Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[mogthew]

I've been playing for a year or two now, but have been lurking on the boards and decided to post.

My problem started when I got an announcement about someone finding a mutilated yak corpse in my pasture. Since then, every month or so, I get reports about creatures being reported missing. None of them are ever recovered or found mutilated. Do I have a serial killer/psychopath, or a vampire or..?

[Ross Vernal]

Animals in too small of a pasture will fight, and occasionally kill each other.

At one point, I watched a mother horse and her foal break the legs of another horse foal, then kick it in the head until it died.

[rampagingfrodo]

Suggestion for future development.

!!Aliens mutilate cattle!!

[zehive]

animals kill eachother, or sometimes your butcher kills an animal and it doesnt quite... report

[telamon]

If you leave a grazing animal stowed in a cage, it will be unable to eat. Eventually it will die, and go missing, until one of your dwarves handles the cage. Inside the cage, with all the other animals, will be the corpse of your unfortunate grazer (you can examine the cage and the corpse will be part of the contents; you can then dump the corpse or something to get it out). This happened to me once with a yak, and it's probably the most likely reason for the animal going missing and only later being found dead. I would expect that if the animal died in open pasture, one of your dwarves would see it quite soon and it would be unlikely to go missing prior to being found, where as in a cage, nobody will be the wiser until someone goes up to the cage and checks it (not sure what actions will reveal the corpse; you'll have to try that yourself)

EDIT: but oops. if you did find the animal dead in your pasture, it's probably, as others have mentioned, a mix of it being attacked by other animals in an overcrowded pasture, and being unable to feed as a side effect of the overcrowding

[mogthew]

Ahhh, this makes sense. I guess I'll increase the size of my pastures then. Thanks guys

[arzzult]

Even with large pastures there are crowding issues since the pathing algorithms tend to cause them to bunch up any way. It's better to split them into multiple smaller pastures, though it can get tedious.