The entries for monster editing in the mod wiki are woefully inadequate, particularly on the topic of derived monsters, which receive exactly two-thirds of a sentence in total. For example what, if anything, needs to be restated in them and what is inherited from the main definition? Also the effect of "Palette Tint" is not explained in any detail beyond the fact that it changes the monster's color. It does not explain in any way how it changes the monster's color. http://dredmod.com/wiki/Monsters_Tutorials
*Everything*, unless otherwise restated, is inherited. Palette tint is simply a hue shift of the defined number of degrees.
Can you dumb that down for me a bit? Assume that I haven't taken any courses in digital art. If the creature has spellcasting, do spells listed for a derived creature replace the base creature's spells, or add to them?
Imagine you have a circle with all the colours of the rainbow melding into one another in sequence clockwise. Now let's say I start off with a base image that's red. A positive hue shift will shift it towards orange, then yellow, and so forth. Negative would shift it towards violet and indigo. If I started off with a green base image, then the same thing applies; positive being blue and indigo in that direction, and negative being towards red. a 360-degree shift would mean the colour remains unchanged. WRT spellcasting, it's a replacement. Any newly defined parameter (save monster drops, for some reason) is replaced. Note that the amount of precision varies. Spellcasting lists can be replaced as a whole, resistances need to be individually defined, so you need to specifically state that yes, this child monster does not have conflagratory resistance. What I like to do to avoid confusion is either make a dummy base monster as a parent, or make the base monsters as simple as possible with as many common traits which the family will inherit.
