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[Veylon]

This defies my understanding of how egglayers work. I thought egglayers would not multiply as long as dwarves are able to collect their eggs. Thus, egglayer breeding requires either active management or a scheme like mine; simply configuring the autobutcher plugin will not work. Am I mistaken?

-TC

No. You need to stop the dwarves from collecting the eggs. You can do this in one of two ways:
1) Have no food stockpiles that accept eggs. Thus no job order will be created to gather them. This is the easiest and fool-proofest option.
2) Make the Nest Boxes inaccessible. Lock them away and only open the rooms they are in when you are ready to mass-slaughter egglayers and/or have the boxes up on some unreachable platform and harvest the birds as they fall. This is infinitely scalable both horizontally and vertically if bulk goods are desired.

[Loci]

The repeater is an excellent idea. It is certainly the best design so far. But why do you recommend a retracting bridge rather than a hatch? I can see that a bridge may be better than a hatch because it covers more squares with the same number of mechanisms, but did you have something else in mind?

In addition to the mechanisms, hatches must be constructed adjacent to a supporting tile. The largest "hatch-only" pit is therefore 2x2, while retracting bridges can scale up to pits of 20x20.

This defies my understanding of how egglayers work. I thought egglayers would not multiply as long as dwarves are able to collect their eggs. Thus, egglayer breeding requires either active management or a scheme like mine; simply configuring the autobutcher plugin will not work. Am I mistaken?

Unattended egg-laying is problematic for a few reasons--not all eggs will be fertilized, all eggs won't be fertilized after you hit the per-species population cap (50), fertilized eggs won't hatch if their mother was disturbed from the nest (which includes other animals as well as dwarves), and unhatched eggs will remain indefinitely, tying up a nestbox and an egg-laying female. All of which mean you will need to send in dwarves semi-regularly to clean out the old eggs. From an "unattended reproduction" standpoint, one of the non-egg-laying animals would probably be easier.

But yes, eggs taken by dwarves will not hatch. You can disable eggs in food stockpiles to prevent most egg-thievery; disabling cooking isn't really necessary unless the nestboxes are closer to the kitchen than all other ingredients. Another annoying bug with egg-layers is that the chicks are *not* automatically assigned to the mother's pasture, leaving them free to wander the fortress and drain FPS.

[Koremu]

I just dig a small room with a Nest Box & a lockable door off from the main "barn" area. Assign Hen to the room, lock the door, wait however long.

[jcochran]

If you want lots of leather without requiring any work on your part, the easiest way I can think of is to use the autobutcher command in dfhack and keep pigs.

After all, pigs don't require any grazing, so you can simply create a pasture to hold 'em in and they won't starve. And you can setup autobutcher to keep quite a few young piglets, but as soon as they reach adulthood, they get slaughtered. Much more leather that way than slaughtering young animals.

As a side benefit, you can setup milking in a farm workshop and get plenty of milk and cheese as a extra food item. Plus tons of meat for cooking.

[Fluoman]

Ok, thinking out loud here. Chickens can go through unlocked doors, right? Unlocked doors can hold back water. Water can trigger pressure plates. What about this?

# = grate
^ = pressure plate
D = door
%% = pump

Code: [Select]

=====
#^D≈=
===%=
   %
Set the pressure plate to trigger at 3 or so. If a chicken tries to go through the door, they'll get pushed back by the water being pumped in, and the water will trigger the plate and drain through the grate.

Why would the birds go through the door if there is no accessible tile beyond it? And why would the door close once water is flowing?

[doublestrafe]

Why would the birds go through the door if there is no accessible tile beyond it? And why would the door close once water is flowing?

1) Overcrowding pressure, displacement, and peck-dodging?

2) Doors destroy liquid when they close; I've never heard of this being a problem. There could be a second pressure plate inside the closet, though, so the pump isn't always on.

[Nil Eyeglazed]

Doublestrafe's solution strikes me as wonderful.  It's possible to set up a no-maintenance trap like that for trap-avoids (and chickens).  Mechanics like that are always fun.

I have to wonder, though-- given that most egg-layer are also flyers, maybe dropping isn't the best way to kill them?

As an alternative, consider wildlife.  I'm not sure about the most recent version (or the version to come), but wildlife in previous versions didn't need to graze, but would still breed.  Autodropping camels makes many, many camel-steaks.  And raw camel hides, since it seems like you're more concerned about those.

Unsupervised, you're maybe going to accidentally kill off all of your males (or females).  But the odds of that are slim.  I think you can expect a long-lived, hassle-free food source.

[Larix]

Dropping is not supposed to kill, only to separate the animals. Tame animals need to be slaughtered for any further use, if they die from the drop, the carcasses will be useless garbage. Dead wild animals are butcherable regardless of cause of death, but may be harder to auto-drop (i don't think they start infighting when crowded).

Going by the wiki, the only common domestic bird that's rated as a flyer is the goose, so dropping chickens would remain a valid separation technique. Birds don't really work for a sustained no-maintenance farm, though, because sterile or killed eggs will occur from time to time, and those permanently block a nest box until removed by a dwarf.

I like the idea of a re-setting water trigger, but suspect that pumps feeding directly into the chamber behind the door (or the door itself, if you don't rely on pathing, just on crowding/avoidance) would move the water too quickly and flood more area than is needed for the purpose. Adding a simple diagonal might improve the design substantially:

Code: [Select]

####
GD^X
##.#
#.##
#%##
#%##

G - Grate or other drain
D - "trigger" door
^ - pressure plate triggering on 0-5 water (or inverse, if you want the plate to be "on" when untriggered)
X - door to pathing goal or wall
% - pump taking water from south
%

The diagonal should remove flooding concerns. The drain should remain unused in most cases, but would prove valuable when the door stays open for a longer time, e.g. because critters congregate in the door tile.

[Varnifane]

Do the peck-dropping thing with cats or dogs.

Actually I think I'll try this one myself. Not that I ever have less than 300 leather lying around by year 3...

Can't wait until my butchers and tanners start getting brained by falling livestock.