Print

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

[OldMiner]

I have five purring maggots in a cage next to a farmer's workshop, in a room where the doors are pet-impassible to keep cats out, so that the maggots don't get swatted when they've been dropped on the floor post-milking.

Unfortunately, I found recently that the maggots I had were no longer milkable.  I'm not sure if this is because the maggots have a limited amount of milk available or if it's something else.  I was hoping they just refilled with dwarven milk over time, so five or so would be enough to have a regular milking schedule.

It appears the five live purring maggots I have are *owned* by one of my miners, which is odd because they can't be pets -- they're not tame.  How does a dwarf come to own a wild, caged animal?  Further, does such ownership immediately make the maggots unmilkable?

I have found the one maggot I tamed, itself unowned, is also unmilkable.  (It never had been milked.  I just wanted to tame one for giggles.)  Does taming a purring maggot stop it from being milked?

I know placing this in the bug reports area might be off, but I don't know what correct behavior is in this case.

[GrimmSweeper]

You do have to wait a bit for the maggots to renew their milk. Like cows, you can only suction out SO much of it a day! As a renewable resource, five isn't enough to keep your Farmer's occupied, especially when they do the job one after the other. :/

Unfortunately, I don't know the effects of taming on milk. I figure it's the same as butchery; can't do it if they're pets.

As an aside, I've had a number of small animals caught and tamed, and only one miner decided he liked three. Three happy bats are perched one to each his shoulders and head. The rest are languishing in cages to be admired in my dining room.

[OldMiner]

To be clear: the tamed maggot is not a pet and is not available to become a pet.  And the regular 'live purring maggot's have all been unmilkable for several months, so it's not just that I'm sucking them dry constantly.

[Toady One]

As it stands, even an unavailable tame purring maggot can't be milked.  I probably didn't want to deal with it being bought mid-job.  The others should fill up once per season.  However, being "owned" in the sense of an item would prevent them from being used, as they are private property.  This shouldn't happen, but I might have let the small animal item slip through on the buy check.

[OldMiner]

Someone in another thread which, oddly, I can't find (*) now that I need it, had mentioned that he had seen his maggots being carried away by hungry dwarves as food!  This would explain why I had several live maggots which were tagged as owned by a dwarf.  They were probably uneaten food (probably didn't know how to pick them up since they're in a cage) that he still owned.

Are dwarves supposed to eat raw, live purring maggots?

I do hope this is actually a bug.  Given the cost for obtaining a maggot (generally three stacks of meat, a fair bit of hauling time, and a few bats you can't get rid of), this is a severe pain if it's how things are intended.  It would be a bit more reasonable if trappers were smart enough to split a stack of 9 meat into a stack of 8 and 1, and only bait a trap with the 1 meat.

(*) The search feature for these forums is decidedly painful because there's no way to -search all forums-.  It is very tedious to go back and forth)

P.S. Pardon the post full of complaining.  I'm delighted that there's enough detail in the game for such complications to arise.  But considering it used to be a bug that live maggots would get automatically butchered, I'm guessing there's a lingering issue with them being treated as food, rather than an intentional in-game annoyance.

[Toady One]

Nah, purring maggots aren't intended as wriggling delicacies or anything like that.