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[nate.219]

I've recently embarked on a savage ocean after being reminded of the breeding sea serpent thread and I was looking forward to catching some sharks or whales to put inside a giant terrarium. However I cannot seem to get ocean spawns.

I know that land spawns trumps ocean spawns so I did the trick with the bridges to block off all edge tiles around my world. The issue with this is that I keep getting birds spawning in ocean edge tiles, and I believe I've seen them spawn above the bridges as well (I could be wrong). (Can birds spawn in the air or do they have to spawn on the ground-most tile around the edge?).

Is there any way I can increase my ocean spawns without using dfhack to slaughter all species of birds, or needing to bother with hundreds of dwarven marksman and pray they fly close enough to them?

I've even tried a method I saw in a thread with a similar title to this one where he bridged off the whole edge except for a single tile on the beach, then made a tunnel out of bridges leading to that one space in the edge of the map and pumped water through. In his tests this resulted in fish spawning above land, inside this tube of water he created. I replicated this but nothing spawned (unless they immediately got pushed off the map again from the force of the water lol...)

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Leonidas]

The same thing happened to me. I embarked by the ocean in 44.05 with visions of feeding goblins to sharks, but I got virtually no ocean animals. One octopus in two years, IIRC.

There's a DFHack command that shows a list of creatures that might spawn: Region-pops

[Immortal-D]

As an avid beach-goer myself, I have also struggled with this problem.  One possible solution would be to cap the zed height of your map, thus forcing flying creatures to remain at ground level for easy hunting.  The obvious downside is you are stuck building entirely underground, no surface projects beyond 1 zed.  The DFHack command you mention has an option to kill all creatures of a given type, and I honestly think that is the best bet.

Assuming that wild sea critters have the same duration behavior as land ones, they will breed on their own, eventually.  So if you can capture a pair of sharks, in theory you will no longer need to hack-kill all the birds.  Lastly, (and this is just an observation); In my experience, locations with Cloud Weather (both Evil and Good) inhibit flying creatures somewhat.