[DEVBLOG#107] Endangered Animals pack preview
Added 2021-01-10 17:37:14 +0000 UTCHello everyone and welcome to a development diary solely focused on our upcoming mod, which will release on the 19th of January!
Endangered Animals pack is our opportunity to spread awareness of animals nearing extinction, and we will go an extra mile to provide donation links to associations tasked with preserving them in the mod description.
To further show how big of an issue this is, we have decided to add a special mechanic that prevents these animals from spawning naturally in the world. Instead, they will appear from an event similar to Thrumbo wanders in - A pair (male and female) of one of the endangered animals will wander into your local map, giving you a chance to tame them.
Once tamed, their offspring and them can be released to the wild using a special button:
Release to the Wild means an animal will wander off the map and disappear forever - as it returns to it's natural habitat. It also raises your relations with tribal and outlander factions slightly.
This means you can help repopulate the world by breeding endangered animals in a safe environment, and then release them for relations boost!
Now lets take a look at what animals we have in store for you! Their more detailed descriptions will follow in a few days:
Can you try and name all of them?
Comments
There is no performance difference whatsoever when you're loading 12 separate mods or one mega mod, the only problem there is is you having to click 12 times instead of once. Now let me tell you what problem we would have. Whenever we fix an issue with a Tiger. We have to update 2 mods, separately, copy and pasting the same fix here and there. Whenever RimWorld updates, we have to update two mods, same manner, copy and pasting two fixes into two mods. Whenever someone accidentally leaves one of the 12 animal modules on when playing with the supposed 'compilation', there will be a long spam of red errors that can lead to cascading bugs. This person then reports the bug to us. What can we do? Absolutely nothing, because we haven't done anything wrong in the first place - user did. And there would be a lot of users like that. All translations for our animal mods on the workshop would not work for the 'Compilation mod' and as such, all translation authors would need to re-release their translations for the compilation mod, again. It's also harder to pinpoint bugs for us. Imagine a user is playing with the Compilation mod. There is 70 animals. Game crashes, all we know is that it crashed because of the Compilation mod - but we don't know which of the 70 animals caused it. If we at least knew the submodule (Tropical, Arid Shrubland etc) we can pinpoint specific bit of code that caused the crash. So no, sorry, but I prefer for the player to spend extra 10 seconds enabling mods and extra 2 seconds when scrolling through the mod list than to essentially double my workload.
Oskar Potocki
2021-01-12 22:45:06 +0000 UTCIf I could make one small request for the future, could there be an official "Vanilla Animals Compilation" mod that includes all the mods, for those of us who want all of these amazing animals but don't want to overload their modlist?
Stephen Bohlman
2021-01-12 21:00:23 +0000 UTCI think it is a Chimpanzee
2021-01-11 14:47:39 +0000 UTCfood
Nameless Guardsman
2021-01-11 00:00:41 +0000 UTCFinally I can release animals again :D
tomi
2021-01-10 22:35:58 +0000 UTCOff the top of my head I see black rhino, silverback gorilla (I think), panda, pangolin, tasmanian devil (fortunately, they are returning to the wild recently), tasmanian tiger (I doubt it, they are extinct), african spotted dog. This is an interesting mod, looking forward to seeing what it'll be like.
Zac
2021-01-10 21:42:47 +0000 UTCAs someone who did a degree in conservation, I won't ruin naming them. Big well done for bringing attention to 'endangered' species though! But no love for frogs :'(
2021-01-10 19:44:09 +0000 UTCGood point haha. I suppose in my fantasy it would be to encourage them to breed more and release as well, like zoo breeding programs or something
Michael Cooper
2021-01-10 19:29:33 +0000 UTCBut that would be in a sense close to 'Trading of the endangered animals', which I do believe is, well, illegal. :P Here, have this totally endangered pangolin for brownie points xd
Oskar Potocki
2021-01-10 19:27:37 +0000 UTCHmmm it might be do-able, yeah. I will see what I can do!
Oskar Potocki
2021-01-10 18:43:09 +0000 UTCThe "release to wild" feature sounds like something that would be of use to animals in general, rather than waiting around for their tameness to expire. Could this feature be extended to all animals without compromising the goals of the endangered mechanics? (I ask because I use a "release to wild" mod already and since I'm fully onboard with this mod, it would be simple to have this mod and not the one I already have)
Zachery Gaskins
2021-01-10 18:31:21 +0000 UTCAmazing! So excited for this. I see Panda and Pangolin! Black rino, royal penguin, Grévy's zebra, African wild dog? Would be cool to gift the raised animals to a specific faction by trade for a bigger more pointed boost to that faction.
Michael Cooper
2021-01-10 18:22:01 +0000 UTC
