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Author Topic: Pet burial  (Read 1150 times)

Larix

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Pet burial
« on: January 07, 2013, 02:39:55 pm »

I can't seem to properly register on the bugtracker, so i'm posting this here:

Burial of fortress pets is known to have two notable bugs:
- cats who adopted a dwarf never or only rarely get buried (but in my experience, dwarfs tend to not care about their corpses rotting; might be sufficiently isolated refuse piles, though)
- dead work animals assigned to a dwarf typically don't get buried at all and the dwarf does get a bad feeling for seeing their unburied corpse/skeleton.

When trying to start a pet cavy breeding programme in another fort i noticed that all my dead cavies suddenly got buried - not one had gotten adopted, they had merely been set to 'available'. Intrigued by this, i set some dogs to 'available' immediately before training them for war. I did not assign those dogs to dwarfs, which might mess things up again, but the unassigned war dogs (and the one who got adopted before getting trained...) were all buried after death.

So it appears that what determines whether a tame animal gets buried or not is only whether or not the 'available' flag has been set.

Unfortunately i don't have a usable testing fort around to check whether this knowledge can be used to get individually assigned war and hunting dogs buried after all, but it would certainly be worth a try.
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wierd

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Re: Pet burial
« Reply #1 on: January 07, 2013, 04:04:22 pm »

I don't usually care too much about pet deaths. Just assign a special refuse pit in an atom smasher, and be done with it. No corpse to rot == only minor bad thoughts that are easily treated with various happiness generating methods.

In the case of "Urist McCatlady", I usually pre-emptively atom smash the cats, preventing the dwarf from noticing the bodies via said smashing.  Keeps Urist McCatlady from initiating a tantrum spiral.
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Cheedows

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Re: Pet burial
« Reply #2 on: January 07, 2013, 11:28:24 pm »

Yeah, I don't bother with wasting coffins for animals while a bunch of dwarves are laying dead outside.

A side-question, would burying one part of the animal count such as dwarves?  This is because the goblins flayed a bunch of pets (my new elvish dingoes and black bears too, that I got from beating them hippies down)  I bury some noble pets so he doesn't make outrageous mandates.
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moki

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Re: Pet burial
« Reply #3 on: January 08, 2013, 08:42:30 am »

I think burying pets works the same as with dwarfs. Only with pets I don't bother at all, because the bad thought (if it even happens) is very minor and easily compensated by a nice *dog tallow roast*. Also pets don't become ghosts, so it's not urgent. I'd only worry in an evil biome where being attacked by undead fluffy wamblers is a frightening possibility.
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But my good sir, the second death was for Dwarven Science!

krenshala

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Re: Pet burial
« Reply #4 on: January 08, 2013, 09:46:31 am »

Just to verify, your unburied available animals didn't die outdoors with the
  • rders to collect refuse from outdoors disabled, did they?
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Quote from: Haspen
Quote from: phoenixuk
Zepave Dawnhogs the Butterfly of Vales the Marsh Titan ... was taken out by a single novice axedwarf and his pet war kitten. Long Live Domas Etasastesh Adilloram, slayer of the snow butterfly!
Doesn't quite have the ring of heroics to it...
Mother: "...and after the evil snow butterfly was defeated, Domas and his kitten lived happily ever after!"
Kids: "Yaaaay!"

Larix

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Re: Pet burial
« Reply #5 on: January 08, 2013, 02:56:57 pm »

Just to verify, your unburied available animals didn't die outdoors with the
  • rders to collect refuse from outdoors disabled, did they?
Don't know what you're referring to, but shouldn't that be irrelevant in the case of properly burial-enabled corpses? In my experience they don't fall under refuse (as can be seen by that action using the 'burial' labour and not the 'refuse hauling' one) - at least dwarven corpses from the surface are collected with 'outdoor' refuse set to ignore.
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