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[Magmacube_tr]

I am just curious, and sorry if this has been discussed before. I looked around the web and there seems to be no such discourse.

What I want to know is the type of creature, of any kind, that can be found in vanilla DF, that has the lowest chance of encountering.

[Thisfox]

I am just curious, and sorry if this has been discussed before. I looked around the web and there seems to be no such discourse.

What I want to know is the type of creature, of any kind, that can be found in vanilla DF, that has the lowest chance of encountering.

Dragons? I only find them if I go to specific locations and really do a multi-reload search.

[voliol]

Good question. Gabbro men, iron men, mud men, blood men, amethyst men, magma men, fire men, yetis, sasquatches and frill sharks all have a ”frequency” value of 1, the lowest possible in the game. That value is weighted against the frequency of other creatures in the same biome though, so magma men and fire men (and yetis) found in biomes with few other creatures are still comparatively common creatures. For the rest of the elemental ”men”, the caverns are filled with all sorts of other monsters, but the spawn rates are high and they are available no matter where the player embarked, so sooner or later they will be encountered.

In conclusion, the rarest creature is (probably) either the sasquatch or the frill shark. The sasquatch is found in forests, the most biologically diverse of biomes, while the frill shark is found in oceans where non-vermin creatures are rare as is.

[NJW2000]

I'd like to note that for some reason, Sasquatches turn up in elven territories a great deal, as war animals or similar. Not sure if this still applies to the current version, but I had one adventurer encounter dozens. So civilisations can influence the rarity of actually encountering the thing.

Megabeast and semi-megabeast rarity can be controlled by the player, so that varies.

[Thisfox]

That does make me even more impressed that the humans keep providing me with annual frill shark leather. I guess it's an endangered species, perhaps I shouldn't be encouraging them by buying it.

[PatrikLundell]

@vcd14: Cave dragons aren't that rare, so Thisfox must have meant the megabeasts (there's nothing "semi" about them). I've been attacked by them only a handful of times over a fair number of years, and while you can control megabeast rates to some extent, they'll severely cut down on civilization if you try to push it (and I try to get as many megabeasts as possible while still having thriving civs, scrapping many worlds that were broken in the search for "balanced" ones).

Given how dwarven economy (doesn't) work, I'd say no shark where hurt in the production of imported frill shark leather...

The rarest creatures, though, would be the Titans, FBs, and demonic overlords, as each creature is unique.

In terms of numbers, I'd expect some experimental creatures may well be unique as well (necros CAN mass produce them, but I image there might be cases where only a single one was ever produced).

In terms of sightings, I'd guess it would be various sea monsters, although it depends on where you embark.

[Magmacube_tr]

Good answers overrall.

But the necro'ed creatures make the most sense, since they have infinite variety. A reanimated lynx man skin/fur would be very, very rare.

[PatrikLundell]

Now you're shifting the focus from the creatures to products acquired from the creatures, and that's different.

It's surprisingly common to find clothing made out of hide from sapient creatures, both on visitors and on goblin invaders. However, DF allows butchering of reanimated creatures only if the creature whose corpse was reanimated can be butchered, and dwarves aren't allowed to butcher sapients, so any products from reanimated former sapients can only come from "natural" butchering, such as e.g. a severed arm providing bones that dorfs happily use for crafting (if the arm came from a zombie, but not if it came from the base creature), but I'm not aware of anything flaying undead (or live creatures, for that matter), providing a skin.
In my current fortress I've been invaded by sapient experiments as part of necro armies, as well as received clothing made out if their skin (may be from necros of from the gobbos).

[Salmeuk]

A while back I was experimenting with this sort of thing, and I modified the raws to give a completely level spawn rate for every creature. This did not work as expected since (iirc?) the creatures would pull based off of total population values, so a more fecund species (looking at you, Giant Mosquitos) will still be weighted highly. I solved this by just deleting all the insects and attempting to even out the birth rates for remaining species.

Oh, and I made it so every species could spawn in every biome. The results were spectacular. I saw creatures I didn't even know were in the game! All sorts of weird creatures like flying squirrels and whatnot. After this, I realized that like %80 of the creatures in the raws are literally never encountered in regular gameplay, due to the aformentioned issues w/ spawn weighting. This also made me sad because these creatures are really quite awesome, and my dreams of creating a zoo containing a variety of creatures is less enticing when I know I will literally never see certain creatures, despite their existence in the world and their habitation of my chosen biome.

[Mobbstar]

The rarest creature to be encountered may be Minotaurs, because they go extinct almost immediately in regular worlds. This is, to my knowledge, because they are puny compared to other (semi-)megabeasts and even ordinary livestock, but still go out to do megabeast stuff in worldgen, where the first town or adventurer to battle with them promptly grinds their bones into porridge.

[PlumpHelmetMan]

From my personal experience? I still have yet to encounter most of the non-procgen, non-(semi)megabeast fanciful creatures in their natural environment. To name just a few examples: I haven't seen a single unicorn, satyr, harpy, yeti, or nightwing yet in any of my dozens of worlds.

[FantasticDorf]

In my opinion, Giant Toads are the absolute rarest intentional mundane creature (as in the giant-animal form of toads distinct from cave toads) because murky pools aren't egible in size to be part off-map features egible for spawning in off the sides directly, nor are giant toads that are "technically" there encouraged to congregate onto the player's tile with that biome.

[Salmeuk]

From my personal experience? I still have yet to encounter most of the non-procgen, non-(semi)megabeast fanciful creatures in their natural environment. To name just a few examples: I haven't seen a single unicorn, satyr, harpy, yeti, or nightwing yet in any of my dozens of worlds.

harpies are easy to come by, just embark in a evil mountain biome and they are top of the pop lists. Same w/ yetis - embark on evil (?) glacier and you're bound to encounter one.

I will agree with the rest, but I think I've seen unicorns once?

Now, dark gnomes, mountain gnomes gremlins are both pretty rare, and have special features re: boozethieving and lever pulling, respectively. cool creatures that I wish I saw more

Creatures I LITERALLY never saw until I modded the game to even pop distribution:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Aye-aye
Bilou
Blizzard man
Cassowary
Desert tortoise
Deer (yes, I'm serious . . . I have never seen a deer in the 3d version lol)
Duck
Gorilla
Grimeling
Hare
Hornbill
Hyena
Ice wolf
Iguana
Koala
Koala
Mandrill
Orangutan
Porcupine
Siamang
Spider monkey
Stoat
Stoat
Unicorn
Giant green tree frog

And a large number of the other aquatic creatures, though I have seen a Great White Shark and that was pretty cool.

Things I wish I never saw:
Echidna (undead variety)
Kea

[Thisfox]

It's all anecdotal, but for some reason I've seen a LOT of unicorns, and am surprised to see them on that list.

[Mohreb el Yasim]

It's all anecdotal, but for some reason I've seen a LOT of unicorns, and am surprised to see them on that list.

unicorns live in good biomes, so if you go there andhe does not, it explains why.
what is the rarest might depend on how you generate your world too .... (only warm regions, you can end up with 0 penguins for example)