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[Rollory]

I haven't done much hunting in the past and am curious as to what is going on here:

I'm in the 3rd year of a fort in a coastal area - most of the fort is actually dug out as side tunnels on an undersea tunnel connecting two continents, bits of each of which project into the game area from opposite directions.  Anyway one of the land areas was my embark site and main surface resource site, for wood and plant gathering and the like.  It also, early on, was getting huge amounts of wildlife - elk, musk oxen, horses, groundhogs, usually 3 or 4 groups of creatures at least wandering around at any given time - usually near the edge of the map because they kept getting scared back there by the dwarves moving around in the center and on the shore.  So I started setting up some hunters - first 3, then adding on a few more here and there as I got migrants, eventually it got up to 8 - and went into industrial-scale animal processing - 4 butchery/tannery setups with dedicated dwarves and some craftdwarf workshops exclusively for skull totems and bone bolts.  Well, I ended up with huge amounts of meat and bolts (5220 horse bone bolts in stock right now) even though I didn't come close to collecting all of it (they would keep getting interrupted by other animals and dropping their current kill to kill the new one; also the butcher shops were jammed full of corpses for a while and a lot rotted) and for about two seasons now I have gotten no new wildlife coming in at all.  There's one band of horses on the opposite shore, but as my undersea tunnel isn't quite complete yet (need to finish the pumping system) I'm ignoring them. 

It is not a serious problem, I have enough domesticated animals to suit my needs, but I'm curious if this is common/expected behavior.  I had thought that wildlife was generated on the fly and brought in on the map edge as needed; is the game actually tracking the wildlife population in an area, and realizing that I've literally killed everything on the peninsula?

The elves haven't complained at all.

[Rollory]

Hm, never mind.  I took a closer look at the other shore.  There's 3 bands of horses, a group of musk oxen, and rhesus macaques.  I guess it's that my embark site was larger so it was just likelier that the wildlife would respawn there, but eventually it all got stuck on the south shore.

Once I dig up through the aquifer I'll fix this.

[twwolfe]

It is very possible to kill so much wildlife that no more will spawn. hence why i olny have hunters hunt until they become somewhat good with a crossbow, and then they get drafted

[Rollory]

Ah really, ok, good to know.

[NW_Kohaku]

More details:  When you generate a world, every biome has a given population for every animal type.  Animals that march onto your map and get killed are subtracted from this pool of available creatures.  Unless the biome is tiny, you shouldn't run out of things like groundhogs, and I don't think land vermin EVER go extinct, but larger creatures will eventually be hunted to extinction, especially the fanciful beasts, like merpeople.

To combat this, you should work on capturing some of them, and having a breeding stock within your fortress - even better, this takes away the need to actually hunt them down and drag their corpses back, plus you ensure a regular supply, if you just keep your breeding bears in a pin, and your spawned eating bears in a cage, and occasionally mark a few to be slaughtered, they get killed right there in the butcher's shop.

Another option is to have automated slaughtering towers - tether up breeding animals, while letting their spawn roam free, and set up a retracting bridge connected to a pressure plate so that when the animal tries to leave the breeding pins, the bridge comes out from beneath them, and they fall several z levels to their death - right on the butcher's floor!

To capture the animals, you want to either dig a trench or build a wall.  The animals in this game path by picking a target location at random, then choosing the best way to get there, instead of just randomly meandering one tile at a time.  To take advantage of this, make a wall or a trench near the edges of the map where they like to loiter, seperating two large chunks of land, where there is a good chance of them wanting to randomly path there.  If you have two whole continents seperated in the middle of your map, that's the easy solution - just make a bridge between the two on the surface (if you can), and they will want to migrate between the two continents, so long as you don't have an interposing fortress full of doors.  Otherwise, just dig yourself a trench or build a wall that leads up to a line of trees so that there isn't a small gap on the edge of the map (trees block movement, just like a wall) then set up your cage traps on the corners of the area of the wall where you do have that little gap for the animals to get through.

I just caught 11 unicorns in a single season with a single trench.