Sirocco wrote :-

Epee Em wrote :-

Alright then.

Forgotten Beasts and You!

Forgotten Beasts are the randomly generated monstrosities that Toady One saw fit to introduce to DF2010 in addition to the demons that add the most severe danger to the abundant wealth the caverns and magma seas bring to any fortress.

From a design perspective, these represent another step towards Toady's ideal of DF not being a generic fantasy world, but instead being a generic fantasy world generator. In previous versions of the game, Dragons, Bronze Colossi, and the like consisted of the strongest "typical" threat to a fortress. All well and good, but they don't change. The same tactics used against a Bronze Colossus in one fort will work again in the next. This also applies towards the demons, there used to be only a few varieties of demons in DF hard-coded into the game, so they couldn't even be modded for an additional challenge. Vox's Holistic Spawn were tougher than the average demon, let's face it. Spirits of Fire, Frog Demons, and Tentacle Demons (shut up) were the worst the game had to offer.

Consider the FBs and by extension the new demons Toady's way of rebalancing the scales.

You may have heard of Titans. These are not to be confused with the megabeasts from previous versions of DF, Titans are the same thing as FBs, they just spawn at the surface rather than underground in the caverns. That's the only difference.

Okay, enough natter. The heck are they? A FB can be broken down into several sections that are described by the alerts that show up every time one of them enters the map.

1: Main Component.
2: Physical Additions and Descriptors.
3: Material.
4: Natural Weaponry.
5: Syndrome.

Let's go over these in order.

1: Main Component.

This is the 'template' of the FB. Let's look at Siga, the most recent one:



It's a gigantic pterosaur. Like everything else about a FB, size is determined randomly. When the game says "gigantic" it MEANS gigantic. I recall butchering a FB in one of my forts, the process took my butcher several in-game weeks to complete. For reference's sake, butchering a cow takes several seconds real time and less than an in-game day for even a dabbling butcher. It resulted in several thousand units of Forgotten Beast Meat, bones, cartlidge, etc.

These things can easily be the biggest creatures in the game. As I'm not familiar with utilities like Dwarf Therapist, I do not know if creature statistics like size can be checked in-game. In DF, an adult Dragon is size 25,000,000. Size is a very important factor in determining how physically powerful a creature is, so all FBs should be considered an extreme danger even to legendary soldiers.

2: Physical Additions and Descriptors.

More simply, these determine the physical characteristics of the FB. Each descriptor the game offers corresponds to a physical trait of the FB. Wings are never vestigial, I should note, so any FB with those, such as Keihao and Siga, can fly.

Everyone knows dwarves are stupid. No more does this shine than in combat. You see, when creatures not under your direct control in Adventure Mode fight, they attack body parts randomly. The more body parts something has, the less likely it is for soldiers to actually attack something important like the neck.

That said, the combat system is a deeply complex thing. Scales are a flexible exterior armor that functions similarly to chainmail, a FB with a "tough, leathery hide" has something similar to leather armor, and so on. What this translates to gameplay wise is that certain attacks will be less effective than others. DF splits damage into piercing, slashing, and blunt categories, so knowing what a FB is going to resist particularly is important. Which brings us to...

3: Material.

In the DF raws, this is what puts the Bronze in a Bronze Colossus:

[TISSUE:BRONZE]
		[TISSUE_NAME:bronze:bronze]
		[TISSUE_MATERIAL:INORGANIC:BRONZE]
		[MUSCULAR]
		[FUNCTIONAL]
		[STRUCTURAL]
		[RELATIVE_THICKNESS:1]
		[CONNECTS]
		[TISSUE_SHAPE:LAYER]
	[TISSUE_LAYER:BY_CATEGORY:ALL:BRONZE]