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[Spookycoconut]

I'm looking to capture wild animals, and I have a cage trap set up. I've been waiting for at least three seasons and nothing has came. Is there a correct way? Am I doing this wrong?

[StagnantSoul]

Put more out there, in 1x5 lines. One cage trap won't do.

[utunnels]

Well you can simply make a long wall and leave only a small gap.

Code: [Select]

xxxxxxxxxxxxx^xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
            x^x
            x^x
            x^x



When some animals appear, send someone to scare them so they run into your traps.

[NullForceOmega]

Actually, due to the pathing code, using a checkerboard of traps will be incredibly effective at netting whole groups of animals.  Far more so than lines, which will almost invariably miss animals folowing the 'leader' of the group.

[Loyal]

Pay attention to where animals move on the map. Place your traps behind them. Animals tend to path in the same general area, season after season, year after year, despite being totally unrelated to each other.

When you do place your traps, space them out a bit. I usually have five or six cage traps arranged kinda like so:

Code: [Select]

...^.....^.....^
^.....^.....^

You can have more if you like, and it doesn't have to be in exactly that pattern, but that's plenty enough for me. After a year or so you'll have more animals than you really know what to do with.

[PatrikLundell]

Or use the engineering way:
Make a wall with a single tile gap. Extend a single tile corridor from the wall. Fill the corridor with cage traps.
The walls can be replaced with chasms if you've got an abundance of miners and a dearth of building material. The theme is to restrict the path they can take to get them into your traps when traversing the map.

[Urist McVoyager]

And then stick traps on top of the walls, too. Because Climbing is a thing, and smooth block walls don't impede it. Only smooth natural stone will.

[Arx]

Smooth block walls are significantly harder to climb than rough block walls. It's just that only smoothed natural walls are impossible to climb.

[utunnels]

Well even if they can climb, they prefer to walk on flat ground, unless you leave them no other choice.

[Deboche]

And then stick traps on top of the walls, too. Because Climbing is a thing, and smooth block walls don't impede it. Only smooth natural stone will.

If you don't want things to climb your walls you can just make a ledge.

I usually lay out 3 traps like this
^
  ^
    ^

in 2 or 3 places and they often get full.

[Niddhoger]

Or use the engineering way:
Make a wall with a single tile gap. Extend a single tile corridor from the wall. Fill the corridor with cage traps.
The walls can be replaced with chasms if you've got an abundance of miners and a dearth of building material. The theme is to restrict the path they can take to get them into your traps when traversing the map.

This is incredibly easy to do underground.  There are fewer map-edge spaces and lots of stone pillars and walls to help you.  You can sometimes get away with only building ~5 walls to properly funnel an entire section of the map-edge through a line of tiles.  I often feed my fort for years entirely off of cavern meat. 

But yeah, build walls, channel ditches, construct bridges.... then trap the shit out of them.  The point is to create funnels that the animals more or less have to path through.  If all else fails, you can use your military to "spook" animals into a trapped area.

[Aslandus]

You really don't even have to build the wall, just place traps around natural topography like trees and valleys where animals will likely walk while heading from one spot to another...

[Badger Storm]

I like to put traps on the narrow, 1-tile areas that lead from one z-level to another.  As Aslandus said, you can also put them between trees or ponds to make animals walk closer to them.  If you're looking for predatory animals like lions or tigers, you can try putting out surplus animals (preferably non-grazing so they don't starve) as bait.