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[Reelya]

Oh, I like this idea... even if toady restricts it to making cabbits

The main issue is that the hybrids can't be created in the game "organically".

You can mod in a "half-elf" and it's a different race/creature-type, but there's no way to make one in the game unless you just spawn a population of the "half-elf race", who then only breed with other half-elves. Just adding a "cabbit" race and calling it a cat-rabbit hybrid, isn't interesting at all in terms of game mechanics, or something Toady needs to help us with.

And changing the thing so that crossbreeds are possible is in fact non-trivial because it challenges the entire conceptual level in a roguelike of the term "creature type" and any and all code that is reliant on the concept of "creature type" being a non-mutable thing is now suspect and needs to be tested again or rewritten.

However, some middle ground could work. If e.g. all races were defined as creature variations from more general races, then you could create a taxonomy tree exactly like the real world. Then you could say that things within the "genus" level or "species" level could interbreed, and you have procedural creature variations which mix and match the trait variations from each "species" definition of the creature variation, in defining which tags the individual creature possesses (you'd also track which original "race" each inherited trait comes from - then you could quickly say "this person is X% human, Y% elf").

Then, e.g. dwarf and gnome could be in the same species ("dwarf-kind"), with elf, human, halfling defined as another species ("human-kind"). Both species would be part of a single genus. So "dwarf-kind" could mate with "human-kind" but they would have a low possibility of having fertile offspring (some tags could control this), while any of the "human-kind" can mate with each other. Then the "races" would be at a level below species. e.g. "race" of human or elf is a cultural distinction and someone who fits in neither one or the other would be called a "half-elf", but if you then mated with an elf and your offspring had enough elf-traits, then you'd just be considered an "elf".

[Shonai_Dweller]

Mythgen will feature procedurally generated raws and completely random, playable creatures. Anything is possible.

If Toady feels half-breeds are a common enough fantasy trope (he does, they feature in one of the base stories) he'll work out how to do it. What's difficult to do now, or difficult to mod in right now is irrelevant.

[Bumber]

And changing the thing so that crossbreeds are possible is in fact non-trivial because it challenges the entire conceptual level in a roguelike of the term "creature type" and any and all code that is reliant on the concept of "creature type" being a non-mutable thing is now suspect and needs to be tested again or rewritten.

Well, you could just have a special creature type hybrid that derives its properties from the parents. Deciding how races react to them (i.e., treat a half-elf dwarf as a dwarf, yet also as elf) is an extra matter, but it's not like anyone really cares about race yet, beyond breeding.

[Reelya]

"derives its properties" is easier said than done. The token system in the raws is largely unstructured, so it would be hard to automate something that sensibly merged bodyplan details and all the rest. Plus it would be excessively time-consuming to manually merge the entire raws for two individuals, since most of that is redundant. And if you're going to make "hybrid" a generic type, then it starts as a blank slate and you need to manually compare and collate all tokens for each parent each time a baby is born. Which is a lot of work for basically no advantage.

You'd also have the issue if e.g. if you hardcode the rule "any human and any elf can breed to make a hybrid" and the "hybrid" is a type encoding ALL "hybrids" of any two species then your computer would have difficulty answering the question "can a human and a hybrid breed?" since it would need to read the raws for the hybrid, manually compare to the human, and all that would be excessively time consuming for the CPU. And if you have to have that manual system for doing so, the hypothesized hardcoded rule system clearly didn't achieve what it was supposed to.

Like I suggested, coding the difference between an Elf and a Human as creature variations off the same base would make them much easier to merge, reduce the size of the raws, and their relation as being CV's of one type would encode the information "can breed". Then instead of a separate "hybrid" creature type, elves, humans and the mixes are all specified as derivatives of the single e.g. "homonid" type, which would bypass the issue of "creature types" altogether. Whether an individual is considered an elf or a human would become a subjective interpretation made by the characters in the game, not the engine itself.

[Bumber]

And what about breeding with demons, or other magical creatures? You can't really fit them into the hominid class, yet you need to be able to inherit their traits.

A hybrid creature would track what percent of each race it is (until insignificant,) and breeding capability can be checked against the most significant races. You don't need to merge the entire raws if you can define a section of heritable features. The hybrid is then generated as a sort of civilized FB.

[Draco18s]

And what about breeding with demons, or other magical creatures?

Dragons can obviously breed with anything.