Regarding low light levels

[ClockGen]

Hello, I've seen another issue regarding darkness in caves, I'd like to propose a way to preserve both element of exploration and managing navigation and some way to actually enjoy beauty of caves in dfcaverns.

I think that adding a light level of 1 to certain nodes (ground covers, mushrooms and other flora) would allow to actually perceive an overall shape and size of the cavern, while maintaining balance and a need to place light sources.

Plus, dfcaverns are relatively rare and most of the time spent underground by a player is in completely inilluminated "basic" caverns.

I can open a PR (and gather a "showcase" of sorts) if you're not against the idea.

Another question I have: is this mod oriented on replicating DF undergrounds only? I was making a similar mod and I have some assets and biome drafts that I'd like to contribute (again, if you're not against I can start working on a PR with a new layer of biomes).

[FaceDeer]

I've already added light to some ground cover (cave moss) and did a pass a while back looking for other things to add some light here and there, so I'm not fundamentally opposed to the concept. I just want to be careful not to overdo it. Caverealms is an example of going way too far with lighting everything up, the caves there are garishly bright. My preferred approach is to try to add specific things that are sources of light rather than just make everything vaguely luminescent. For example, I added streaks of luminescent hoar moss and hovering ice sprites to the nether cap caverns, and invented torchspines as an excuse to have some lights in black cap caverns.

A mod that's been on my to-do list forever is a 'torch gun' that lets a player shoot torches into distant cave walls, something like that might also strike a better balance.

Anyway, to the other questions; dfcaverns is just "heavily inspired by" Dwarf Fortress, not a slavish recreation, so I am quite open to incorporating new stuff as well. The oil and gas cavern layer is completely new, for example. What sort of stuff did you have in mind? My to-do list is mainly focused on adding variety to the smaller caverns next time I go on a dfcaverns binge - my previous major update added "warren" caves but didn't decorate them, for example. And the default cave tunnels just have wet or dry speleothems, which isn't a big distinction. But whole new biomes and cavern layers aren't off the table.

Unfortunately I am currently on vacation and have only a relatively weak tablet to run minetest on for the next week and a half, so for the moment this will have to be a mostly theoretical discussion. Can't really do heavy mapgen development like this. But we can discuss ideas until then, certainly.

If all else fails and we just fundamentally want a different feel for these caverns, I can also do some work to make the code more modular and easier to add divergences to. Or additional optional settings.

[FaceDeer]

I've started putting together some new decorations in the small_stuff branch that are suitable for the smaller tunnels and that will add some light sources. Nothing's actually in the mapgen yet, but I'll probably find somewhere for them. What I've just added:

• cave pearls, softly glowing mineral nodules that form on the walls, ceilings, and floors of caves. I expect these will be found in large, dense clusters that virtually carpet a section of tunnel or part of a cave. I made them climbable since they look a lot like natural handholds.
• "spindleshrooms" (name subject to change), a medium-sized big mushroom that have glowing caps of various hues and intensities. white spindleshrooms have no glow, red, cyan and green spindleshrooms glow softly, and "golden" spindleshrooms emit very bright light indeed - enough to kill nearby cave moss. The golden ones will be quite rare, assuming I keep them.

I'll continue puttering at this sort of thing for a while, building up a collection of decoration items and then once I've got a bunch I'll switch to mapgen mode and figure out where to place them specifically.

Oh, and I converted the underwater portions of the giant stalagmites and columns in the Sunless Sea into cave coral, which previously was a rare formation you had to swim deep underwater to find. It doesn't do much for the above-water portion but if you go for a swim in the Sunless Sea now you can see a lot more about the shape of things.

[FaceDeer]

Just added another new item; "gas wisps", a sort of small blue flame that will "live" inside the mine-gas-containing giant oil caverns. They slowly and randomly float around inside the caverns, I'll probably try to make them catchable like fireflies are. Maybe make a small chance of them spawning from gas explosions.

[FaceDeer]

Okay, all three are now added into the mapgen. Spindlestems actually take on a coloured glow based on what mineral deposits are nearby when they sprout - red for iron, green for copper, cyan for both copper and iron, and yellow for mese. As with everything I try to create, they wound up being a lot more complicated than just my initial idea of "how about a biggish glowing mushroom?" :)

Going to take a breather now. Any ideas you'd like to add? Spindlestems add light to warrens in cavern level 1, cave pearls add light to some warrens and tunnels in cavern level 2, and gas wisps add light to the lakes of oil (those were utter blackness until now). I've no solid ideas for the tunnels and warrens in cavern level 3 yet.

[ClockGen]

Hello, sorry for lack of reply.

I don't have any coherent ideas about decorations, but I had a lot of small decorative improvements to base caves in mind. Stuff like fossils, various flora (roots, moss, etc). If you want to add something like that I can always make new textures and schematics.

A few other improvements I had in mind:

Would be nice to expand seabed of sunless sea. Like adding sand instead of dirt, more flora like kelp, corals and similar stuff. I can provide alien-looking textures and schematics of you like it.

Dfcaverns provide almost sustained survival underground, but if playing with technic, there's no way to craft plastic. Would be nice to add some nodes into default "leaves" group so it would be possible to craft oil and other oil and other stuff in technic.

Also compatibility with Tenplus' "bonemeal" mod would be cool. It works exactly like bonemeal in minecraft. I haven't checked the code yet (to see how it's implemented) so if it requires changes in the mod upstream I'll open a PR in the mod repo.

Another thing I had in mind is some kind of reward for reaching the last layer, with bedrock. Right now there's no point in going there. I can only think of an abudance of some resource, maybe molten iron (to simulate iron planet core or something) that can be cooled down into iron blocks, and some purpose to plasma pits. Can't think of any particular one though.

Finally, the last thing I had in mind is a 4th layer, beyond the lava ocean. I don't know if it fits into a reasonable explanation of biomes in dfcaverns, though. I have resources for two biomes (from a similar mod I've been making). First one is glowing bluish biome with mycelium, mushroom grass and mushrooms of various sizes (from 3 to 21 nodes tall). Another one is kind of primordial jungle with many prehistoric oversized plants (giant ferns, giant trees, vines, etc).

I'll try to slowly open PRs for things I mentioned above (I'm working on a few different mods now).

Regarding "torch cannon" mod - I'm about to release a weapons modpack (from bows to hi-tech technic stuff and a nice api). It also includes a torch bow.

[FaceDeer]

dfcaverns hasn't done much with the near-surface base caves, some cave mosses and other such decorations could be nice for that. I don't want to add anything really fantastical before getting to Layer 1, though. The general theme I've been running with is that things get weirder and more dangerous the deeper you go (well, the oil lakes aren't particularly weird, but they are super dangerous).

Fossils are something I was planning on adding in a separate "realistic minerals" mod, since they're not a cave-specific thing. In general the only things dfcaverns adds are things you'd find specifically associated with the caverns. I did have an idea for some giant skeletons to put in the Underworld, since the theme there is "site of an ancient long-forgotten war against demons", but that idea is a big one that'll be for another time (I want to create code that turns 3D models into voxel arrays - very powerful and general purpose, not just for dfcaverns).

I was already planning on at least adding a second kind of coral to the Sunless Sea, since I repurposed the existing coral to be part of the giant pillars and stalagmites. I'll see about varying the seabottom sediment as well, there's already sand in the deeper parts of the Sunless Sea (below 30 meters under the surface) but I guess that's inherently hard to see.

Bone meal is for agriculture, if I recall correctly? Yeah, I can look into that and see if I can fit it in there as an optional requirement.

Oil seems like an obvious candidate for a plastic-making recipe. Black Cap gills are very oily as well, they can be used for making torches, so a plastic-making recipe using that would also make sense. I'll add some.

Regarding the "reward" for reaching the Underworld: in the actual Dwarf Fortress game the only reward for this is generally immediate violent death, as the Dwarf Fortress underworld is filled with endless hordes of powerful demons. :) In the dfcaverns mod, though, I don't have any built in mobs so it is a pretty empty and lonely place. Ideas that come to mind:

• Adding "loot" to the ancient abandoned buildings and battlefields. I'd already considered making a mapgen adapter for the "bones" mod that pre-populates the area with old corpses, items can be added to their inventories.
• Some sort of use for the amethyst crystals that form around glowing pits, perhaps as a Mese substitute.
• Perhaps a Technic power generator that requires proximity to the glowing pits would be thematically appropriate. Or a transmutation machine that can convert minerals into other minerals. Working adjacent to glowing pit plasma is super dangerous, it's more damaging than lava and will destroy any node adjacent to it.

As for the new biome/layer proposals; the blue mushroom one sounds like it'd probably fit in well with an existing cavern layer, but a primordial Lost World jungle would be great as a separate cavern layer. It'd have the advantage of being able to incorporate jungle-themed resources from other mods very easily, too. And maybe some other surface-like biomes. :) I have ideas for tampering with light levels directly during mapgen, a jungle would need near-sunlike lighting and that would be tricky to pull off with just conventional light-emitting nodes.

I'm thinking it would actually be neat to have the Lost World below the Underworld, with Underworld tweaked to have occasional passages down through the Slade (technically a player can already penetrate the Slade by digging down through the amethyst sheathing of glowing pits, but that's more of a "glitch I decided not to fix as a reward for players that love exploiting that sort of thing" than a deliberate means of passage). The Lost World then becomes the "reward" for exploring the Underworld.

Do you have any of that code in public repos yet? Rather than pull requests it might be easier for me to just go over there and start pulling pieces out. I use the MIT license for all my stuff to make it maximally cross-compatible, but if you prefer a more restrictive license I can compartmentalize the code to keep it separately licensed (dfcaverns is already a modpack so it'll probably be super easy, barely an inconvenience).

[ClockGen]

I pushed changes to this repo https://github.com/ClockGen/better_caves_modpack. There isn't much code, I wrote an api for underground biomes, it would only decorate already existing caverns. Mushroom biome is already there, but for the jungle one there are only textures (you can find gimp .xcf files in every textures folder). Found a few old screenshots


Jungle resources are subject to change (I never made them into nodes, only made the textures).

[FaceDeer]

Ooh, that's a very cool-looking cavern biome. I think I'm quite willing to find a place for it in dfcaverns, I'll ponder how to integrate it into the existing layers. Or perhaps put it in the Lost World layer, to break up the jungle stuff. :) Definitely going to make use of these art resources, thank you muchly.

Edit: Wow, bc_mushroom_21 is a damn big mushroom! Going to need to do some special handling for that monster. :) These art resources are starting to gell nicely in my mind, I'm thinking they'll fit nicely together into a "Primordial" cavern layer. It'll have quite a unique character to it.

I'll aim to wrap up some of the various smaller tidbits mentioned above (plastic recipes, bones in the underworld) over the course of the rest of this week so I can put a bow on the "small_stuff" branch and merge it into master, and then open a new branch for this new cavern layer on the weekend. A whole new cavern layer doesn't seem like it falls under the "small_stuff" name very well. Especially not with bc_mushroom_21 in it.

[ClockGen]

I've been trying to find new spindleshrooms, however they seem to spawn only on level 1 biome intersections (apart from goblin cap biome). Is this supposed to be like that? (also I get a lot of >1000 ms block time generation warnings in such places).

Also, maybe I should open another issue for general discussion?

[FaceDeer]

I've already started gearing up for adding a whole new cavern layer based off of your "better cavegen" art assets (I set up this branch last night and did a marathon of node-coding to get everything tangible so I could see how it all looks in world. The jungle stuff is very lush and diverse!). So if you'd like an issue specifically about discussing that it might make sense to file one. I'm fine with continuing general discussion of how to improve the existing cavern features here, though, if you like.

Currently I've put the spindlestems in tower cap caverns, goblin cap caverns, and in the "warrens" of level 1 in general (warrens are the smaller sponge-like caves that sometimes form on the borders of the giant caverns, until now they've been dark and featureless). The ones in tower cap caverns don't glow, so perhaps they're not as noticeable. I suspect that the block generation times have suffered because each spindlestem "scans" its immediate surroundings on spawn to see what minerals are present, to determine what colour it glows. I've been pondering ways to optimize that, or perhaps spread out the load a bit more (such as having them spawn in an "uninitialized" state and update the colour later on), I'll need to do some more testing to see if that's really a significant gain.

Last night I also added some additional glowing nodes to the Bloodthorn caverns, reusing some of the salt crystal textures from Caverealms and the small crystal model I got from Underchallenge. Since Bloodthorns are moisture vampires it made sense to have salt deposits around them. Still need to think of some use for the salt crystals other than "they look pretty", know of any other technic recipes or similar that could use some exotic salts in them?

[FaceDeer]

Don't know if you've been monitoring the primordial branch, but I've been making significant progress on the new cavern layer and figured you might like a heads-up if you haven't.

The fungal biome is nearly done, I just need to do something new with the column material (I've decided not to put any flowstone formations below the Sunless Sea's level since the lore for dfcaverns is that it's the final destination for water percolating downward through the ground, the Primordial layer is almost completely sealed off from the surface and doesn't get groundwater from above). If you start a v7 map with seed "1" you should be able to find a cavern by teleporting straight down to 0,-3800,0. I've made a few modifications compared to your screenshots; the spires with glownodes at the ends grow downward from the ceiling instead of upward from the floor (leaving more room for those truly massive mushrooms :) and I added a "giant mycelium" growth that creeps along the ground, walls, and ceiling. There are seedlings for the giant mushrooms and "seedlings" for the giant mycelium so the player can grow those themselves if they wish. The density of the giant mushrooms should vary with biome humidity but I haven't gone exploring to confirm that the range of numbers I used is good yet.

The jungle isn't in the mapgen yet, but I just finished making all the basic big "trees" work. Jungle trees, giant jungle mushrooms (I made them edible instead of woody since there are already trees for wood and it distinguishes them from the other giant mushrooms better), and giant ferns (I revamped some meshes I'd made for tunnel tubes to give them nicely curved central stalks). I still need to make use of the jungle tree variant nodes (glowing and mossy), though I have some ideas. It's going to be a very diverse biome, I'm thinking I'll have the fern/tree ratio change based on humidity so you can get a couple of different environments out of it.

Some of this stuff is dependent on my other utility mods. I've extended the schematic format a bit with my own homebrew place_schematic code in mapgen_helper and I'm using a giant mushroom builder function from subterrane for the giant jungle mushrooms, for example. But if you want to take any of this work back for your own mapgen I don't think it'll be very hard to disentangle it. I haven't used any of your code, just the art assets, so everything lua-side is under the MIT license so far. Let me know if you'd like any of it dual-licensed.

[ClockGen]

Yes, I'm checking new commits in both branches every day. Haven't actually seen primordial branch yet, though.

I suppose 2 biomes will be enough? I had a whole list of biomes planned for my mod before I scrapped it. Here's a short list of biomes I had planned for my mod, tell me which are not too crazy, I'll make assets for them if you like.

https://gist.github.com/ClockGen/57fc624795a042ad37eefa9869de10ed

I don't plan in continuing my mod, I'd rather contribute to dfcaverns.

Also, I put together a (not complete) list of changes I'd like to make and open PRs for (I'm still working on my mods but I plan on putting more time to dfcaverns, I'll have a vacation soon), some of them are quite bold so please check it and tell if you approve it.

https://gist.github.com/ClockGen/63cb2ede5b65c93f2fac5ed7e028b541

[FaceDeer]

2 biomes are fine for a cavern layer, especially with biomes as lush as the Primordial layer's biomes have turned out to be. The first cavern layer only has two as well (though it also has "barren" caverns which may count as another cavern layer). Two biomes is also convenient with Subterrane because there's a setting I can use in mapgen to ensure that there are two completely disjoint sets of giant cavern - I never need worry about how the "seam" between the two biomes will look, they never touch.

Here's a 2kmx2km test map I just generated with the current version of the Primordial layer: http://www.mediafire.com/view/8zvwqpk5swf1mpt/primordial_3600.png

I've spread the jungle plants out along a humidity spectrum so you go from regions of mostly giant fern to regions mixing giant fern, jungle tree, and giant mushroom, to mushroom-dominated. There isn't a similar gradient for the fungal biome yet, at least not a noticeable one, I'll look into improving that.

Anyway, regarding the various ideas in your linked documents. I hope you won't be too offended if I don't accept every one of them, at least not without some tweaking and modification; DFCaverns is kind of my labor of love (one reason why I haven't transfered ownership of it to the minetest-mods project like I have most of the other mods I've written) so I'm a little protective of my "vision" for it. But I MIT-license these things for a reason, so by all means if we run into a thing you steadfastly want and I steadfastly don't I'm sure I can make the code modular enough that there's hooks to fit an extension in. :)

So to go into detail, then:

Pre-first layer

The wall mushrooms sound good, and hanging roots in the upper reaches (I'm not sure they'd make sense 200 meters down, but I think I wouldn't want to see green moss on the walls here. This high near the surface I want to keep the fantastical elements to a minimum and photosynthesis would not be happening here.

First layer

I'm a little unclear on your description of the curved mushrooms in the tower cap biome, would they be growing out of the ceiling and curving back up toward it?

Ditto the "ropes" in the Fungiwood biome, are they hanging from the ceiling? That would be neat. The ropes mod is another of mine, I could reuse some of the code from there to make them behave similarly.

Second layer

The three fungi you propose here all sound nice and fit well with how I imagine the place looking.

Third layer

I had initially considered spreading cave pearls here too, but I'm reluctant to make them too "common". I've been wracking my brains (when I remember to) trying to think of other decorations to add so that they don't have to be. But I suppose until such time as I come up with that spreading them around a bit more is okay.

Sunless Sea

White kelp sounds nice, maybe lots of fine strands so it looks like creepy underwater spiderweb. :) There's two kinds of coral in the Sunless Sea already at this point (I'm particularly pleased with how the "castle coral" turned out) so bone coral might be a lower priority, but I won't say no to it.

The Divide

I'm not sure if this is strictly necessary, but if you want an absolute hard-stop "no digging past this point!" perhaps we could put a layer that's just a literal sea of the glowing pit plasma. That stuff is super deadly and nigh impossible to build your way through (it destroys any adjacent nodes except a very few rare types of material).

And now the proposed biomes:

Primorial jungle

Already being implemented

Boneyard biome

I think bone-based decor would fit excellently into the existing Underworld. I've already added a bunch of old skeletons lying around there in the "small_stuff" branch, the remains of the ancient warriors who fought against whatever is now imprisoned there, and I've pondered ways to put the skeletons of leviathans down there embedded in the stone.

Atrocity biome

This feels like it would be suited as a further cavern layer below the Primordial. Players breaching the Slade would think they've discovered a wonderful new world, but when they dig a little deeper they discover why the ancient warriors of the underworld fought so hard to seal it off...

Inferno biome

Perhaps this would work as an addition to the existing magma ocean layer? Right now the magma ocean isn't very easy for the player to really appreciate, all of the caverns are flooded with super deadly lava. I could add little cavern side-pockets above the lava to put some decor like this into.

Quartz biome

The "barren" biome of the third cavern layer already has sparse glowing crystal formations. Perhaps I could move that up to the second cavern layer's barren biome and make the third layer's barren biome more spectacular with these decorations.

Dark caves biome and elder stone biome

Maybe these would fit in to the same cavern layer as the Atrocity biome?

Anyway, I think I'll merge small_stuff at some point on the weekend and continue to work on getting the primordial layer "finished". I've started fiddling with ideas for the slade player penetration points and I think I've come up with something fun - slade seals that the player unlocks by putting a particular pattern of items into its inventory grid. Figuring out the patterns and finding the right materials will be a puzzle to solve. I've already added occasional blank books to the "loot" that can be recovered from the bones of the ancient warriors down there, I could perhaps put clues into those books. Or, if a player really hates puzzles, Slade is already somewhat susceptible to TNT explosions, and there's the glowing pit bypass trick. Regardless, the player will get a sense of pride and accomplishment from penetrating to the lower layers.

My attention's going to be a bit split in the near future, unfortunately. I've committed to a major rewrite of the Digtron mod and I foresee that becoming a significant project. Will keep plugging away at DFCaverns though, it's a great place to exercise all sorts of different tricks. :)

[FaceDeer]

Just giving a little update so you know I haven't forgotten about this. :) As I anticipated, Digtron 2.0 is taking up a lot of resources. I anticipate it'll be another week or so of all-out effort on it before I've got a release candidate ready and can take a breather to get back on DF Caverns. At that point my goal will be to finish up work on the Primordial cavern layer and the connection between it and the Underworld, at which point that will be worthy of a release candidate as well.

[FaceDeer]

At long last, I've pulled the trigger and merged the Primordial layer into the mater branch. :)

I don't have solid plans about what aspect of dfcaverns I'll work on next. Maybe something to soup up the magma sea a bit - the aberrant trees mod has inspired me with some ideas for that. Or perhaps finally add some custom mobs tailored to the environment.

As for the original subject of this issue before I got a bit distracted with the underground jungles and stuff, I just put together the torch_bomb mod and have found it quite powerful for lighting up these caverns. I think making it easy for players to install lighting may be a good compromise toward preserving the natural darkness many of these cavern types should have, IMO.

[ClockGen]

Yes, I've been monitoring it through the whole process and quite enjoyed what it became.

I few notes and suggestions:

Both new biomes seem to be missing stalactites and stalagmites, I guess it makes sense to barren caves since there shouldn't be any water past the underworld, but since these are biomes with life, I guess it makes sense that water would also be present there?

I'm fine with my textures at mushroom layer, however the jungle textures seems sloppy and I never actually saw them in-game before making the whole texture set. Many textures have slightly wrong hues, wrong pixels here and there, overall wrong shadows, colors and highlights. Do you mind if I remake the jungle layer, or, even design something better? I saw that minecraft has an upcoming nether update that introduces many new biomes in nether and I really like their colors palettes and look. I thought, maybe it's worth to redesign the jungle with different color palette, for example cyan and crimson as seen in these screenshots (from minecraft's upcoming update):

or maybe if it'll break already written lore for the jungle layer (I guess it should stay green due to photosynthesis from the glowstone) it's worth just improving the jungle layer and adding a whole new set of assets for some other biome.

Also, considering that other leave-type nodes in minetest are not plantlike, maybe it's worth to switch leaves on trees and ferns to a usual node drawtype?

If you have any other biome ideas (for example expanding magma sea, or designing some scary and terrifying biomes past-underworld) I'd gladly work on assets for them.

Another thing I mentioned earlier is the "stop-layer", to stop the player from going further, an end biome. So far I've made a placeholder subterrane layer that's just a simple open space with columns of slade and pit plasma at the sea level. If you're interested I can open a WIP PR to work on it further.

And, finally, mobs. I've been working on a completely new mob pack, that would also be tightly integrated with dfcaverns. So far I've designed some dfcaverns mobs and would like to hear your ideas for mobs and opinion on things I've already made.
Here's my emacs org-mode dfcaverns subtree with progress. It's not complete, there are big gaps for some layers, and it doesn't include other mobs that are not related to dfcaverns in my pack (common mobs and monsters). The idea is that the surface won't have any fictional animals or mobs, they'll only be underground.
list.txt

and also an overall screenshots of all planned mobs so far (it'd take too much time to screenshot and label each mob individually). As it can be seen, I didn't texture the dfcaverns mobs yet.

Most mobs are supposed to have at least 2 texture variations and most have 3.

I'm also working on a lot of environmental mods that will be tightly integrated with dfcaverns (my ambience, music, skybox mods, fog layer manager, etc), so if you have any suggestions in this field too (for example what atmosphere every biome should create, what kind of music should be playing, what sounds should be heard, etc) I'd like to hear them. Music_modpack with dfcaverns layers is already available in my profile, however I didn't push any local changes so far (it includes outdated music that I'm planning to replace).

[FaceDeer]

Well, as you say, I've kind of developed a bit of lore for the jungle stuff and I'd like to keep it looking lush and green. It gives me a "journey to the center of the Earth" vibe, when I eventually do up a dfcavern-specific mob pack I want to put dinosaur-like creatures in there. But if you want to touch up the textures within that context I won't necessarily say no.

The lack of stalactites and stalagmites was indeed a conscious decision. Partly for "realism" (such as it is) - this layer is below the magma sea and a layer of impenetrable Slade, water's not going to get through all that easily to carry dissolved rock with it. But also partly because it adds to the distinctiveness of the layer. The player will have made his way through many kilometers of caves full of flowstone formations to get here, now he's in a different realm.

Using plantlike nodes for foliage was another conscious decision in that vein, it makes the jungle trees fall more into the "familiar but also definitely something different" feel. I'm less wedded to that, though. I could test it out and see if it still feels exotic enough with leaf cubes. The giant fern foliage should stay plantlike though, either way. Those guys are definitely different from trees.

I've been tinkering with some ambient environmental sounds myself, I didn't include them with the main Primordial release but will likely create a branch in the next day or two to start fiddling with them. I wasn't going to add music, just enhance some of the node sounds. I've started revamping the default game's env_sound mod to make it a general-purpose ambient sound engine for this, I'm awaiting a response to my query about whether I should be doing that as something the default game might want back before I get too much farther into it. I'll check out what you've got in your profile and see how these efforts mesh. There's already a few ambient sounds built into dfcaverns - the pitter-patter of falling spores from spore trees, the occasional scrape of something ancient clawing the underside of Slade seals - but I haven't been systematic about it.

My next vague plans with dfcaverns are probably going to be souping up the magma sea cavern layer with a few new things to discover. The aberrant trees mod has inspired me a bit here, the author gave some rock and metal-based trees as examples and I could imagine something like that growing on the shores of lava lakes in rare groves. But I think I'm dfcaverned out for the next few weeks so I'm not making any of these plans very solid yet. :)

I should also mention that FreeGamers is working on some dfcaverns mobs to go into their Saras Simple Survival Server game, I was planning on reusing a bunch of that work for a dfcaverns mob mod too. So maybe we should form some kind of separate discussion group for that to let us all work together on it. Dwarf Fortress does have some iconic cavern creatures it'd be fun to include, but Dwarf Fortress doesn't really use segregated "biomes" in the same way that dfcaverns does so there's actually not much inspiration that can be drawn from there for this. That game's caverns just have a jumbled mix of fungal tree types.

[FaceDeer]

Oh hey, I see gas wisps in your list of mobs to make. Why didn't it occur to me to make those things entities to begin with? It'd solve several problems I had with them. Perhaps I'm not quite dfcaverned out yet, I'll take a stab at that. I don't think they need to be full-blown mobs, they just meander around at the edges of gas pockets providing visibility.

Hm. Solved some problems, but others remain. Seems like two different kinds of glasslike nodes still have a visible face between them, so making wisps cast light is still kind of ugly. Will tinker a bit more.