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[kidhedera]

Hiya!

I've been playing DF for a few months now, and after many tragic tales of slaughter, drowning, tantrums and starvation, I recently had a semi-successful fort. I ended up abandoning because of FPS death. Between Urist leaving a trail of discarded socks all over the fort, goblinite accruing in the yard, an oversupply of food, and my Noah-like desire to collect two of every stray animal that the elves bring by, my FPS dropped tragically low.

I had put a whole bunch of puppies and baby cougars and bunnies and kittens etc in a cage, and had slaughtered all-bar-one of the males of every species except my badgers (cos I had only male badgers), which lead to having INSANE quantities of food. Too much for me to give away to the caravans cos the dwarves couldn't haul it all to the depot in time. (even with a one tile quantum stockpile right next to the depot). Also, I got cramps in my hand from hitting 'enter, down, enter, down', trying to trade all my XXSmellySocksXX and puppy roasts. (quantum stockpile = no bins)

I was thinking about this tragic situation and how I just wished I had not enabled 'pet available' on so many useless exotic critters, when an idea struck me...

If I keep all the male critters in cages, and only let them out when I want a female of that species to breed, will that work? I know females wont breed in a cage, but can I prevent male critters from sporing by caging them?

[weenog]

Stuff in a cage won't impregnate or be impregnated, but stuff that goes into a cage already pregnant will eventually have its young anyway.  Keeping excess animals caged all the time can help with population control.

You kinda did your slaughtering exactly wrong for population control.  One male can impregnate any number of females, and a single male running loose with multiple females is a good way of ensuring all the females are pregnant all the time.  Next time if you want to avoid population explosion, try slaughtering or caging most of the females, instead of most of the males.  For example if you want a gang of cats to help contain a rat plague, 4 males and 1 female is good, but 4 females and 1 male is asking for way more kittens than you can slaughter before they adopt anyone.

[kidhedera]

Oh right, that makes sense.

I was keeping my female yaks/cows/sheep/llamas etc for the milk, and so just adopted that pattern for all the beasties. In hindsight though, your suggestion makes much more sense.

Thanks for the info about caging. One other question, can a milk or yarn giving beast in a cage still be milked/sheared, or do they need to be free to go to the farmers workshop?

[jaxler]

just kill all the babies, problem solved.

[donfuan]

standard reply: Atom Smasher. A Dump Zone beneath it, set corpses to be dumped under (o)ptions - (r)efuse, and from time to time also make it a pasture and assign surplus pets to it. Butchering them will create even more food and refuse items. Hell, in my actual fortress, if happiness is all around, i sometimes even smash adopted pets. They will be missed, but no corpses will ever be found, so no big harm done. Just be sure everyone has their own bedroom and everything is smoothed and engraved and you have a nice sculpture garden under the sky.

[Quietust]

Stuff in a cage won't impregnate or be impregnated, but stuff that goes into a cage already pregnant will eventually have its young anyway.

In older versions this was not the case, and I'm pretty sure I checked that bit in v0.34.11 - caged animals cannot become pregnant, but an uncaged female can be impregnated by a caged male.

[chronicpayne]

I had heard it mentioned that the game keeping track of deceased creatures actually means that butchering huge amounts  may decrease performance?

I'd love to get an answer on that, as I only recall reading it in passing on these forums, and it could affect many peoples decisions on food supply, etc.

[kidhedera]

Hrm. Well, I just had the elves come by and I managed to resist the temptation to buy a breeding pair of echidnas, so I'm already off to a better start in this fort, at least!

I might try keeping one female of each of my war animals locked in cages for replenishing supplies, and just let the males roam free. I also realised that I have had critters get pregnant by animals wild on the map, or possibly trader animals, or maybe just arrived pregnant with migrants, not sure, so having my epically fertile female warbeasts loose is never going to work anyway.

[weenog]

Oh, critters can definitely get pregnant by outsiders.  Lock females away in some deep dark dungeon in your fortress, and they'll eventually start dropping young if males of the same species turn up wild or with traders.

What exactly are you using for war animals that the supply provided by just 1 female is enough to keep up with demand?

[kidhedera]

Well, I'm mostly using dogs, but in the Noahs Ark fort I only had a couple of fatalities, so supply was far outweighing demand. Most of my military had 1 wardog assigned to a dwarf, and then was assigned to train 2-3 more critters, so each squad of 10 dwarves had like 20-30 animals running after it. Goblins were just turning tail and running when they saw the hoard of grey d's running across the fields at them.

I kept buying things that seemed fierce from the elves and then discovering that I couldn't actually train them for war (war badgers would be AWESOME), and so just pasturing them around my fort. Once an animal got named from killing kobolds/wild animals/child-snatchers I'd open it for adoption so it could provide a little pet-based protection to one of my civilians.

In my current fort I have only 2 female dogs, but a 4 dwarves arrived with (male) pet dogs, so I'll lock the girls away down stairs, and start a puppy leather industry. At the moment I'm just butchering every non-pet animal that shows up, except for a female camel and a male llama (milk + wool).

I've only just breached the aquifer, and this fort is *very* new (second summer) BUT I just discovered that unicorns are available on this map. One of my hunters shot one, but then ran out of ammo, so I sent my military after the injured one. I didn't realise they hadn't equipped *ANY* weapons yet tho, so I had 8 dwarves running around the map chasing a unicorn and punching it for about a season before it finally keeled over. So now I'm building mechanisms and cages and plotting to catch some unicorns. Unicorn bone armour, unicorn leather cloaks, unicorn steaks! Its going to be great! (Although I might have to nix this plan because my girlfriend threatened to leave me. She said she could deal with puppy leather factories, but unicorn bone armour is just depraved. I almost had to sleep on the couch last night).

[weenog]

Ohhh, might want to stop with the assigning animals to dwarves if you're having attitude problems.  Dead pets cause bad thoughts, which can lead to tantrums or insanity.  If you want to avoid the bad thoughts but still have a measure of protection, try making pasture activity zones at choke points and in risky work areas, and assigning some animals to those pastures.

[kidhedera]

I've not found it too concerning actually. My dwarves seem to be a pretty cheerful lot - even when I've had to butcher an assigned dog or a pet cos it got injured they didn't seem to mind. My biggest problem was trying to evenly assign animals so that one dwarf doesn't have a dozen dogs, and another has none.

I don't know why the little buggers were so happy. I mean, I had about 150 dwarves, but only 1 dorm with 20 beds in it, a barracks with 10 beds in it, one 10x10 dining hall with 10 chairs and 10 tables, and everything was made of wood and dirt because I had trouble breaching the aquifer. Maybe it was a combination of the AMAZING masterwork barrels their booze was served in, and the fact they all had so many pets.

Hell, even the dwarves that got injured in skirmishes were promptly looked after in the 2 hospital beds, given water, puppy roasts, and didn't drop below 'fine'.

Yeah... population explosion was the hallmark of that fort. It was only 5 years old, and I had clear felled the forest in an attempt to get enough wood together for the barrels and furniture I needed, so was having trouble producing new beds, furniture doors, etc, but was drowning in animals, food, and cloth. (Did I mention my farms were doing *very* well too?) At least I could trade for metal armor and weapons.

[Garath]

As suggested before, create a garbage zone under a raised bridge, dump items, lower bridge, problem solved. You can even create a pasture zone and smash, though butchering and processing all the animals is good training for better butchers and legendary cooks. One of my forts that ran for 27 years had 160 dwarfs, 30 of them legendary cooks... Main export, well, you make a guess. And you can do the same with useless goblinite, XXsocksXX and anything that's not worth trading (I assume you got plenty of trade goods that are valuable but that you don't trade since you want to get rid of the garbage first). Crafts, totems.. just watch out you don't smash someones only masterwork creation

[Cozmopolit]

dfhack has an autobutcher option that helps tons with population control. You set how many kids and adults you want of each pet, everything that goes over that amount is automatically tagged for butchering.

For example I have it set to 1 kitten male and female each, 2 adult females and 8 males to keep vermin down and avoid catsplosion. For dogs I set 20 puppies per gender (effectively "dont butcher puppies"), 3 females and 4 male dogs. This has the effect of puppies growing up before I butcher the adults which (I think) give more meat and leather.


dfhack can also confiscate worn clothing and make the dwarfs put used clothes into a garbage dump. If that garbage dump is a refuse stockpile at the same time (not accepting any actual refuse) the worn clothing will disappear on its own.

[GreatWyrmGold]

I had heard it mentioned that the game keeping track of deceased creatures actually means that butchering huge amounts  may decrease performance?

I'd love to get an answer on that, as I only recall reading it in passing on these forums, and it could affect many peoples decisions on food supply, etc.

Dead things don't pathfind, so while it could be worse than without any animals, it will be better than with them alive.