Replacing Vanilla animals?

[Volomon]

Hello!

I was curious how much effort given that I have no modding skill, would it take for me to replace all the base animals?  Say instead of chicks and cows I instead replace them each with a lizard type creature that lays eggs and a bipedal mammal that gives milk?

I have hundreds of hours on Rimworld it's oddly the best game, ever.  However I've always had a gripe with the fact that its called Rimworld which by definition is a world that exists on the fringes of our universe or known galaxy.  Yet there are human tribes and farm animals as if an ancient cargo ship from the local zoo crashed on the planet lobg ago.  I mean fine I can roll with that but there does appear to be numerous odd animals like the megaspider.

So if I dedicated the time into replacing all the animals, minus the artwork and the effort there how hard would the coding be? Can I get rid of the vanilla animals if I did?

[BrokenValkyrie]

You don't have to replace all vanilla animal. If I was you I'll be more concerned with removing all vanilla animal and then adding my kind own, not necessary finding a replacement for each one. Removing animal is not hard but removing them all will be tedious. All animal are located in Mods\Core\Defs\ThingDefs_Races. You can remove animal with patch operation. https://gist.github.com/Zhentar/4a1b71cea45b9337f70b30a21d868782. You'll need to remove both thingdef and pawnkinddef just to be safe.

You also need to remove vanilla animal from spawning, since those definition no longer exist.
Mods\Core\Defs\BiomeDefs

I recommend not touching Thrumbo since its tied to a special event.

After you removed all vanilla animal, you'll add in your own animal just like any other mod.

Rough estimation
8 hours to remove all vanilla animals
16 hours to create new one to "replace" vanilla animal.

A great deal of time will be spent fixing typos and tweaking values. But all honesty, estimation is really difficult and quite often wrong. Most likely it will take much longer than what I put there, there so many factor to consider. The scope of your mod, your work habit, experience with coding, tools available ect...

I am assuming you aren't planning to make replacement do anything outside the scope of vanilla behavior such as ranged attack.