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[Zombie0hour]

A_Fey_Dwarf has asked me to take over his "Ant Colony" mod. I will continue work on it, and implement some of my own ideas into the project. First things first, I am renaming it "Ant Mod" its more to the point. Below is all of his work, and I take no credit for any of it.

A major mod replacing the dwarf fortress world in every way possible to an ant's perspective.
Release information:
V-0.1 - http://dffd.wimbli.com/file.php?id=861
An incomplete release, still needs a lot more things.

Civilization creatures replaced with:
Ants - The controllable civ, pretty much like dwarves. Fast reproducing, fast moving.
Termites - Faster moving than ants, faster reproducing but generally weaker. Will hopefully compete with ants for territory.
Wasps - A flying Civ, uses it's pointed stinger as a weapon. Fun to adventure with. Will hopefully compete with ants for territory.
Beetles - Slow moving but much larger and better armored. Takes longer to reproduce but does not compete with ants so is a suitable trade partner.
Roaches - The kobolds of the Ant colony world. Large, disgusting, slimy filth. Will steal from you, is well armored, stealthy, slow moving and slow reproducing.

New weapons and armor:
Replaced all weapons with their mandible counterparts. Mandibles are held using the jaw body part to simulate how an insect would attack.
Armor is now called shelling and is made from a new hardened chitin "metal". This chitin is processed at the smelter by using two leather/chitin pieces to create a single hardened chitin bar. However, I currently don't know what effects it will have on the game if I remove all other metals so I shelling and mandibles can still be made from normal metals. My original idea was to have the insect civs replace mining out ore with butchering, tanning and hunting, thus killing wildlife will become much more important.

Things to expect in the next version: Appropriate wildlife, no more metals, appropriate megabeasts, appropriate plant life, a crossbow like spitting mandible weapon.

Some of my ideas:
Plants
Trees= long grasses
Farmed plants = Fungus
Quote

Leaf-cutter ants live in tropical and semi-tropical rainforests in South and Central America. They cut leaves and carry them to their underground nests, where they chew the leaves into pulp. The pulp is stored with ant feces. A fungus grows on the decaying plant matter; this is the leaf-cutter ant's diet.

Gathered plants = Sugar granules, gathered human food?

Domestic animals
Aphids -
Quote

Some species of ants "farm" aphids, protecting them on the plants they eat, eating the honeydew that the aphids release

Caterpillar
Grasshopper

Wild Animals
Pretty much every insect you can think of...

(Semi)Megabeasts
Giant magnifying lens, flying, firebreath attack etc.
Anteater, Erm long paralyzing tongue attack, high damblock.
I am sure you guys can think of more...

Minerals
This is where I am going to have to bring in some fantasy elements as ants generally didn't smelt ores... One idea that i have is that all ground layers are dirt like layers, I am not sure if this will work though. I could base it on this chart:

where the top layers are humus and the bottom layer is actually the rock layer. Minerals can be in the middle layers. I know next to nothing about geology or soil so someone else might have to give me a little advice to what these layers could be called.

Weapons/armor
The smelted ores could be used to make little weapons, sheilds and armor. I will probably stick with variations to the hammer (heavy thumper), spear (poker), sword (slicer), axe (chopper) and mace (spikey thumper). The projectile weapons seem a bit to far fetched so I wont be having any.

Other races
Current ideas:
Wasps (goblin like, except flying)
Beetles (Human like)
ladybugs/ladybirds (elf like)
Spiders (another hostile goblin like race)
Roaches (like kobolds except relatively humongous)

[Hippoman]

looks good.

[Vester]

Hmm...

Ants are tiny, so an Anteater would be ten times the size of their fortress to them. Spiders would do for megabeasts, or Bulldog Ants like the Jack Jumper.

[Stargrasper]

Hmm...

Ants are tiny, so an Anteater would be ten times the size of their fortress to them. Spiders would do for megabeasts, or Bulldog Ants like the Jack Jumper.

I would go with frogs or toads as they're still huge by insect standards and eat insects(though I'm not so sure many eat ants).  Large spiders would work, too.  Between frogs, toads, and spiders, you'll have so many megabeasts that you'll be glad that you live underground.

There is one minor problem, though.  Ants are SO much smarter than dwarves.  That and they don't use magma.  Or stone.  Look forward to seeing what this turns into.

Good luck with this mod.  Make it your own.  And listen when we suggest things.

[guale]

I would like to see tameable herds of wild buldog ants since they function somewhat like a pack animal. Leave megabeasts to solitary insects sich as Praying Mantises and scorpions and things like that. Also would it be possible to make aphids vermin so they are milkable and still have them function properly?

[Vester]

The thing is, bulldogs are huge (compared to other ants), they do hunt as solitary animals, and are vicious killers. Maybe they could be like extreme wardogs.

Oh - here's an idea for a semimegabeast - Antlion larvae.

Anyway, the termites as goblins makes a lot of sense, since termites and goblins both build towers. But you'll have to replace the Demon ruler with something that makes more sense.

Also you should up the birthrate and lower child-growing-up-time so you can rely on those instead of migrations.

[Vieto]

my reccomendation: leave GCS the way they are; they are perfect for this mod.

for domestic animals: I think caterpillars and worms would make good domestic animals. Also, the Termite Ruler can simply be a termite Queen. Same for the Ants.

[Stargrasper]

Given the nature of ants, wouldn't not having migrations at all make sense?  My understanding was that while ants migrate out all the time, they don't go to join existing colonies and when ants of different colonies come into contact, it generally leads to skirmishing between the insects of the two colonies.

On that note, however, I don't think DF actually allows you to turn off or otherwise control migrants by any means other than restricting the population cap.  The idea of nobles and traders is ludicrous as well.  Ants don't trade.  They also come with their own queen.

Being the geek that I am, I know a bit.  Sadly, I also know that DF doesn't allow you to create truly ant society.

[Hippoman]

Lets throw in a ultra mega super beast.

A dwarf.

[Stargrasper]

Lets throw in a ultra mega super beast.

A dwarf.

We all know how much dwarves love to eat vermin.

[Vieto]

I think cats would be more fearsome. Dwarves only eat vermin as a last resort. Cats... much more frequently.

except for those cats with-out [CAT_MOUTH].

[Zombie0hour]

I am going to try and get some kind of update in by next weekend, or the weekend after. School is making it hard to find time to work on the mod.

[nil]

You can take out ores with no problem (although I'd make sure to take out both the metal and ore entries).  You can even take out most if not all stone with no problem.  I'm pretty sure that even if you have no stone designated for a given layer type it will then just pull a random stone entry.

Has anyone figured out how to make a stone edible through reactions?  You could have tubers and edible roots represented by small clusters of some sort of edible ore that pops up randomly in soil layers.

[A_Fey_Dwarf]

You coul;d probably set up a reaction turning a stone into food.

[Zombie0hour]

I was also thinking about implementing sugar somehow, like the ability to extract sugar from most foods.