Welcome to the first edition of the Dwarf Fortress mod jam! This mod jam’s theme is ‘Creatures of the Night’! We’re looking for flavorful and fearsome monsters that suit the world of Dwarf Fortress, bringing variety to its bestiary of foes while seeming at home with all the ogres, trolls, gorlaks, and green devourers players must already contend with. Send your submission and we’ll look it over for errors and send it back for refinement if we find any. Once it’s neat and polished, and if it fits the eligible theming, we’ll add it to the jam.

For those new to modding Dwarf Fortress, it may seem a little daunting, but there are an abundance of resources available to understand the system:
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Modding
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Token
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Lua_scripting
https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Lua_functions 

Guidelines (please read carefully before submitting):

1. When you submit the creature, you need to clarify a few things:

• If it has Premium graphics or only Classic glyphs. Mods made for Premium can still be used in Classic, but Classic creatures will only show placeholder graphics.
• If it uses Lua, the new scripting function. We’re looking to showcase the power of DF’s new innate Lua modding capabilities, so any submissions that put it to good use will be featured in a special highlight stream!
• If it uses DFHack, the third-party utility.

2. In order to ensure there’s no duplicate raw errors or other incompatibilities, the entries you submit need their ID to have _USERNAME at the end, or something similar.

• For example, if two users submit a vampiric creature, one would be registered as [CREATURE:VAMPIRE_USERNAME1] and the other [CREATURE:VAMPIRE_USERNAME2].
• The actual name you see in the game itself can be anything.
• If your creature comes with custom abilities or materials, their IDs need to follow the same naming system. 

3. All submissions will be reviewed by the organizing committee, Any mods that contain offensive material will be disqualified from the jam. This includes mods containing NSFW content, hate symbols/speech, racism, sexism, homophobia/transphobia.

4. No AI-generated content.

While we accept any submissions that fall under the category (creatures of the night), we’re especially interested in seamless integrations into the vanilla bestiary, which will all be combined into a modpack available for download after the jam. If you’re submitting your creature with that in mind, please say so in the submission. 

Here are examples of the sort of stuff we're looking to put in the mod pack:

• The Flying Fumer, by Squamous
• Gorgons, by DPh Kraken

Important Dates

Submissions open: October 20th

Submissions closed: October 23rd

Modpack release and showcase stream: October 29th