I got very distracted for the week and instead of focusing on laying the groundwork for new spells and abilities, I ended up focused on one of the lowest priority tasks on the list... So now all of the non-random NPCs can have their genders edited with an option, similar to how you can control what genders random NPCs have. I naively expected that to take maybe a day or two, but had underestimated how long it'd take to put the system together and rewrite all the necessary passages @_@. But it's all set up and working now (still needs some testing though). While I was at it, I also altered some existing random NPC encounters to use the normal random gender system, as some of them had fixed genders for no real reason. I think some people might question my choice to make the witch a random gender, but hey, guys can be witches too!
As part of overhauling NPCs I'd also made it possible to more easily swap their species with mods. I think next week (or next week that I work on the game) I might continue delving in to boring internal stuff that nobody cares about, in order to lightly overhaul how species are handled. Then with that all fixed up I can implement a system for modders to use to more easily introduce them, alongside a basic species overhaul mod to exploit those changes. Since it's the only thing I can think of with a broad enough sample of animals, it's probably going to take the form of a Pokemon mod :P
I've also been making random minor fixes to any problems I come across, but I'll hold on to them until the species changes so I can share them all in the same update.