figs if needed to fill a position, but if there's a suitable hist fig that one will be taken instead, and possibly a bit too often.

[therahedwig]

IIRC, it's something inbetween. For instance, in Adventure Mode, many of the people you meet are not histfigs - yet they have a profession and an assigned age. When the player does as little as greets them, they get a name and become a histfig. This mechanic has been used to great effect in Kruggsmash's "Honeystoker" to turn abstract dwarves of the hillocks into requestable migrants.

I think they become histfigs the moment they enter a conversation, as then they get assigned to an entity and have to be able to spit knowledge of the entity about a rumour.

[mikekchar]

I think any time you even look at someone (i.e. go to their description page) in adventure mode, they become a hist fig.  Or at least, I've been able to look up everyone I've looked at in Legends mode.