wild neopets, intelligence and ethics

[melodyxwilliams]

This is a topic I've been struggling with a lot. Way back when, I made wild neopets not have can speak/can learn, and I gave them PET tokens and everything. It felt really weird though and I really did not like it. I switched them all over to be intelligent, and ended up removing all the pet stuff, and gave them benign.

Currently some of them still have CURIOUSBEAST_* tokens, but I'm not sure I like it. They all have CANOPENDOORS which means wild neopets just wander in, but they don't actually confront any dwarves. They did attack my dogs when I was testing in fort mode. Lets say I had set up cage traps, what do you do with a caged intelligent creature? you cant sell it as far as I know, and you definitely cant train or tame them. I like seeing wild neopets running around in the world but like, I'm not sure what to really make them do.

I'm still having a battle between, do I make the wild ones intelligent and passive, or do I let other neopets enslave/eat/fight/etc their own kind? It seems pretty obvious like, hmm they probably shouldn't eat and enslave their own species, but then what do they do? Right now they wander around the map and occasionally wander into your fort, help themselves to however much food they want, and possibly kill your livestock.

Are lairs the solution? I'm thinking I might just remove "LARGE_ROAMING" entirely. I wanted them to spawn and be intelligent so they join civs, not so they annoy players.