Snailling Race

Adds a playable race and civilization of snail people. Physically, they are like human-sized anatomically accurate snails, but with a more upright posture and four tentacle arms. They generate civilizations, and you can play as them in fortress mode and, when it comes out, adventure mode.

DIFFERENCES FROM DWARVES:

Snaillings differences in gameplay, other than being snails, is that they have four limbs allowing for four weapons/shields to be equipped (for best results, have them use 1 weapon and 3 shields), and they typically tame all the wildlife they encounter, making them about as good as the elves when it comes trading for animals (or, if you are playing as them, you can start with a much larger selection of animals depending on what your civilization has encountered as it grew in worldgen). They also birth in groups of 1-4.

Their downsides are their lifespans (60-80 years), their lack of a skeleton (exo or endo) resulting in being highly susceptible to limb loss, and their physical weakness. Their physical stats are not very good, though their strength is helped somewhat by their size. It is highly recommended that you give them armor before using them in combat. I have found that highly skilled snails, like dwarves, seldom take damage, but when they do it will hurt if they are unprotected.

Snaillings have a near identical governing structure to dwarves, with the exception being that their monarch is called "archsnail" and instead of a hammerer, they have skewerers that execute with spears. Due to not having skulls, executing a snail is much easier and thus precisely piercing the brain is considered more appropriate. I have been planning for, at this point, years to mess around with making a unique structure with different nobles and stuff, so maybe actually uploading the mod will motivate me to actually work it out a bit. No promises.

Snaillings can craft a handful of weapons that dwarves cannot. These weapons are:
-Halberds
-Two-Handed Swords
-Whips (WARNING: kinda OP)
-Pikes
-Blowguns

Halberds, two-handed swords, are uncraftable by dwarves I think due to the fact that they are too small to wield them. Snaillings are bigger and able to wield them and thus should be allowed to craft them. Blowguns are used by subterranean civilizations, and since snaillings come from the depths themselves, it makes sense to me that they should use them. They could be a cheap alternative to crossbows (though darts are better used with poison, which is notoriously difficult to apply). Whips are craftable because I want them to be. So there.

CUSTOM ANIMALS:

Snaillings, before civilization, lived in the underground caves, particularly near water bodies. As a result, they domesticated subterranean creatures and use them rather than other domestic animals you may be used to. The creatures are as follows:

-Buglet: A small creature descended from bugbats. It is used as a house pet and as pest control.
-Naked Mole Hound: A large, pale rodent with loose, hanging, hairless skin. It is descended from naked mole dogs. It is used as a pet and hunting companion.
-Underhorse: A large, long-bodied grazer with a thick mane. It is descended from Draltha. It is used for labor and milk.
-Scruffer: A huge monster with an enormous tail, covered with thick fur. They are descended from Rutherers and are sheared for their wool.
-Suckernub: A medium-sized land-dwelling mollusk with eight arms. It is used for its eggs. Suckernubs don’t really have an undomesticated variant. They come from swamps, which are an aboveground biome that snaillings tend to favor, and was thus perfect for them to domesticate early in their development.

Unfortunately, the giant cave spider proved too challenging to domesticate, so if you want a silk producer, you gotta do it the old-fashioned way.

Please note that the custom animals are a new feature. Anyone playing on saves that came before this update will not have access to these. For those older versions, Snaillings tamed everything they came across in their environment much like the elves do, meaning it was possible (and by possible I mean guarenteed) for you to be able to start out with giant animals. I had fun with that, but ultimately giving them their own creatures feels more balanced and interesting.

COLORFUL SPRITES:

This mod comes with custom sprites that reflect the snailling’s skin colors. Includes a sprite for all 36 possible colors in both adult and child proportions, as well as a sprite for babies (though this is currently bugged. The babies display as adults, and I have no clue how to make it work correctly. Will fix eventually I imagine). They also hold their weapons and shields, and in the future they will have sprites for their armor.

The animals mostly just use the sprites from the creatures they come from. Suckernubs use the octopus sprite, though they aren’t directly domesticated versions of them. I may give the creatures some more distinct spritework just to make them visually different from the creatures they descend from.

WHY SNAILS?

I made this mod primarily because I have a mild mollusk obsession and didn’t like the fact that the already existing snail people in the game had legs. While this was a very easily fixable problem to a fledgeling mod created like myself, I ended up using it as an excuse to learn to make mods.

WHY DO THE BABIES LOOK LIKE ADULTS?

Currently, Dwarves do not have baby sprites either. There is a way for me to tell the game to use a certain sprite when they are children, but not babies. As a result, they look like adults when they are babies. This will be fixed when the baby update is released. There already is a baby sprite for the snaillings, it just needs the feature to be implemented.

NOTICE: Please comment if you have any issues, especially graphical ones.