Have an idea for an extremely ambitious mod but not sure how much of it is currently possible

Modding
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Hi,
I have had an idea for a mod rolling around in my head for a while now and given the time of year being one for making yourself do the things you want to it seems like as good a time as any to force myself into it. I don’t want to reveal / give away too much of the concept currently on the off chance that like so many new years resolutions it completely falls through or, as i fear, proves currently impossible to do and i end up letting people down who get there hopes up at my grandiose ideas so bear with me on some of my vague questions.

  1. What is the current possibility of multiple races in one town?
    The idea largely revolves around constructing entities to perform various roles that regular citizens would not be willing to do within my mod. I was told on a previous question i asked some time ago that constructing and deploying a living entity with AI packages, such as something from the entities\critters or \monsters folder should be possible as opposed to the entities\furniture folder, etc is theoretically possible. These entities that would be crafted would be for all intents and purposes, partial citizens, they would be locked into there own career tree (an upcoming question) and would be able to perform the roles of several professions (e.g one of the types of race could do carpentry and blacksmithing, another would be a farmer and a mason). I suppose it would be similar to crafting steampunk style robots, but this is not what my mod would be about, my idea is a bit closer to the flavour of the game.

  2. Is it possible to have separate and unconnected career trees?
    Take for instance Wharp’s Bastioneers mod. This mod introduces an entirely new playable race that completely replaces humans and has its own custom career tree. Tieing into question one, would it be possible to have both Bastioneers and Humans in one settlement and that each race would either see its own career tree, or that both career trees would be on the same promotion screen but would be unconnected with no way to cross-contaminate? e.g bastions could not reach the human job tree and vice versa?

  3. If it is indeed possible to construct an entity and for my mod it must be human, how would it interact with the 50 Hearthling Limit?
    If my constructed entities had to be "human, as opposed to say, critters or monsters, albeit with heavily modified ai packages, how would it interact with the 50 Hearthling limit? would it bypass it or would they be deleted as soon as i attempted to deploy them?

  4. Can the game handle dramatic body changes following promotion?
    A.K.A can you instruct the game to use a different body / head model for a Hearthling after it has been promoted? This could be as simple as wanting the next job up to wear full hand gloves and so have an edited version of the body.qb specifically for that job to have a hand be the colour of the glove as i’m pretty sure creating a form of the outfit to include a glove over the fingers is impossible, due to how things are held, animations, clipping, etc.

I am very sure i can think of more questions as time goes on as i develop the mod further but these are probably the 4 most important at this stage as depending on the answers to these the entire idea could need to be reworked. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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All of this is possible. It won’t be easy, but everything you mentioned is handled by the code that we can see and modify.

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  1. Look at golems, look at classes, blend pieces of both, should be prety doable on the scale of moddabillity.
    (difficulty: intermediate, if you know how to modify classes, items, weapons etc. you should be able to, with some fiddling get this done. if you dont, start with items, transiton to weapons/armour, then move up to fiddlign with classes. then try this idea.

  2. Yes as far a i know, but they would have to spawn as different jobs on paper, somehow. not sure how to get that done but the rest is relatively easy. (could even beworker_job_2) which is a carbon copy, but sperate on paper) and then make the seperate tree stuff require that instead of the normal one. the tree is probably smart enough to make that work.
    (once again: intermediate difficulty+one damn tricky part)

  3. isnt the limit arbitrary and defined in a config? constructing a human…my instinctive guess is no problem what so ever. humans are just smart walking animated items, codewise.
    probably breaks the limit on deploy.
    (surprsingly easy, i guess)

  4. yes. see the blacksmiths metal arm? hell i scale up one of my classes on promotion so they are 7% bigger than usual…
    (N/A)

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This one I can answer definitively: the limit only defines whether the game will continue to allow migration/daily updates; it doesn’t actually cap the citizen count. When completing the titan quest, for example, you can gain citizens above the cap. Golems also don’t count towards the cap, even though the game considers them to be town members they’re not the same as hearthlings (much like pets, too); so there wouldn’t be any issue with “hitting the limit” for constructed hearthlings unless you specify one e.g. how vanilla golems work. It’s worth pointing out, though, that even with highly simplified AIs there will come a point where they cause serious lag because of the pathfinding and/or idle checks alone.

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