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[MuseOD]

How do you get fish such as sharks or creatures such as squids or whales? I HAVE a fishing industry, and the biggest thing they caught was a goddamn clownfish. Help please! Also: how do I maximise the chance of getting a whale?

[Billfred]

Not that I have attempted it myself, but I imagine that catching whales involves embarking on a coast and then using ‼Science‼ to construct a trap that keeps the whales in an enclosed area while the water is drained out.

The wiki says they sometimes appear beached, providing you with huge amounts of food for no effort. But as I have no experience with whales I cannot say how often this happens.

[MuseOD]

Thank you!

[Hotaru]

Look for a thread called "Oceanshoots - Hunting whales with ballistae" for a good example.

I don't mean to be rude, but in general it would be nice if people ran a few searches before asking. This particular subforum is usually slightly painful to read because it tends to loop and loop and loop around the same questions and people inventing the same things in their imagination the first time ever.

[Absentia]

Just to clarify something you seem to misunderstand: Fisherdwarves will only catch small fish, which are classified as vermin. They're never going to bag a tuna or a shark, much less a whale.

[jellsprout]

The catching part of the Sea Serpent farming linked in my signature will also work on whales, sharks and other large oceanic creatures.

[ivanthe8th]

Basically what's happening is that fisherdwarves only catch vermin-type fish. Those are invisible and do not count as creatures in the same way sharks or whales do. An ocean biome will generate groups of fish in a manner similar to a jungle generates tapirs, they just wander in from the edge of the map.

To catch "real" fish, like you can see in the units screen you would need to put cage traps in the water and wait for the animals to path into them. See the aforementioned thread on Oceanshoots for an example of how to achieve this.

Once you have these fish, I think you process them in a butcher shop. The "clean a raw fish" job applies to the vermin-type fish caught by fisherdwarves.

[Girlinhat]

All large animals are butchered in the butcher's shop.  Land, water, or air, it all falls under the knife.

[Sphalerite]

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=101795

[Weirdsound]

I once got a bunch of whales to beach near my fort. Because their carcasses take so long to haul I built some butcher shops outside right near the whales. Just as I finished butchering one, while all my dwarves were charging outside to bring whale to foodpile, I got ambushed by some goblins and lost half my population...

[Girlinhat]

Whales have now been weaponized by goblins to lure dwarves to their doom!

[xeivous]

Whales have now been weaponized by goblins to lure dwarves to their doom!

Clearly retaliatory +Whale Bone Bolts+ are in order.

[o_O[WTFace]]

The best way (IMO) to catch large sea creatures is to set up a system that drains an ocean into an aquifer through a series of cage traps.  Its complex, but produces incredible amounts of food. 

[AWdeV]

I don't think you need an aquifer for that. If you could set up a tunnel-y thing that gets fed water from the sea/ocean and dumps it either back in the sea or, and this is easier, off-map you can get the same thing. All you then need is a way to shut off the water supply and a way to get rid of the water without also flushing away your fishies and marine mammals, and hey presto you have a critter. An aquatic critter on rapidly-drying land. Just place a butchery and a tannery in the tunnel instead of a cage trap and there's no bother whatsoever.



Now I wish I'd tried that on my previous fort. Not that I was short on food or anything, but still.

[Sphalerite]

The best way (IMO) to catch large sea creatures is to set up a system that drains an ocean into an aquifer through a series of cage traps.  Its complex, but produces incredible amounts of food.

Actually, this doesn't work very well.  The bizarre nature of fluid flow in DF means that a draining ocean will have pockets of standing 7/7 water here and there.  Creatures only are pushed by flow when in water of less than 7/7, and an aquatic creature in 7/7 deep water will never voluntarily path into shallower water, so what you tend to end up with is the creatures you're trying to catch stuck in those random pockets of 7/7 water and never leaving.  I've actually tried this and other methods of catching sea creatures.

It works far better if you can get the creatures to move into the cage traps under their own power.  To catch sea creatures I dig channels lined with cage traps along the beach, with a raising bridge so you can seal them off from the ocean to drain and recover the creatures.  Dogs on platforms out over the ocean scare sea creatures into the channels, where they are caught, and I then seal them off, pump the water out, and gather the caged creatures.