Dwarf Fortress

Dwarf Fortress

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Better Creature Descriptions
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fix, creature
Tags: mod
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Jan 20 @ 12:30pm
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Better Creature Descriptions

Description
Better Creature Descriptions

Better Creature Descriptions enhances and unifies the in-game descriptions of all vanilla creatures

This is a partial port of Taffer's DF Revised. Taffer's Revised is a beloved old mod and I am going to be working on porting all or most of the features over time that havn't already been ported by other people.

The first thing I am porting now is all the wonderful creature descriptions and the edits that make the most sense to accompany them, such as the atmospheric edits Taffer made to creatures to better match their vanilla description and unify the game based on them.

You can find the old thread by Taffer on the bay12 forums
here[www.bay12forums.com], with Taffer providing permission at the bottom of the first post.

Features Included

  • Every creature has a new description. You will notice in particular that animal people and giant animals are MUCH improved over the previous 5 word descriptions the game gave. This is especially important when playing the game in ASCII and the new descriptions all feel atmospheric and evocative. Most of these I ported unchanged.

  • Generated creature descriptions are also improved. For example, birds now often have their beaks noted in their generated description, IE "her beak is black". Relevant bugs have been fixed related to this on some animals. I intend to add even more strings to the generated descriptions.

  • Every humanoid has new (usually gendered) baby and child names that are more descriptive, and many animals do as well. IE baby snakes to hatchlings

  • Many giant creatures lacked child names entirely and I added appropriate ones. This has the side effect of fixing some bugs related to taming, so congrats.

  • Most animals now make an appropriate sound in text. IE crocodiles hiss or snap. This will be much more relevant in adventure mode when it comes out.

  • Some animals whose art and description doesn't match the game's raws have been fixed. For example, Gazelles and some other animals did not have horns despite visibly having horns and having them in description. Horns have been added.

  • Mussels and oysters provide pearls, like they're supposed to, due to fixing their entry.

There are many other features to Taffer's Revised on the bay12 thread, but I have chosen not to forward them all on this mod besides those listed. I may choose soon to port the rest and maybe separate some of the changes in this mod to others. For now I just wanted to get this out as iv been using it in my own game and wanted to share.

Compatibility

I took extreme care to make this as compatible as possible. Zero CUT commands were used, and everywhere I could I used SELECT or creature_variations to apply changes. This means this should not conflict with almost anything else, especially given how simple most of the changes (even beyond descriptions) were. Adding horns to a gazelle is maybe 2 tags and is an example of the most invasive thing I did.

Load this AFTER any mod that does CUT and replace creatures more invasively and it should work.
Popular Discussions View All (1)
2
Feb 10 @ 10:05am
Entries in the errorlog
Doctor Zalgo
6 Comments
NitexKnight Mar 14 @ 1:03am 
I was looking for a mod like this! My favorite part of Dwarf Fortress has always been how detailed everything is so this will be a huge improvement for me. :lunar2019piginablanket:
annaflyte  [author] Jan 25 @ 5:48pm 
Thank you for the kind comments. The next mod is going to be porting Taffer's changes to animal people. Doing it without cut certainly takes longer but I personally get frustrated with mods like that.
anopiko Jan 25 @ 4:02am 
Going to try it with the next fortress. Thank you for the consideration regarding the compatibility, tired of bunch of mods using CUT tags and not specifying anything about it. Good job!
Wight Jan 24 @ 6:59pm 
Thank you so much! DF Revised has always been my favourite mod for DF, so I really appreciate you taking the time to bring it over. Thank you!
Damon Jan 22 @ 10:03am 
Nice mod :)

here's how to add this mod into a current world if anyone's interested:
1) find the mod id (id=3143767330) in the url of the steam page
2) navigate to steamapps\common\Dwarf Fortress\mods and find the folder named the mod id
3) copy the mod id folder to steamapps\common\Dwarf Fortress\data\installed_mods
4) rename the copied mod id folder to better_descriptions (name is found in info.txt), keep the (1), thats the version number
5) open Dwarf Fortress, in the start screen click 'Mods' and you should see it installed in the list
6) continue your world
If unclear check out the guide on warm/damp icons

I haven't tested this with other mods that add/remove animals
Fae Jan 20 @ 8:15pm 
Oooh my goodness! I'm so thrilled to see somebody take the mantle to port some of Taffer's wonderful Revised. I used it all the time. Thanks for taking the time to do this. Gonna add this right away. <3