Hey! Sorry I'm a little late on this, but modding dwarf fortress is a bit harder than some other games. There's a lot of documentation on it, fortunately; the best collection is the Modding page at dwarffortresswiki (.org) . That page conveniently has a section on modding creatures, patching vanilla stuff without overwriting it, and also tells you where you can find base-game files to reference when creating races. To summarize, most things in dwarf fortress are made up of tokens that do various things and the game revolves around adding/changing/removing tokens from stuff you want to mod or create. There's also a Token page on the aforementioned wiki that lists all the various types of tokens and links to pages that explain those tokens in more detail.

You don't need to code every token manually, don't be afraid to copy and paste another creature and only change tokens you understand as you go along.

I also want to ask on where did you learn how to make a playable race. I myself am trying to get a fortress playable race put in. But i'm looking through other peoples files to see how they constructed it. And would love a little direction. Much appreciated.

Fake floors is an interesting idea, although it runs into a few issues. First of all, I don't know of any way to prevent other races from traversing the floors or slowing them down... or speeding up movement on specific tiles - from my understanding speed on land/sea is baked into the race itself. Secondly, on that note, is it even possible to have Merfolk move faster on the "water" floors and slower off of them? I've considered the idea of adding a semi-aquatic farm plot, specifically for farming Merfolk stuff, but I have no idea how to go about adding and restricting new farm plots, if it's even possible. Go ahead and send a friend request if you'd like to talk more.

I have a possible solution for the pathing problem but can't write code, dyslexia. We should have a chat somehow. This would mean your merkolk build 'canals' and sea rafts. Both are fake floors. These still look wet but actually exclude water. They can also build a system of buoys that have various functions. A new weapon, a harpoon,for hauling in big fish. I've also been thinking about coral & kelp farming.

Great mod, dude! Got a little fort going right now, very inspirational with the current aquatic D&D game I'm running. Pathing used to be hardcoded and may still be, not sure as file structure has changed a bit. Maybe a [fish] tag or the like that could bypass? Maybe compare dwarf raws to aquatic species and fish raws and other data as needed, haven't modded much beyond map tweaking.