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@Marrow, I'm hoping for something along the lines of "unique_portrait = yes" in the species portrait files that can be modded. I heavily suspect some form of this unique marker is already implemented in order to keep extra-dimensional and extragalactic species portraits unique for endgame crisis.
My main concern is whether such a uniqueness marker will still allow player to select that species portrait during species creation... and whether this marker would interfere with pre-made species that use unique portraits. I hope it can be just something that would disable species portrait from RNG but still allows manual selection.
Yes and no. Wiz said that no portrait will be the same UNTIL all have been used. Remember, there can be uprisings, new empires, savages getting tech and flies off to space, etc. It's a "sorta" answer to your question.
What
Wiz said was only applicable to the generic species portraits. I highly doubt we can make Blorgs or Humans unique in the vanilla game, but we may be able to mark Blorgs and Humans as unique and no longer "generic" in our mods.
Now that you mentioned it, I don't recall seeing a Blorg-like or human species in the stream! Maybe both humans & player species are unique?
Ehh, most likely just a coincidence.
That would inciting upon a gameplay mechanic in that Xenophobes only like their phenotype, which means people with the same portrait as theirs.
We wouldn't know how the exact mechanism work. Sure, you can most likely pull Humans out of Mammalian group or Blorgs out of Fungoid group and then place them in their own special snowflake phenotype, but how exactly would that prevent RNG from choosing those species portraits? Just because you put them in the new Blorgoid and Humanoid groups doesn't necessarily mean that RNG will skip over them... so what's the point?
Now, if there were a line that tells RNG to skip over certain species portrait, then you may not even have to segregate the Humans and Blorgs from their native phenotype.
