And of course making their bones into crossbows. A pamphlet of my thoughts on menageries! A good meat/animal taming industry can create huge amounts of wealth very quickly, and frankly I just find them to be a lot of fun. I like letting my dwarves adopt animals and to have a good zoo/colosseum.
GETTING LOTS OF DIFFERENT ANIMALS: I've been worldgenning with parameters to increase the patchworkness of the world. If you increase the X/Y variance of things like rainfall, and also change the mesh sizes to emphasize the top and the bottom end of ranges, you usually end up with lots of different biomes in small spaces. Then you pick your 4x4 embark so that it's at the four corners of several different biomes.
AREA ATTRIBUTES: If you want a cool zoo, you should definitely go to the tropics. That's not to poopoo those of you that want to make an ice palace with a polar bear exhibit, but generally the tropics have a wealth of different animal species. Savagery must be high. Animal men suck, flying animal men really suck, they're harder to kill and you gotta wait for them to leave the map, but you really gotta love giant animals though, they can provide a ton of wealth very quickly if you bring one down, roast the whole thing, and sell it to the caravan. Evil biomes are just out, or you could do it as a challenge but butchering+evil just doesn't go well. I keep trying to make an ocean farming system, like the one done by the guy with the sea serpents, because... giant whale roasts, baby. One day I will make a fort out of giant whale soap.
EMBARKING FOR EARLY ANIMAL SLAUGHTER: I guess the best way to hunt is to use a hunter but I personally favor military dwarves. I usually embark with a guy who likes copper, so I give him proficient weaponsmithing/armorsmithing. Preferences are insanely important in this game and you can have good armor sets and weapon right off the bat at a cost of some wood and a couple of ore. Putting aside two dwarves for military duty is a sizable blow to your labor pool but it's worth it. 2 female dogs and 1 male dog gives you some early supplemental hunters and a puppy mill. I like to take a proficient chef.
EMBARKING FOR A ZOO: Proficient mechanic, proficient glassmaker, and about 150 bags of sand. I like to find McLikesgreenglass and give him the cagemaking job. Go ahead, be a dork, spam cage traps. It's the best way to make a zoo so embrace it. The best way to capture mass animals is a giant cage trap perimeter. Build chokepoints for better efficiency or go full dwarf and make 600 traps. Regardless of whether you're embarking to sand, just take the bagged sand at embark since it's a 1 point bag. Magma makes things easier or just use coal. Maybe take an animal trainer.
One thing I'd like to know is, if I want to generate +animal man bone bolts+ and +goblin bone bolts+, should I build a sentients slaughter room and just let the parts decay? If I build a droptower I won't be able to get the flying animal men to die.
Your thoughts are appreciated.
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Topic: All about animals: Fighting them, eating them, training them to kill (Read 1157 times)