[MOD]Forgotten Realms Direforged[MOD]

[GoblinCookie]

Download Link[dffd.bay12games.com]

Several years I started an extensive mod to add creatures from the Forgotten Realms realms into a Dwarf Fortress world modded by the Direforged mod of Knight Otu I was keen on that itself adds new creatures into the game. The Forgotten Realms is a Campaign Setting[en.wikipedia.org] of D&D which provided the setting for such games as Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights.

This mod adds creatures from both the Forgotten Realms and Direforged while mantaining all the creatures that are in the base game, ablait with a few modifications. It also contains a very extensive expansion to the base dictionary that is also available for vanilla as GoblinCookie's Expanded Dictionary

If you wish to support me and my work, you can do so by reading/reviewing/linking to my E-Book here[www.amazon.co.uk]

[GoblinCookie]

A new version has been released, it adds building destroyer back in for sentient creatures, this was removed due to a bug and it also removes natural skill in daggers from them because it was messing up training.

[inSane]

I hope to see your mod in the workshop when the game releases.
I didn't try it yet because I'm still learning the basics with Lazy Newb Pack installed... And i always liked how easy it is to install mods on Steam.

[GoblinCookie]

I noticed that words for D&D creatures were showing up in the names of people in my fortress dwarf civilisation and that was not supposed to happen. That led to a surprisingly lengthy period of combing through all the D&D pack files to make sure that all of them were in the [TORIL] symbol-group. I also fixed another problem I noticed, I forgot to rename the lantan gnome guns along with all the weapons; in the long run I will be simplifying guns but not this release.

[GoblinCookie]

I was not finding it very easy to keep playing or modding dwarf fortress, brought back bad memories of the forum. The latest release however did manage to galvanize me back to work, resulting in Version 2.7Q. What I mostly did is take advantage of how that ever-annoying bug with dark fortresses is gone now to add the positions back in.

I have had a half-finished version of 2.8 lying around on my computer for over a year now. I took the positions from the files within, added in [CHAT_WORTHY] to all of them and confirmed it all worked. It used to be you could add in non-chatworthy positions to dark fortress civs, but that stopped working which required me to remove all the positions altogether.

So in effect I was copying from an earlier version, labelled 2.8 into a later version of the game labelled 2.7, rather strange. Hopefully the bad forum memories won't harass me too much and I will release 2.8 BEFORE the devs release this game on Steam. That will involve a lot of work since I will have to make graphics for all my creatures.

[GoblinCookie]

I am integrating four mods into Forgotten Realms Direforged. My initial plan was to integrate 6 mods, but Lands of Duality was proving a little extensive and was taking too much time to integrate. The present lineup is Deeper Dwarven Domestication, Domestically Bred Dwarven Beasts, Creatures of Myth and Legend, Voliol's Various Vivants and Dwarf Caramel.

Four of these are now integrated, I had to go through the error to remove the bugs and incompatibilities. Dwarf Caramel proved particularly interesting in that it was so ancient a mod that the files needed plenty of additions to keep up with the changes to Dwarf Fortress over the years. I have now successfully created a large world with no bugs in the log, so I consider this part of the process a success; nothing stands in the way of adding in Various Vivants and then finally my own additions.

The main focus of the mod other than adding in more unique creatures to make the world more interesting is to increase the distance between the vanilla dwarves and the D&D ones I added in (there isn't presently much, since the former is basically the latter to begin with). The vanilla dwarves will no longer have basic human creatures to start with, but the D&D ones will, this should make them seem more different.

[GoblinCookie]

I started playing the game again, which led as it always does to bugs being found. My Captain of the Guard, Vadam Plumpwar started complaining about how all the folks were having 'pretentious sleeping arrangements'. It seems when I equalised the mid-level positions, (so that a militia commander does not complain about a manager or the other way around but does complain about a captain) as part of adding room requirements for those nobles, I forgot to change the value for captain of the guard and then copied that value to the dungeonmaster. That has now been fixed.

[GoblinCookie]

I had the most hilarious yesterday and it led to another bug fix. After spending hours trying to fix a non-existent bug with the medical care of grigs, the real problem I eventually found another bug because having loaded a backup I ended up with a different megabeast (their arrival seems predetermined but their identity is random). This time it was a chaos roc and I found something out rather hilarious.

It seems if you add the [FANCIFUL] and the [NATURAL] tag together into the same creature, the creature's materials do not load properly but everything else does. You end up with a creature that is both invulnerable but ALSO harmless, as since the creature is not actually *made* of anything all attacks on it simply pass through while all attacks made by the essentially imaginary creature glance off. Vadam and her dwarves spent ages throwing the roc about the place (since it weighs nothing) but doing no harm at all and suffering no harm in return.

[Nova Solarius]

Originally posted by GoblinCookie:

Vadam and her dwarves spent ages throwing the roc about the place (since it weighs nothing) but doing no harm at all and suffering no harm in return.

Behold, the omniverse's angriest beach ball.

[GoblinCookie]

This mod is *not* abandoned. I am still at work on 2.8 but progress has been slower than it might have been had I greater motivation. I had originally decided to pare down 2.8, or the "beast release" but ultimately have decided against such a course of action. Reason is that I am going to be spending alot of time turning the mod out for the Steam release and provided I can get it done on time, if the whole thing is done completely by then we will all be able to enjoy the full content while I work on updating it for the release, providing more motivation to continue. At this point I have finished integrating all the flora/fauna mods, which took way longer than it should have done (poor motivation/trauma) and started on adding in new content that is entirely mine.

An extensive list of trees has now been added, drawn pretty much from Rimworld and King Under the Mountain. The reason was I have been long annoyed by the overabundance of fruit trees in the game, many forests are basically natural orchards in DF :-). Adding more types of trees should shift the balance away from this orchard planet situation. Moving on from this, I understand that a number of creatures are referred to in describing procedurally generated monsters that do not exist in the base game. I intend to rectify this by going through monsters of a few worlds in order to create a list of such missing creatures and then add them in.

Then I am going through all the creatures in the raw files in order to check-up on everything and see to it that there is a proper giant/animal/normal set for everything that isn't a intelligent creature that comes from the Forgotten Realms. I plan to solve another issue that has been bugging me at the same time, the word-soup that occurs from having a separate word for creatures that are described in English as ADJECTIVE>NOUN. The reason for this is that in our language many creatures will full noun-names, really could be described as ADJECTIVE>NOUNS, ravens for instance could well be described as GIANT CROWS. I aim to come with a consistent taxonomy so that very similar creatures end up sharing the same noun but sufficiently different creatures do not, we can assume the differences between the creatures are described using place-names or adjectives.