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Author Topic: Capturing the local wildlife  (Read 1019 times)

melphel

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Capturing the local wildlife
« on: February 05, 2012, 10:54:49 pm »

I want to establish a force of war crocs, but I'm having trouble catching them to tame and train them.  They just don't want to move towards my cage traps.  I never had this problem with bears or wolves, they seemed to wander into them no matter what. 

Does anyone have any tips or tricks to catching the local beasties?  Or just how to motivate them to move in a particular direction?
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Prologue

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Re: Capturing the local wildlife
« Reply #1 on: February 05, 2012, 11:28:18 pm »

Salt water crocs or cave? If it's a cave croc, build a wooden door and surround it with cage traps. That usually works. If it's salt water crocs then I just randomly place cage traps arond the map and hopefully they'll run into it.
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melphel

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Re: Capturing the local wildlife
« Reply #2 on: February 06, 2012, 12:04:17 am »

I am dealing with the salt water variety.
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sirinon

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Re: Capturing the local wildlife
« Reply #3 on: February 06, 2012, 12:16:53 am »

Random cage traps everywhere eventually you will snag one
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lobstercow42

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Re: Capturing the local wildlife
« Reply #4 on: February 06, 2012, 12:36:31 am »

put a kitten on a rope near the river/wherever they r and surround with cage traps

also i just make cave crocodiles domestic instead, something about a little girl migrating to my fortress with fully grown 20 foot long crocodile seems dworfy
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melphel

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Re: Capturing the local wildlife
« Reply #5 on: February 06, 2012, 01:19:05 am »

I considered just making them domestic, but that seemed a little to cheaty to me.  Using cage traps is cheap enough as is.  Plus I already went through all the trouble of establishing the fort in the swamp.
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Sphalerite

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Re: Capturing the local wildlife
« Reply #6 on: February 06, 2012, 09:10:19 am »

Saltwater crocs are tricky to catch.  They don't really wander around like land animals do.  They aren't building destroyers, so you can't attract them with a wooden door or window or something to smash.  They don't seek out animals to kill, so using a kitten on a rope will not work.

They should actually avoid military dwarves and war animals, like most animals do, so you might be able to set up a line of cage traps and then use soldiers to carefully herd the saltwater croc into the cage traps.  This has a high chance of resulting in dead soldiers or a dead croc, so you have to be careful.
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agatharchides

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Re: Capturing the local wildlife
« Reply #7 on: February 06, 2012, 09:22:02 am »

I've had some success making walls across the map with a few trapped entrances. Though be warned that in most biomes this generates a lot of bycatch. If they don't move on their own that makes it harder, I guess your best bet is to herd with melee or unarmed military dwarves. Marksdwarfs would probably just kill them.
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slowpokez

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Re: Capturing the local wildlife
« Reply #8 on: February 06, 2012, 09:31:46 am »

I've had some success making walls across the map with a few trapped entrances. Though be warned that in most biomes this generates a lot of bycatch. If they don't move on their own that makes it harder, I guess your best bet is to herd with melee or unarmed military dwarves. Marksdwarfs would probably just kill them.
Yea, in my experience the best way to capture stuff in cage traps is to divide the map into 4 or 16 "squares" with cagetrap-tunnels between them. For increased speed you could always combine it with herding :D. Also if you have alot of miners just standing around it might be easier just to devide it with channels instead of walls. Bycatch shouldnt be much of a problem since you could just pit them in a hole with magma and military in magma or military in :P