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[cathartic rooster]

so hi, I am a noob at fortress mode, so I have a question. do I need to feed turkeys and chickens and such on grass, or can I store them underground? also, will 4 female turkeys, 1 male turkey, and the same for chickens and ducks support my fort with food or will I also need farm and hunting?

EDIT! : how do I butcher this opossum!?!? hunter shoots it and drops it on the floor. tell the butcher to butcher.. has nothing to butcher? I would like to deal with it before it rots on the living room floor...

[BlackFlyme]

Most egg-laying creatures such as birds, some snakes, and crocodiles don't need to graze, all you need to make them productive is to build and place enough nest boxes for every female so that they have a place to lay their eggs. Given that you have 12 egg-laying birds, you should have more than enough eggs to keep your fort fed for quite some time.

Though a small farm wouldn't hurt, as it will allow you to grow plants that will be needed to brew drinks for your dwarves.

Edit: Is the possum dead? Butchers won't butcher a living wild animal. If it is dead, is it outside? The default orders are to ignore outside refuse. This can be changed in the orders menu, which you can reach by pressing o. There is also a chance that it is too small to actually be butchered. If a creature is too small to give meat, it will be ignored.

Try creating a refuse stockpile away from high traffic areas so that there is a place for your dwarves to store corpses waiting to be processed or buried.

[AutomataKittay]

You don't need to feed the birds, you can even stash them into some forgotten corner with a nest box or two for a couple years. You'll need farming for booze anyway, but I've found bird eggs and culling is more than enough to feed young fortresses.

If the corpse's too small or mutilated, the butcher won't take it apart. They won't butcher tame corpses either.

[Kumis]

First off, you'll at least need farming for booze (unless you plan on forcing all your dwarfs to drink mead).
Secondly, whereas turkeys and the like will provide a lot of food and leather, at my current fort (for example) the hunters are bringing in UNICORNS!!1! and they're an awful lot of food and fancy leather.

Now, to poultry. I'll take you through what I do and explain the logic at each point.
I use geese, they mature quicker than turkeys and still lay a good-sized clutch (number of eggs).
I take 3 females (geese) and 3 males (ganders) with me upon embark. I then butcher the 2 least suitable males for extra meat, leather and bones.
Poultry doesn't need pasture, so I like to carve out rooms underground for them and also build nestboxes for them.
I don't really bog myself down in the details of exactly how many rooms I need or how big they should be, but they're usually 2x6 with a one square entrance for a door. I put the egg-layers in one room, the males in another and have other rooms set aside for the young that will be born.
I lock (forbid) the door to the egg-laying room, [v]iew the geese that are most suited to breeding (big and muscular), then I press [t] and look at their nestboxes and then forbid the eggs of the most suitable goose. I then unlock the door so the dwarves can harvest the eggs of the others for food, whilst the forbidden eggs will eventually hatch to be geese.
I then put the young in their own pasture in another room and wait for them to mature (I may do this 2 or 3 times with the same mother goose).
Once they're mature I remove their pasture and then repasture them according to male or female in 2 empty rooms. The reason for removing the pasture is that the new geese and ganders will show up in the list as not being already penned.
I then work out which males should go to breeding, which females should go for egg-laying and then slaughter the rest, including maybe the first generation if I'm feeling merciless. Also, inbreeding be damned.
Only slaughter mature poultry, and remember that a meal can't be made purely from eggs.

If you're being very compact with this design and keeping the number of poultry to a small scale (you'll be overrun with meat and eggs, anyway) you can have 2 rooms for males, 2 for females, 1 for young and then just alternate between rooms as you alternate between generations.

I realise it's quite a long-winded explanation, and I hope it comes across quite clearly even without diagrams, but I used it mainly as a way of introducing my points, like why I prefer geese, for example.

[cathartic rooster]

thanks a million for the help with my flock! should keep them alive (hopefully) and producing food for years to come (or one quite nice thanksgiving feast). now the Opossum is quite dead. and dumped right in the meeting room.  the wiki says it has meat, but the butcher wont even look at it.

[Kumis]

Dumped in a dump zone or in a corpse stockpile?
Butchers will take meat from hunters, or from nearby corpse stockpiles. If you want to hunt with your military it's a good idea to put a butchers near a corpse stockpile, then via (o)rders and [r]efuse to permit refuse collection from outside (so those mangled corpses will be taken to the stockpile). If you do go down this route you'll want to put the corpse stockpile outside, and maybe the butchers outside with it.


Also, I didn't know that by writing

Code: [Select]

[o] you could get this:

• , I do now!

[AutomataKittay]

thanks a million for the help with my flock! should keep them alive (hopefully) and producing food for years to come (or one quite nice thanksgiving feast). now the Opossum is quite dead. and dumped right in the meeting room.  the wiki says it has meat, but the butcher wont even look at it.

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Opossum

Noting the size and the range of return from zero to six. Generally animals that's under 2,000 size don't give butchery return. Mangled corpses or loss of limbs can bring the corpse size to under what would be needed to butcher. If it's unforbiddened, in refuse pile and next to butcher shop and nobody want to butcher it on autobutcher, then it's too small or chopped up.

[cathartic rooster]

ah. well then I'm tossing it outside and will collect the bones later for more crossbow bolts. you guys are like precision tactical strike levels of useful. I ask a question and like 5 seconds later someone tells me what to do, its amazing!

[Kumis]

Ooh ooh! When it comes to building hospitals don't put any containers in them otherwise all your thread and cloth will go to the hospital. Instead set up small (2x2 or so) stockpiles for cloth (not metal cloth), thread (not metal thread) and maybe also soap. Gypsum plaster too, if you can find the option for it.

[CapnUrist]

My best tip from my experience with poultry husbandry: Even geese can be drowned if you flood the wing they're located in.