If it were me, I'd make all the non-civilized bugs non-sentient, if only to avoid all the little annoyances that sentient pets bring in. For example, your ants will likely consider cleaning up the corpses of hostile sentient predators to be incredibly stressful. You also couldn't butcher and eat them.
Good point. Maybe I will just add [CAN_SPEAK] to all of the non-civilized bugs.
That reminds me, it might be good to have (relatively) giant mice as [COMMON_DOMESTIC] farm animals. If strange mood materials are hard coded, the mice could provide leather and bones without having to rely on chance.
Interesting. I may have to just remove strange moods. I could add shrew moles as farm animals, but even those creatures live on a diet of bugs and would be a terrifying creature to encounter.
What about "giant" mushroom trees in some (forest) biomes, in addition to the grass trees? A really large tree, the ant equivalent of the savage highwood, or even larger, could be the fern.
I'll add some mushrooms as trees. I could potentially add ferns, but I will have to see if I can construct the branches/leaves into a fern shape. I will also add weeds as trees such as dandelions, thistle, penny wort, chickweed, etc.
Conifer trees are too large to model, but perhaps one biome could have their needles growing from the ground as crops. Hand-waved as them dropping from invisible trees, of course. I imagine it would be the biome for players who want to build ant-hills, as the needles would be cheap building blocks, even compared to cutting down grass straws.
Mountains could be big rocks, if mineral-generation allows for such leeway, having the mountains be of minerals that are barely used elsewhere. Otherwise they could be mounds of dirt or small hills.
I think I will make mud, sand, clay, loam, peat, chalk and silt "stone" so all dirt can be made into anthills/building blocks. I think I will make stones like shale, granite and limestone unable to be mined (like slate is in vanilla).
I can mess with pine needles and see if I can include some version.
Oh, and milkable aphids as ant pets should be a given, considering that relationship actually does exist IRL. Ants could farm... mold maybe? I believe I've seen some documentary that included mold-farming ants. Dunno whether most ants do that though. The ants could lack farming for extra challenge. I don't know if it's possible to turn of farming, but considering this is a total overhaul all plants could lack farm-ability.
I will add milkable aphids as pets. I am not sure about farming. I could just remove it. It would require the player to interact with the environment more and couldn't just hold up underground.
I really like LargeSnail's idea of vermin to ants, it really gives you a sense of scale that there are creatures tiny even for ants. If you go in the opposite direction, what could be the Mega-beasts? A difficult question, as many creatures big enough to regularly eat ants are way way too large for an ant population of at most a few hundred to defeat. Skinks would work, while anteaters and boars would break the size-limit of DF by far.
For megabeasts, I was thinking the following:
finch
bat
frog
lizard
skink
mouse
rat
mole
Mid-writing-edit: I saw the creature line-up. Some comments on it:
- Is a daddy long-legs a cellar spider, a harvestman or a crane fly? The name is used for all three depending on region, but I suppose it is one of the former two as you put it with the spiders.
- Beetles are good. Vanilla DF just has one single beetle species, which is too few. Beetles have noticeable grubs, should these be counted as separate creatures? Come to think of it, ant babies should probably be larvae as well... FirePhoenix might have a solution to this, considering they made the Dwarvemon Pokémod. Maybe IndigoFenix as well, IIRC the piranha plants have multiple stages to them.
- Mites are really tiny. The ticks (!) are the largest ones, and even they are barely visible before they bloat up with blood. I propose that mites be vermin.
- Grasshoppers, locusts and the like are huge relative to the ants, and thus would give lots of meat when butchered. They are incredibly speedy though, and have flight, so hunting one down wouldn't be easy. They could be given a high value materials as an incentive for the player to try that challenge.
- Butterflies need flowers, as do the bees, so there should be some kind of flower trees, or at least decently large flowers. Butterflies could be set with SPECIFIC_FOOD to only appear in flowery areas, though considering a game world will be considered tiny enough for a butterfly to easily cross this might not be a problem.
- Slugs/Snails seem like slow, steady sources of food. A beginner's blessing. Snails might retract into their shells, though, at which point getting that snail-meat out would be tricky. I dunno if carnivorous snails/slugs ever eat ants, in which case they could be a moderate threat.
I will change the name to cellar spider.
I will check out the Dwarvemon and ROTMK mods and see if I can figure out stages. If not, maybe I will add separate grubs. Ants may give live birth though. I will have to work around the system limitations.
I'll make mites vermin. I am also considering making louse, fleas, nematodes and a few of the worms vermin. Arrow worms will possibly be vermin fish.
I was planning on adding dandelions as trees, but I could add other flowers as well: daises, lavender, chamomile, basil, oregano, etc.
Apparently there is a
giant carnivorous land snail.
It's actually possible to somewhat bypass the size limit by setting a creature's size to 1 and then multiplying by a couple million. The Godzilla megabeast I made once uses this method. That Godzilla is just about on the "new" limit, but you could get a bit larger.
I also wanted to suggest the trilobite beetle. It's famous for its extreme sexual dimorphism. The females are giant grubs for their entire lives, while the males are relatively tiny beetles.
I will add a trilobite beetle.
Good to know about the massive creatures. I may use it for something, but I probably won't add anything bigger than a chicken. Anything larger than that is basically unrecognizable.
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Topic: DF Overhaul - Insects (Read 16517 times)