Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Grendus]

Until cats have a delay on how quickly they can adopt dwarves, I won't be using more than one or two (and only because my dwarves occasionally bring one in immigrant waves). I've gotten birth and adoption messages back to back before, it sucks.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

I think the whole pet thing pretty much sucks. Better to let the butcher have them and give the pet's owner an unhappy thought. But cats in DF are basically like nobles, except they do something useful.

Right now, any immigrant who brings a cat in gets a special bedroom. As soon as his cat is in it the door locks and it floods. Whether the dwarf is in there or not.

Realistically, I don't expect pets or cat behavior to change. I do expect that eventually there will be an Animal Care job to castrate male animals regardless of whether they're pets or not. And I do expect that kittens will eventually be unable to adopt dwarves - they have to wait until they become cats. Until then no fort of mine will have a cat.

It seems that the [VERMINHUNTER] tag gives cats both their beneficial behavior (killing vermin for you) and their detrimental one (adopting dwarves). It sure would be nice if these were split ... I wouldn't normally want to cheat-mod but I absolutely would in this case without looking back once.

[Saber Cherry]

I don't see why people want vermin hunted by cats, anyway.  I only allow male cats to live, and my current fort has about 3 of them.  All they do is cause huge amounts of miasma.  Why is miasma AND vermin better than just vermin?  If I want to get rid of vermin, I can always order a dwarf to hunt them - but neither dwarves nor cats get rid of flies.

[Tradanbattlan]

I have a kitten factory.
A male and female cat are put on a high bridge, 1x2.
When they give birth, the kitten only has two places to go.
Down, or on the bridge
If this happens, the 'lever' is pulled, sending all three to their doom.
Free +cat tallow biscuits+.
So, it's either they throw their kitten off the bridge or all of them die.
Twisted, even for me.

[**((pig tail sock))**]

Personally, I think having massive amounts of animals of all kinds clogging every room and hallway is a vital part of Dwarven culture. If we regulate animal populations, what next? No slow, miserable deaths from minor arm injuries? 

[Arramiy]

I find that recently I've been leaving a couple otherwise-idle dwarves on trapping duty with a stockpile for vermin close to the dining room, with exceptions made for extract-bearing vermin. It doesn't take long for a dwarf to snack on the critter and free up the trap, and seems to leave a much smaller mess.

[Shoku]

My pet removal hall:
██████████
█_P_____ P_█
█D██████D█
____HDH____
██████████

(D)oors are pet restricted and the middle one is forbidden or low traffic or whatever.
(H)atches and linked to Pressure (P)lates.

It probably gets cats on the way back but either way you take the floor out from under them while they sit meowing at the middle door. And of course there are lots of ways to deal with cats separated from their owners- or you can just drop them far enough to dze them on top of a cage trap so they're caged like you wanted them and then you could even install them in the dwarf's residence for no unhappy thoughts.

Now, with handling early cats what I do is mark all the females for butching but forbid my butcher shop. I've usually got enough male cats by the time I want to start slaughtering animals anyway so it works out.

*I like cats killing pests early on because of the small supply of early bones to work with before I have immigrants to throw at that stuff.

Additionally I don't mind modding the raws to make kittens take 5 years to mature or taking away their vermin hunter tag if I want an actual butcher industry animal.

[Beanchubbs]

I just go a year or two, check the cat population, and if it's too high, kill all but one male and one female, it it's not very large at all, kill all but one male and one female. The cats that have owners are usually just stuck in cages utnil their owner is kiled/caught in an "accident". The real problems for me are the horses, all the immigrants in 3 waves came with one it seemed to em.

[Zruku]

I have a design for a simple yet always effective depending on what the dwarf does.

Code: [Select]

WWWWWWWWWWW
WL D S D S D S D S D
WWWWWWWWWWW
WL D S D S D S D S D
WWWWWWWWWWW
W=wall L= lever S= spike D=Door
How it works:The dwarf will stand on the tile where the lever is and will keep pulling on it causing the spike traps to go up and down. If you set the door just behind to passable but pet forbidden, the pet will be forced to get hit by the spike. Works very effectively if you have multiple going off, you can also have as many pet killer halls as you want.

[Tradanbattlan]

Ahhh yes, the good, old-fashioned "Cat Blender."