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Author Topic: Ideas for a hive race.  (Read 4696 times)

MachoNacho

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Ideas for a hive race.
« on: August 17, 2019, 07:32:51 pm »

I'm planning to create a hive-mind race and I want some suggestions.
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brolol.404

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Re: Ideas for a hive race.
« Reply #1 on: August 17, 2019, 08:56:07 pm »

What kind of suggestions are you looking for? What kind of race? Ants, bees? You will probably have to restrict all of the personalities to the same value so they all think the same.

MachoNacho

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Re: Ideas for a hive race.
« Reply #2 on: August 18, 2019, 12:39:16 pm »

What kind of suggestions are you looking for? What kind of race? Ants, bees? You will probably have to restrict all of the personalities to the same value so they all think the same.
They're meant to be some sort of subterranean wasp/bee things.
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brolol.404

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Re: Ideas for a hive race.
« Reply #3 on: August 18, 2019, 07:23:02 pm »

You will probably want to set order/productivity very high and stress/laziness/enjoyment, etc to basically 0. Without DF hack you cant remove too many labors effectively so keep that in mind when forming the civ. You probably want to set art/music/self expression to basically 0 too so I'm not sure how well that will work with the default mechanics. You probably want greed set to 0 too so that would also mean nobles with little needs/mandates (except for maybe one queen). The idea being that everyone knows what they should be doing in the hive mind already.

You should probably figure out a few ideas to mass produce necessities (like food) and incentivize the player to prioritize those. One problem you may run into is that a hive mind can be heavily influenced by the player. If a player builds a tavern and let's their population just sit around drinking, dancing and playing instruments with visitors while grabbing random food, it would be hard to call that a hive mind. So, incentivizing/decentivizing the player is the best way to guide them into acting a certain way.

Atkana

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Re: Ideas for a hive race.
« Reply #4 on: August 19, 2019, 06:28:04 am »

I partially made a hive-mind civ in the past but got annoyed when I kept running into problems with both DF and DFhack so I gave up, but you're free to swipe whatever might be of use to you from it (link).

I had them as a builder sorts, being able to rend organic matter into wax globs that they could use for construction, furniture, or food. They served under a queen, who acted as the centre of the hive mind. All drones under her control shared her emotions, thoughts, and stress - so long as the queen was happy, so was everyone else. Through her they also collectively shared their skills, so as one drone learned a skill, the whole hive benefited from it (though as creatures they learned a bit slower to offset this). I think they could also spawn new drones with a reaction by using eggs the queen laid?

My main idea for designing them was for people who enjoy building stuff: a way of basically generating whatever you need for building (or more workers if that's what was required), a site-wide skillset to encourage themed hives, and you only need to focus on keeping a single person happy throughout :P

Maybe I'll eventually pick it back up and finish it some day...

brolol.404

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Re: Ideas for a hive race.
« Reply #5 on: August 19, 2019, 07:34:25 am »

I partially made a hive-mind civ in the past but got annoyed when I kept running into problems with both DF and DFhack so I gave up, but you're free to swipe whatever might be of use to you from it (link).

I had them as a builder sorts, being able to rend organic matter into wax globs that they could use for construction, furniture, or food. They served under a queen, who acted as the centre of the hive mind. All drones under her control shared her emotions, thoughts, and stress - so long as the queen was happy, so was everyone else. Through her they also collectively shared their skills, so as one drone learned a skill, the whole hive benefited from it (though as creatures they learned a bit slower to offset this). I think they could also spawn new drones with a reaction by using eggs the queen laid?

My main idea for designing them was for people who enjoy building stuff: a way of basically generating whatever you need for building (or more workers if that's what was required), a site-wide skillset to encourage themed hives, and you only need to focus on keeping a single person happy throughout :P

Maybe I'll eventually pick it back up and finish it some day...

This sounds really cool. What problems did you run into?

MachoNacho

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Re: Ideas for a hive race.
« Reply #6 on: August 19, 2019, 09:58:16 am »

I partially made a hive-mind civ in the past but got annoyed when I kept running into problems with both DF and DFhack so I gave up, but you're free to swipe whatever might be of use to you from it (link).

I had them as a builder sorts, being able to rend organic matter into wax globs that they could use for construction, furniture, or food. They served under a queen, who acted as the centre of the hive mind. All drones under her control shared her emotions, thoughts, and stress - so long as the queen was happy, so was everyone else. Through her they also collectively shared their skills, so as one drone learned a skill, the whole hive benefited from it (though as creatures they learned a bit slower to offset this). I think they could also spawn new drones with a reaction by using eggs the queen laid?

My main idea for designing them was for people who enjoy building stuff: a way of basically generating whatever you need for building (or more workers if that's what was required), a site-wide skillset to encourage themed hives, and you only need to focus on keeping a single person happy throughout :P

Maybe I'll eventually pick it back up and finish it some day...
Not sure if that script would work, seeing as I was planning to make more castes.
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Atkana

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Re: Ideas for a hive race.
« Reply #7 on: August 19, 2019, 11:15:09 am »

This sounds really cool. What problems did you run into?
It was mainly just very minor annoyances adding up - positions not respecting castes properly, one dfhack utility not working as its supposed to (albiet with a simple workaround), another dfhack utility not respecting syndrome chances, so when the drones get severed from their queen they experience every terrible feeling they could possibly feel about it rather than some - combined with me not liking doing fortress mode modding because it takes the most effort to test :P I could probably tolerate getting everything to work now all I really have to do is a few edits.

Not sure if that script would work, seeing as I was planning to make more castes.
Yeah, it'd definitely need some slight edits to support more than a single caste (I think that was planned at some point, given the todo notes).

Dangerous Beans

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Re: Ideas for a hive race.
« Reply #8 on: August 21, 2019, 01:13:38 am »

Hi
Did you get the create new workers reaction working properly? I always wanted to create a construct race that use gems to build new ones of themselves, but couldn't work out the reactions
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brolol.404

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Re: Ideas for a hive race.
« Reply #9 on: August 21, 2019, 06:31:06 am »

Hi
Did you get the create new workers reaction working properly? I always wanted to create a construct race that use gems to build new ones of themselves, but couldn't work out the reactions

This may not be a problem in the next version when summoning is a thing.

Atkana

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Re: Ideas for a hive race.
« Reply #10 on: August 22, 2019, 04:49:53 am »

Hi
Did you get the create new workers reaction working properly? I always wanted to create a construct race that use gems to build new ones of themselves, but couldn't work out the reactions
It's fairly straightforward to do with DFhack. This is how the create drone reaction from my old mod would be structured if it were a dfhack command:
Code: [Select]
modtools/reaction-trigger -reactionName THE_HIVE_SPAWN_DRONE -command [ modtools/create-unit -race THE_HIVE -caste DRONE -setUnitToFort -location [ \\LOCATION ] -age 0 ]I would place that line in a dfhack onLoad.init, and then when the reaction with the ID THE_HIVE_SPAWN_DRONE is performed, it should spawn in a drone at that location. As far as I know it worked back then, so unless something has changed since then it should still be fine. I seem to remember there might've been a caveat that the reaction has to produce a product in order to properly trigger, but I'm not sure if that was an old limitation or not  :-\

But anyways, I'll try not to derail this thread much further (and simply lurk here to steal ideas in case I do get around to reviving my old mod) :P

Dangerous Beans

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Re: Ideas for a hive race.
« Reply #11 on: August 22, 2019, 11:11:53 pm »

Thank you
Sadly i probably won't have time to get to this for a while.
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MachoNacho

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Re: Ideas for a hive race.
« Reply #12 on: August 24, 2019, 02:56:13 pm »

The creature is mostly finished, BUUUUUUT it's missing some attacks that I added and I don't know what's wrong. (And also I need to get to the whole "same personality for everyone" thing, but that's not important right now.)

Creature:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
The entire error log:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
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