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[Sabreur]

My fortress of "Dragonportals" is accidentally living up to its name by virtue of having captured a male and female adult dragon.  I wish I could say I planned it that way, but they were completely random megabeast attacks (although I can take credit for the baited cage-trap corridor that caught them).  They are technically tame, although the male in particular 'forgets' his training a couple times per year.  I'm keeping them in cages for now, for obvious reasons.

My question is, now what?

1.  Breed them.  Somehow.  I know it takes an absurdly long time for dragon hatchlings to reach full size (1000 years according to the wiki - my fortress is 18 years old), but they don't need to be full-sized to be dangerous and/or useful.  The catch here is that I have no clue how to safely breed these things.  I was thinking about locking them in separate rooms with cage traps covering the doors in case they go feral, but that could end in more fun than I'm prepared to handle if the traps don't work.  I have a single legendary animal trainer - I could put him on full-time dragon-training duty and assign an amateur to take care of the other miscellaneous tasks (mostly applying war training to the various animals I've been buying off the elves).

2.  Find out if clowns are flammable.  I know that most clowns are immune to 'normal' levels of heat from fire and magma, but I was under the impression that dragonfire is quite a bit hotter than that.  Of course, this would likely result in the loss of my precious pet dragons, so I might want to try the breeding project first and make pillboxes out of the hatchings instead of throwing away my breeding pair.

3.  Assuming I can breed enough of them, assign everyone a half-tame hatchling pet.  Record the ensuing fireball as dragons go feral.  Or just remove the guard dogs from the entryways and see what happens when a kobold reveals himself in the middle of the dining room.

4.  On a more practical and less 'hilarious fiery suicide' note, covering the fortress in dragonbone furniture would be amusing.  Again, this assumes I can breed enough of them to be worthwhile.  The wiki says the eggs come in clutches of 1-3, so I'm guessing it would take a long, long time to get a useful amount of bones.

Any ideas?  Advice?  I don't really need help against normal sieges - I've already got a magma/water flood device that turns half the surface into obsidian at will.  My main concern is figuring out how to breed them without accidentally killing my precious dragons (or my significantly less precious but still necessary dwarves).

[ninja811]

I'm almost positive that dragon eggs don't hatch but you could make food from dragon eggs i think or you could put them in a box and throw all you prisoners in there.

[Gizogin]

Why wouldn't dragon eggs hatch?  If you have a breeding pair, there shouldn't be any difference between dragon eggs and, say, chicken eggs.  I don't know if the hatching time is the same, though.

Definitely breed them.  I haven't done much with the new training system, but I believe that all animals born in your fortress to semi-tame animals can be completely tamed.

[Sabreur]

A third(!) dragon just flew in!  Another male, unfortunately.  Still, it looks like Armok either really likes me, or is really looking forward to the inevitable fiery death of my fortress.  Or both.

Edit:  Well, not *flew* in, since they don't have wings for some reason.  But still, three pet dragons!

[Friendstrange]

1.  The catch here is that I have no clue how to safely breed these things. I have a single legendary animal trainer - I could put him on full-time dragon-training duty and assign an amateur to take care of the other miscellaneous tasks (mostly applying war training to the various animals I've been buying off the elves).

Place them in a pasture with a nest box. Have the access to the pasture with two cage traps and bridge. Have the pasture close to where your animal trainer is. Having them roam free allows the female dragon to claim a nest box. You just have to keep an eye out for when she does this as dwarfs call dibs on eggs as soon as they are laid, and try to haul them to a food stockpile. It can get quite annoying. Im not sure how that affects incubation.
As long as they are kept inside the pasture and the animal trainer does his job everything should be fine. Have at least two animal trainers on duty, on exclusive to them and another training. Just in case one is too busy doing whatever to retrain them.

Record the ensuing fireball as dragons go feral.

Dragon hatchlings, the second they are re-trained for the first time are considered tame. If anything the hatchlings will attack their parents should the parents revert to a wild state.

On a more practical and less 'hilarious fiery suicide' note, covering the fortress in dragonbone furniture would be amusing.  Again, this assumes I can breed enough of them to be worthwhile.  The wiki says the eggs come in clutches of 1-3, so I'm guessing it would take a long, long time to get a useful amount of bones.

If memory serves, dragon leather is fire-proof. But I think they now only drop scales, which you cant do anything with. Still, dragonbone armor all the way.

[Sabreur]

You just have to keep an eye out for when she does this as dwarfs call dibs on eggs as soon as they are laid, and try to haul them to a food stockpile.

Thanks a million for pointing this out - I checked the kitchen menu, and sure enough "Dragon Egg 2" was listed as "Cook".  I disabled the cooking of dragon eggs and I'm double-checking my stockpiles to make sure eggs are not permitted.

As for the rest, I felt paranoid so I went with a multi-layered setup of cage traps, obsidian bridges, and steel doors.  If something goes horribly wrong, I can seal individual dragon cells or just seal the whole area while I figure out how to deal with the problem.  There's a separate area for any tame hatchlings.  I also put a water trough to help douse any burning dwarves in a worst-case scenario.

[krenshala]

Does the red-carpet entrance for greenskins lead to your large reptilian pets?

[Sabreur]

Does the red-carpet entrance for greenskins lead to your large reptilian pets?

Right now the 'red carpet' is a cooling bed of obsidian that takes up roughly half the surface and is walled in by clear-glass raising bridges.  It takes roughly six months to finish digging my way out of a siege, but it's totally worth it.

My reptilian pets are currently locked away from the rest of the fortress in a breeding program - once I get some expendable hatchlings, then I'll start thinking about dragon pillboxes and whatnot.

[Splint]

Why can't I ever have dragons....

[Crowbeard]

I hate to be a downer, but from the wiki:

Dragons do not have a [CHILD] tag, and therefore their eggs do not hatch in fortress mode.

It doesn't look like that breeding program is going to work.

[Splint]

Claerly you are unfamiliar with emergency modding.

[TeleDwarf]

What is emergency modding? can I mod creature raws after I started playing the fortress?

[Friendstrange]

Why can't I ever have dragons....

Give them the [SEMIMEGABEAST] tag. It will make them much more common, and ensure enough breeding pairs survive worldgen. I did it with hydras because they kept getting killed due to being so trigger happy.

Claerly you are unfamiliar with emergency modding.

Changing creatures requires generating a new world for the changes to take place.

[SRD]

Changing the [CHILD] tag on a monster shouldn't require a new world gen as whenever you load a world it re-loads the files, the only time you should need to re-gen is when you introduce a new creature/item etc.

[Broken]

Is posibble that all the surviving megabeast of your world, or most of them, are dragons. I have observed in quite some number of worlds
that dragons seems to be the more resisting type of megabeast in world gen. Although i can't be sure.