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[Cocoprimate]

I was having a lot of fun capturing cave creatures for breeding and the arena but they seem to have stopped spawning. Dfhack's reveal confirms that there is no life in the caverns now, but it was abundant before. I mean, I saw a lot of cave creatures, but I only killed the worthless ones, such as crundles, creeping eyes, cave ogres, dralthas an elk birds.

There are a ton of cavern animals that exist according to wiki that have yet to appear. Some have but only once. For instance, I only have 1 giant toad, 1 cave croc, 1 giant cave swallow, etc. I only have breeding pairs of rutherers, gcspiders and giant olms.

So, do cavern creatures stop spawning after a point? Is there anyway to reset them so they can spawn (via dfhack or something?)?

[Pukako]

As far as I know, they spawn at the edge of the map, where the cavern is open to the outside stuff. If you haven't got many of those openings, then there's nowhere for them to come from.

No idea if you can dig out more, though. I tend to avoid them. I've got five FB's partying in my caverns at possible and am not opening them anytime soon.

[Bandreus]

The "supply" of creatures (in caves or otherwise) is capped. Basically whenever DF decides it's time for a creature to spawn, it will check if a given species is considered locally extinct. To avoid this you need to make sure you let a few individuals from each species live on.

You can read more about this on the wiki
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Extinction#Site_extinction

EDIT: this is probably going to change in the next version, as births happening during gameplay might also affect local wildlife.

[Cocoprimate]

Thank you guys.

I checked through DFhack using the script "region-pops list" and turns out somehow all the cavern critter populations were extinct. Even the crundles. I guess those FB I left down there were entertaining themselves? No clue how so many died.

Also, only 140 more ravens to go before they stop showing up!

I then used the script region-pops incr jabberer, and sure enough, immediately after entering it a jabberer spawned. So now I guess I know how to handle it. And no more crundles too, thank god.