Print

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

[Cobbler89]

It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

SLAVERING FANGS!!

[melomel]

I had a strange mood like this once, only it was for the perfect siege engineer to help build an embark-wide wall of ballistae around the fort... one who liked ballista parts, ballista arrowheads, and blood thorn wood, to get maximum benefit from making ammo and ballista parts. I only wanted masterwork ammo and masterwork siege engines, and a ridiculous quantity of both. After executing ~400 immigrants waiting for one with the right preferences, I eventually gave up. Good luck, anyway.

Hmm, can you even have both ballista arrows and ballista parts as a preference?  Also, glumprong wood is 1200 to blood thorn's 1250--it would be an acceptable substitute, IMHO.  Not like I settled for my weaponsmith liking anything less than steel and serrated discs, but...  Ahem.  Skimming my current citizens--you can have both ballista parts and crossbows as pref, which is awesome.  (Siege engineering isn't a moodable skill, remember!)

I'm pretty sure I've seen moghoppers in the current version.  It will take me a bit to check this, since it's (1) winter in my fort and (2) there isn't a Savage biome in my embark.

[melomel]

Capture a live fish is doing nothing.  I've designated several fishing zones.  I've put jobs in multiple fisheries.  I've got dwarfs with fishing enabled.  They pick up the traps from the stockpile.  Then stand there.  And do nothing until they are dehydrated.  They don't even move off of the spot they picked the trap up at.  I'm starting to think moghoppers are a myth.  There are toads in the ponds to be captured.

I started a tester fort overlapping two savage biomes and cranked up fastdwarf.

I'm getting the same thing.  The "capture a live fish" task conflicts mightily with the "fishing" labor.  If there's no fishing zone when I tell them to "capture a live fish", they go to the animal stockpile and just stand there, holding their traps forlornly.  If I designate a fishing zone, my six trapper/fisher dwarves dash out and capture a fishie each, and then...  fish.  Despite there being "capture a live fish" R tasks queued in the six fisheries.

HOWEVER!  One of them did bring in a live pond turtle when I gave up on that and told them to get live land animals.  As moghoppers also have the [AMBIPHIOUS] tag, this would make it possible--not likely, but possible--that they can be picked up via kennels' "land animal" task.

I say possible-not-likely because in my real fort, what land animal you catch seems to be affected by either the frequency/quality of the vermin.  Tons of rats and lizards, only the rare demon rat or fluffy wambler.  I'd wager it's a combination of statistics (you have fireflies, dragonflies, monarch butterflies, roaches, slugs, snails, rats, etc.) and frequency (even if the frequencies were even, your odds would be less than optimal because of so many other possible trap occupants).

Those of us who fish for food will be aware that your given pond/river/ocean will only yield a few set species.  Moghoppers, as far as I know, have never been catchable by the "fishing" labor, and it's still spring.  I'm going to try tediously micromanaging my little dudes by turning the fishing zone for the pond that only yields pond turtles on and off, while manually checking what the .s around it are.  If that fails, I'll build a bridge across the river and find out what those evil-weather clouds do.

Oh, and the first place your dwarves will go when you give them a land animal task is your food stockpile.  You could probably up the odds of them getting a moghopper if you placed your trappers in a burrow where the only food stockpiles they could get to were around murky pools.

[ETA] -- It's mid-summer and I've fished out all the murky pools on the surface.  I have 125 pond turtles and not a single moghopper.  Also, I was wrong--dwarves don't catch live vermin from your food stockpiles; they catch it from where your food is.  (Which is usually the stockpiles, but hey, DF runs on technicalities.)  Also, easy work-around for them preferring fishing over fish-catching:  either inactivate the zone or turn off fishing once your trappers run out; wait 'till they're lurking in the animal stockpile and then turn the zone back on.  Repeat until you are the DeBeers of pond turtles.

[Urist McDwarfFortress]

Two questions:
1) Have you guys built and filled an aquarium before trying to "Capture Live Fish?" It may be that they will not start the labor until there's someplace to put the little guys once you catch them.
2) Have you tried just building traps around the ponds? I haven't messed with vermin very much, but whenever I want a cave spider, I just build a couple cages in an area where there are lots of spider webs and bait them with meat. I usually get one pretty fast. (I don't think I've ever caught amphibians this way, but I've never been trying to)

[melomel]

1) Have you guys built and filled an aquarium before trying to "Capture Live Fish?" It may be that they will not start the labor until there's someplace to put the little guys once you catch them.

They will catch the fishies without an aquarium.  You may get an animal stockpile full of rotten eels and all, but they'll catch stuff.  Also, got an aquarium successfully filled with water in the spring of both tester games so far...  The lack of an aquarium never stopped dorfs from collecting salmon/brook lampreys/steelhead trout/mussels/etc. in any game I've ever played.  :<

2) Have you tried just building traps around the ponds? I haven't messed with vermin very much, but whenever I want a cave spider, I just build a couple cages in an area where there are lots of spider webs and bait them with meat. I usually get one pretty fast. (I don't think I've ever caught amphibians this way, but I've never been trying to)

I've had really poor luck with built traps after 40d, and I've been catching craploads of vermin with the manual labor...  just no moghoppers.

The wiki says that moghoppers can be caught by fishing...  is this verified for the current version?  Are the season tags functional?  The [GOOD]/[EVIL] tags for sun berries and sliver barbs were totally kaput for a while.

[Urist McDwarfFortress]

Capture a live fish is doing nothing.  I've designated several fishing zones.  I've put jobs in multiple fisheries.  I've got dwarfs with fishing enabled.  They pick up the traps from the stockpile.  Then stand there.  And do nothing until they are dehydrated.  They don't even move off of the spot they picked the trap up at.

After a bit of experimentation, this seems to be caused by there being no fish in the fishing zone. I designated a bunch of fishing zones in one map and had this happen. A message sometimes pops up saying "There is nothing to catch in the ___ swamps." If you check all your fishing zones and they all say Fishing (0), then your fishers will just stand around holding traps like idiots.

[melomel]

After a bit of experimentation, this seems to be caused by there being no fish in the fishing zone. I designated a bunch of fishing zones in one map and had this happen. A message sometimes pops up saying "There is nothing to catch in the ___ swamps." If you check all your fishing zones and they all say Fishing (0), then your fishers will just stand around holding traps like idiots.

Nope--you get the "nothing to catch" message when they're trying to fish and failing.  If they're trying to catch a live fish, you'll get a message along the lines of "no valid collection source/zone", like when you tell the dorfs to collect sand without a sand-collection zone.

Although they probably still sit there blinking on the animal stockpile.  Dorfs are good at standing around like idiots.

The main problem I've noticed with Experimental Games 1-2 is that the fishing labor takes precedence over the catching live fish labor.  If you tell them to catch a fish without an active zone, they'll stand on the animal stockpile.  Enable a zone, and they will all rush out and catch one fishie-thing each, and then when that task is done, they'll ignore other catch-live orders and promptly start to fish the ponds dry instead of trapping another live critter.

The next step is probably to fiddle with the raws.  I still suspect the season tags.

[MrWillsauce]

Psh, mog juice. I'll stick with my dwarven cheese than you very much.

[Urist McDwarfFortress]

Has anyone actually SEEN a moghopper?

[JohnieRWilkins]

Try starting an adventurer and searching carefully in the proper regions during the summer. That seems like a faster way of checking for mog hoppers.

[MrWillsauce]

Try starting an adventurer and searching carefully in the proper regions during the summer. That seems like a faster way of checking for mog hoppers.

That gives me an idea. Could somebody go out as an adventurer, collect a TON of live vermin using his boundless TARDIS backpack, then leave them at a place for a dwarven settlement later on to use easily. Think about it: thousands of blocks of dwarven cheese, barrels of mog juice, and tame demon rats (I don't actually know if they can be tamed) right from the start. 

[Urist McDwarfFortress]

Try starting an adventurer and searching carefully in the proper regions during the summer. That seems like a faster way of checking for mog hoppers.

tame demon rats (I don't actually know if they can be tamed)

Demon rats have the [EVIL] tag, which IIRC, means they can't be tamed.

[Urist McDwarfFortress]

I still suspect the season tags.

I've been doing a little research on this. Chipmunks also have the [NO_WINTER] tag, but I have tons of them in my current fort. So unless its an issue with the [NO_SPRING] and [NO_AUTUMN] tags in particular, I don't think this is the issue.

PS. Acorn Flies have the [SAVAGE] tag, and they work fine. So its not that either.

[laularukyrumo]

That gives me an idea.

I've had swarms of flies that WILL NOT GO AWAY under any circumstances... Can you trap flies or acorn flies with animal traps? If so, fuck yes, I'm starting a trapping industry, because those damn flies are just raping my collective psyche. Not to mention aggravating the SHIT out of my OCD, because I can have cats massacre the rat swarms, but they do nothing to flies.

[Urist McDwarfFortress]

Can you trap flies or acorn flies with animal traps?

No. Flies, and things like that have the [VERMIN_NOTRAP] tag.