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Sounds cool, if you find me some images to go off of for style I can certainly make them Rimworld-esque

To clarify, are you just looking for a stylistic example, or graphics you can use as a starting point and modify?

If it's the former, I really like the dragon graphic in the Redra mod (steam-only as far as I can tell).

I don't want to intrude if this isn't exactly what you were intending but Tammabanana/GreyFluffs have a community project of mythical creatures that anyone can contribute to over here. If you're willing to lend a hand coding wise I'm sure they'd appreciate it, they have some basic coding for creatures already but extra ideas (like the mining bit) would be pretty neat to see. They already have a lot of art ready to go and in need of code, also.

Ignore if this doesn't interest you, though. I like the ideas you have. I look forward to seeing if it progresses!

Thanks for the heads-up, I'll take a look and see what they're working on.

9x9 shouldn't collapse, but yes, I have a note about trying to make sure that areas are not created that might cause cave-ins. There's the risk of the 9x9 area being right up against an existing open area.

You make a good point about the meta-game that could result from just checking concentrations of loot. It would be easy but annoying to just spread a bit out unless I check a huge area, so maybe that needs some rethinking.

The other big problem I need to account for is simply walling in the dragon when it's sleeping in its lair. It will need to be able to (a) detect this and (b) re-mine the opening.

It may have been addressed in A15 or A16. Unless I have food problems I don't pay a lot of detailed attention to my animal wanderings.

I bought 3 wargs for my colony once and immediately regretted it. Being only able to eat meat, they decimated my freezer in days. Had to call up a caravan and resell them.

All you need to do is restrict them from your freezer and they'll hunt for their own food. Teach them how to haul and they'll haul the kills back for you.

It's slightly more complicated than that. Make sure they are restricted from your freezer and that your freezer is not in the path between two allowed zones (or two sections of a single allow zone). Pawns, including both humans and animals, are allowed to path outside their allowed areas as long as their destination is within an allowed area. I've had animals go through my disallowed freezer to a grazing zone on the other side and grab snacks on the way through.

Overall I prefer timber wolves, much more trainable. The percentage numbers aren't that different but there's some sort of threshold or something because in practice timbers tame much, much more quickly than wargs. I had wargs die of old age before they were fully trained in some instances.

The difficulty to train an animal type is based on its "wildness" value. The more "wild" it is, the more difficult it is to train. Wargs are very wild. Pigs are not wild. Boar are in the middle. Thrumbo are something like 98% wild and are very difficult to train.

You can open up the dev tools and there's a page for stats that can be used to list all animal types and their stats I believe. It's also on the wiki, but I am not sure how up to date that is.

While I understand that some people find insect infestations difficult, this post is aimed at those like myself who do not really consider them a deterrent to mountain bases. I've started working on a Mythical Beasts mod to to make the game more interesting and, in some cases, harder. Up first are dragons and one of the goals is to make mountain bases riskier. What that means, exactly, is what I'd like to discuss.

I have a few different ideas for how dragons could work. One way is that dragons could identify the largest valuable resource deposit, mine to it, and make a lair. This could also take into account player loot that is kept under mountain roofs to increase the risk of them trying to claim your mountain base versus some other area of the map. They would hunt around their lair, prioritizing larger creatures over smaller ones. They will be very tough to beat (much more so than a Thrumbo).

Anyhow I'm opening up the discussion for feedback. What would make mountain bases riskier? How aggressive should dragons be? How strong should they be?

I've done some prototyping to make sure I can do the kinds of things I want. So far my prototype does the following (just as a proof of concept, everything could change):

• Spawn a dragon via debug controls
• Dragon will identify the most valuable resource deposit within a 9x9 area as its lair (currently only accounts for mineable resource tiles and not player-owned items)
• Dragon will mine a 3-wide path to its lair. Prototype dragons currently mine at a rate of one tile per tick, regardless of the material (so it's FAST)
• Dragon will mine out a 9x9 area around the center of its lair
• Dragon will destroy chunks dropped during mining and collect resources (gold, silver, steel, uranium, plasteel, jade...did I forget any?)
• Once a lair is established, the dragon will slumber in its lair until it is hungry.
• When hungry, the dragon will hunt prey, prioritizing larger targets over smaller ones, and will eat until full (currently this is approximately one full elephant or a few deer sized critters)
• Once full, the dragon will slumber in its lair until hungry again.

I'm also looking for someone to do graphics for this mod. See this thread for more details.

I'm working on a Mythical Beasts mod that will add maybe half a dozen or so new creature types to the game and I am looking for some help with the graphics for each as I don't have much experience in that area. Initially I only need graphics for the first creature to get started but I have thoughts on a few more that I'd like to include eventually. The first one up is a dragon.

For those curious, the mod will be aimed at increasing the danger level with some new creatures. For example, dragons will have a very high mining speed and are intended to be a danger to mountain bases above and beyond insect infestations. They have a very large appetite but slumber in their lair when not active.

Current thoughts on creatures to include:

• Dragons
• Unicorns
• Nightmares (evil version of a unicorn)
• Treants
• Giant Spiders

Unfortunately I cannot go back and comment on that bug thread, but it seems to me that the intent of a stack limit is to indicate the maximum amount of a type of thing that can reasonably be stored in a single tile. To me that would imply that regardless of carrying capacity it would not be reasonable to carry more than one full stack of any type of item. Otherwise the stack limit doesn't make much sense and should be much higher for everything.

The fact that even the core abstracts are inaccessible to mods is crazy unintuitive to me. This makes one of the potentially easiest ways to experiment with modding, creating a new variant of an existing def based on an existing abstract, very confusing.

Avoiding conflicting abstract names on the other hand is something that any casual coder should understand. Just make your def name unique by including your mod name and/or a random number or string sequence at the end.

If there are other problems with sharing abstracts across mods, I am failing to see them.

The biggest thing holding me back from doing more modding is the lack of documentation. I've release one mod, and I'm fairly happy with the results, but it required a lot of time just learning what I could and couldn't do aside from the actual progress on the mod itself. I have a list of 8 or 9 more mods I might be interested in making but I simply cannot justify the time expenditure to figure out the modding API for everything in addition to the time it will take to do the actual mod logic once I know how things work.

I am aware of the modding info on the wiki and have been searching the mod forums but that is still time consuming and doesn't really cover any details, it's all very high level. What is needed is a lot more depth on what is available and what all the individual fields mean. For example, the existing Core 'mod' is insufficient because that does not (a) give you a schema that defines what the available options are in one place or (b) tell you what any of the fields mean or how they are used.

I'm not giving up on modding, but I certainly won't have the time and energy to make all the mods I might be interested in.

Boomalopes are the easiest manhunters imo. The reason simply being chain reactions. All of them will blow up if they're close enough when the first one dies. I like that, pyromaniacs love it. Are you sure no turret has set that of? Maddened animals usually don't go to sleep.

I do not use turrets so there definitely were not any turrets around and no one was firing at them. Mad animals that you do not kill  always go to sleep when the madness wears off in my experience.

I have not felt a compelling need to start using them so honestly I haven't really experimented with them much. I've found other solutions to the situations where they might be useful.

I think conceptually I was turned off by the ammo requirement; not that I think it's a bad idea, I just figured I could find solutions where I don't have to keep track of ammo at all.

EDIT: I also have not played around much with sieges of other bases, so I haven't had the opportunity to try them offensively.

It's unclear to me exactly what the conditions are, but pawns do undraft after a some time. It seems to be related to the proximity of enemies, but I've also had pawns in a group where only some undraft. It almost seems like a calculation based on enemy proximity and whether or not the pawn has a melee or ranged weapon but that's speculation. I definitely wish pawns never undrafted though.

Thanks for the feedback, glad you find it useful!