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[Schmaven]

I managed to catch 3 unicorns in cage traps.  The plan is to breed them into a mighty herd.  However they are very fast, and keep tail gating my dwarves out of the walled pen where they're pastured.  I have 3 doors now, but whenever a dwarf goes through the inner most door, at least 1 unicorn gets into the first airlock.  1 of the 3 already escaped off the map due to re-penning the other 2.

I'm thinking the only way to get them in there is to cage them on a platform 1-Z above the pen, then open the cage remotely, and retract a drawbridge.  I'd prefer not to injure them though.  Any advice?

[PatrikLundell]

Have you trained them before releasing them (I don't release animals from cages until they've been trained), and are they set to be pastured in the pasture? I've certainly haven't had any case of tamed animals leaving the map on their own.

Pastured tamed animals generate jobs to haul them back to their pasture when they escape for a walkabout.

If you want untamed animals to breed, a pasture probably does nothing, so just build their cage(s) in their breeding area, hook all of them up to a lever, close the drawbridge to the area, and pull the lever. That would leave them to be "free" while contained (and it will also block one surface group from entering the map, as there's already one on it).

[Schmaven]

There was a perpetual hauling them back to the pen for a while.  I just re-trapped them for now while I hope the were-chamelion that just showed up leaves them alone.  They can be designated to be trained.  The trainers just prefer to socialize and listen to poetry than train unicorns for some reason.

[PatrikLundell]

Training works in some odd fashion, where it seems training jobs are generated only at certain points. Urgent socializing won't be interrupted by normal urgency jobs, so the socializers who have dire needs will continue with that until the critical need has been satisfied.

[Schmaven]

I made everyone a trainer, and now they're getting training.  They revert back to wild awfully fast, so they're still in cages.  They really like wandering into my cage traps by the caravan entrance, so I'm up to 7!  Once I get them more trained, and get some new births, then I'll be in business.

[Xyon]

I've yet to even get unicorns to show up whenever I tried to be in a biome where they would show up, so I don't really have advice for them specifically. They sounds quite fast though, can't wait to read more about your efforts.

[PatrikLundell]

Unicorns (and everything else) have a chance to appear in suitable biomes, but it's not guaranteed. DF makes RNG rolls for everything in a biome (and I think those are weighted according to RAW parameters). It's possible to use DFHack to add anything to any biome, including megabeasts as "normal" creatures.

[FantasticDorf]

Before the raws were altered by toady in response to people hauling back untamable animals from raids, the only way you could breed unicorns or raise local site animal population, was to chain breed wild ones in the smallest possible space.

Logic being that pairs of sexually compatible live birth wild animals crammed together real close create a baby by overlapping how close each chain's 3x3 can be to touch each other but not enough for the other creature to potentially break it or any other furniture restraining them. I've successfully bred yeti's, antelope (i wanted to create more game to hunt) and some cavern semi sentients who don't require marriage

• In-house bred troglodytes and trolls are interesting, they take a while to grow up but they make decent zoo exhibits eitherway even when they are very young. The adults and any future ones you can catch can be applied into fodder trap design by pitting them behind bridge walls to be unleashed later on invaders or live practice

If the animal is restrained for a longer time than when their group should have migrated out of there, the baby produced will ignore everything and try to run out to the map edge, hopefully into a airlock with cage traps. The more adult animals you have on site the more the breeding cap rises and animals can be born to the same or seperate mothers for that species. Unicorns are pretty sweet, only live 20 years though so the range for breeding them is high when you get a substantial supply.

[Dunamisdeos]

You can train animals that are on chains. Put em on chains.

[Schmaven]

The unicorns have begun to starve, but the 3-Z tall wall with a perimeter overhang seems to be keeping them safe from the goblins.  I read that some animal populations have a number in the raws that means if X number of those animals are killed, you won't get any more visiting your site ever... With a new access tunnel dug into their pen, it seems that their trainers are bringing them sufficient food to survive for now.  None of them have a "hungry" indicator in their wound status screen, so crisis averted?  It was DFHack that notified me of their starvation.

Since I embarked in a good biome, I didn't expect much trouble, and thus ignored preparing the usual air tight defenses.  But 40 goblins with 20+ beak dogs arrived after the 2 werebeasts killed all my fresh recruits.  I sealed the direct access routes off, but the goblins and beak dogs have been randomly jumping the 1 tile wide, 2-Z deep dry moat and getting into the fort.  I didn't notice until they killed 20 before another batch of recruits were drafted to stop them.  Some doors have been put up to keep the rest out (no trolls in this invasion) while the new recruits train, and cage traps built between burying the dead to help even the odds a little. 

The 7 unicorns have been assigned to golden chains (matching their golden eyes) in their pen to hopefully prevent future starvation.  The wiki recommends 38 tiles per unicorn, but 8 tiles accessible from the chain is better than 0 in a cage. 

[FantasticDorf]

Animal caretakers take food out of stockpiles (you can burrow and restrict work area for them, but it kind of sucks for the dwarf without being some sort of stablemaster and having accomodation on site) to feed to animals in cages or on chains if they have a good memory to not forget.

Its pretty much vital to keeping large grazing animals or awkward animals that only eat specific grasses like bamboo (panda's, elephants, rhinos) alive without tweaking the game for high co-efficienct grazing to reduce the rate they get hungry/manourished or over areas like stony underground or glacier where there is no grass. You'll need to clean the cage out later by dumping the seeds.

You can for instance make a emergency room for your grazing animals to be penned up in a siege so the invaders don't get past the defences and slaughter them while the caretaker makes sure they're all cared for.

[Dracko81]

Animals in cages can't be tamed whilst tamed, this is why they go wild and subsequently re-tamed.  Animals in a pasture will be re-tamed before they go wild - assuming you have someone to tame them.

After your initial breeding pair has babies enough for newer generations kill the wild tames.  The babies will be permanently tamed upon their first tame from a handler meaning less work for them.  The babies of those babies shouldn't need to be handled and will just be tamed.

As for grazing carve out a large portion of a dirt layer for the moss to spawn on and put them in there.  I usually have 2 or 3 areas personally where I rotate herds if food becomes sparse from too many animals.  But that just means some culling needs to be done.  Surface grazing is rarely worth the effort involved with a flyer being able to cause the herd to scatter, interrupting your dwarves to go gather them up.

[FantasticDorf]

If you can commit the resources, grass grows on natural dirt tiles inside sunlit buildings so pasturing them there is viable, all it'd take is a mixture of built or natural walls with a roof and exposed floor.

[Urist9876]

I'm used to unicorns being not tamable.

To circumvent the problems you mention you can build the cages with any untamed creature anywhere, so also in an enclosed area with doors or bridges you can lock later.

Next is to link those cages to a lever. If you have a lot of creatures you would need a large amount of mechanics. But for 3 animals, 6+1 would do.

Lastly, build some cage traps after the door, if you plan to use the door while the creatures in there.

I used this kind of setup for training rooms with goblins for arena style use, hard to train / dangerous animals or untrainable animals.

Downside is it gets boring if you have to do it many times.

[Schmaven]

Up to 25 unicorns now!  The easiest process is to put the wild-caught unicorns on golden chains and assign any trainer to them.  I had them spaced so each unicorn has their own 3x3 with no overlap to maximize the grazing they have access to.  Despite no overlap, they got adjacent enough to start producing unicorn foals.  I assigned those foals to a separate pasture, and they too had foals.  I haven't been able to keep track of which generation is which, but I heard the 3rd generation is born tame.

An accidental aquifer breach next to the central stairway was stopped by a door for years.  But some dwarf apparently decided he wanted to put that rock in the flooded room in a stockpile somewhere and opened that door.  Of course the rock was dropped right at the door, holding it open, so water is gradually filling the lower levels of the fort.  Between dealing with that, and the annual 50+ goblin sieges, I've been a bit distracted.  That in mind, with bare minimum effort, the unicorn farm is already a success.  The pastured ones are all assigned trainers and have not gone wild nor escaped their pasture yet.  I have all my dwarves with both animal training and animal care enabled.

I'm used to unicorns being not tamable.
To circumvent the problems you mention you can build the cages with any untamed creature anywhere, so also in an enclosed area with doors or bridges you can lock later.
Next is to link those cages to a lever. If you have a lot of creatures you would need a large amount of mechanics. But for 3 animals, 6+1 would do.
Lastly, build some cage traps after the door, if you plan to use the door while the creatures in there.
I used this kind of setup for training rooms with goblins for arena style use, hard to train / dangerous animals or untrainable animals.
Downside is it gets boring if you have to do it many times.

I like your idea for the more dangerous animal training.  I have yet to capture anything that fun so far though.

Edit: I just noticed 1 of my dwarves likes unicorns for their horns!