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[weenog]

Ooooh that I didn't think of. Better stop making those omlettes...

Nah, keep making them.  You don't want her roosting a box of duds when she should be making fertilized eggs.  Just make sure to stop them from being harvested after a male does show up.

[Jenniretta]

Yeah Jabberers are really strong. Only a bit smaller than an elephant, and they fight mostly by ripping off limbs. I lost about three trained, steel-armoured dwarves to jabberers in nourishedcobalt by the time it fell. Both that showed up on the map for me were male, and only appeared in the lowest cavern layer.
If you take the time to train them, they're much better than elephants - they don't graze, and they seem to like ripping limbs off a lot more than the elephants do, disabling enemies before they land a solid hit.
The 4x multiplier means crafting the bones, skulls, and leather of the ones who do eventually die in battle can get you a LOT of trade fodder, too.

[AlmightyOne]

Speaking of these magnificent beasts, What about the other trainable cavern creatures,The giant bat and Cave swallow, how do they fare in combat?

[Jenniretta]

Speaking of these magnificent beasts, What about the other trainable cavern creatures,The giant bat and Cave swallow, how do they fare in combat?

They're not terrible, not as great as Jabberers of course, but their size alone makes them formidable.

[Ubiq]

They don't have the trainable status by default (which is odd since goblins and dwarves use them for war all the time), but Rutherers are a pretty solid choice for combat since they're large in size, show up in sufficient numbers that it's not that hard to get a breeding pair, and reproduce relatively quickly. They need five years to hit maximum size, but even at birth, they're five times the size of a dwarf and are larger than hippos by age two.

[They Got Leader]

Edit: I transposed numbers. My bad.

[Sutremaine]

Jabberers also have a different attack routine compared to elephants. Elephants pick randomly from four blunt kicks and two edged gores, none of which latch. Jabberers have two edged snatches and one edged, latching bite, and the bite is the primary attack. The wiki notes that elephants are effective against armoured foes because their blunt attacks can bypass armour, but jabberers don't need to get through armour to render it useless (to its owner, anyway. The body parts left inside the torn-off armour will remain adequately protected from jabberer bites).

The 4x multiplier means crafting the bones, skulls, and leather of the ones who do eventually die in battle can get you a LOT of trade fodder, too.

Unfortunately, the dwarven reluctance to butcher dead stray animals means that you won't be able to take advantage of that multiplier. You can slaughter animals that were going to die of infection anyway, though.

[Trapezohedron]

Jabberers are effective due to their edged attacks and size. Pretty much like a dragon biting your arm off.

[Larix]

The 4x multiplier means crafting the bones, skulls, and leather of the ones who do eventually die in battle can get you a LOT of trade fodder, too.

Unfortunately, the dwarven reluctance to butcher dead stray animals means that you won't be able to take advantage of that multiplier.

You could ask your friendly neighbourhood necromancer for help with that. Although that'd add the conundrum of deciding whether to put down and butcher the undead jabberer (no mean feat, i should think) or whether to weaponise it as a force of dwarfdom.

[Namfuak]

Speaking of these magnificent beasts, What about the other trainable cavern creatures,The giant bat and Cave swallow, how do they fare in combat?

Giant Cave Swallows can only be trained for hunting.  I had one that I trained and assigned to my hunter, but it got killed by a goblin ambush.  Unfortunately, I didn't see the battle it had with the goblins, but my guess would be that it probably died from arrows anyway.  One problem with it that I would assume will also apply to giant cave bats is that as a flying creature, it often would be flitting around and never path to help the hunter (although dogs seem to be just as useless).

I also have a rutherer that I haven't decided what to do with, and a green devourer that unfortunately doesn't count as livestock and thus is going to probably become either training for my military or the first victim of the forgotten beast arena I'm considering setting up.  I happened to capture an ankylosaurus that shoots webs.  I also have a GCS though, which I haven't tamed yet - I'm hoping to make an automated silk farm out of that, but I'll have to get into dwarfputing to make it happen.

[Sutremaine]

I'm working on an automated silk farm, after success with a semi-automated one. Top level is the webber, the bait, and a bunch of hatches in a straight line*. Middle level is a retracting bridge. Bottom level is the collection room. Somewhere in all this is a loop of track with a pressure plate in it, which is connected to the hatches. The minecart goes round and round, opening and closing the hatches and dropping the shot silk onto the bridge. Also somewhere in all of this is a pressure plate with a lever behind it, and the pressure plate is connected to the bridge (the lever is a dummy). Pull the lever, and the pressure plate doing the real work opens the bridge for 200 ticks, dumping the accumulated webs into the collection room.

Couple of issues with that though. There's a 200-tick window in which webs can brain your weavers, and unless you build in some way of blocking LOS the webs will continue to accumulate on the bridge. But I think I've got those solved.

Code: [Select]

direction of travel around large loop: anti-clockwise

 ╔═════╗
╔╗     ║
║║     ^
╚╝<--  ║
 ╚═════╝

There's a hatch on the corner track tile indicated by the <--, and it's hooked to the plate for the bridge. When the plate is triggered, the hatch immediately retracts, exposing the corner and directing the minecart into the smaller loop. With the pressure plate for the hatches no longer being triggered, the webs will remain in a single layer on the hatches. There's probably a better place to put the pressure plate, to ensure that the hatches don't ever open at the same time the bridge retracts.

There are a lot of ways to automate silk production -- the issue is safety. You could put all your weavers in the same squad and have that squad equipped with full body armour. That would work too.

*1. Bridges throw webs around when they retract, and if you haven't changed the announcements file then any webs hitting the bait animal will start a combat log, which will then be endlessly spammed by web announcements. 2. You don't need a massive catch area for the webs. They'll mount up very quickly.

[Drazinononda]

That's right - three pecks, and three lost limbs.  I need to catch more of these things.

They're only slightly smaller than elephants so there's a ton of force behind those beaks.

If you look closely, two of those limbs were removed with a swipe from a single toe.

Speaking of these magnificent beasts, What about the other trainable cavern creatures,The giant bat and Cave swallow, how do they fare in combat?

[...] One problem with it that I would assume will also apply to giant cave bats is that as a flying creature, it often would be flitting around and never path to help the hunter [...]

AFAIK flyers that are tamed no longer fly around. Their [FLYER] tag still allows them to, say, flap up or down a rampless 1-z level change, stranding them on a wall where your dwarves have a harder time repasturing them, but they don't soar the skies with their annoying and occasionally kleptomaniacal cousins.

[Urist Da Vinci]

...

Speaking of these magnificent beasts, What about the other trainable cavern creatures,The giant bat and Cave swallow, how do they fare in combat?

[...] One problem with it that I would assume will also apply to giant cave bats is that as a flying creature, it often would be flitting around and never path to help the hunter [...]

AFAIK flyers that are tamed no longer fly around. Their [FLYER] tag still allows them to, say, flap up or down a rampless 1-z level change, stranding them on a wall where your dwarves have a harder time repasturing them, but they don't soar the skies with their annoying and occasionally kleptomaniacal cousins.

Plus they can trade places with a dwarf when moving down from a wall to a tile where a dwarf is standing, stranding the dwarf on top of the wall (where he then dies of thirst).

[AlmightyOne]

Plus they can trade places with a dwarf when moving down from a wall to a tile where a dwarf is standing, stranding the dwarf on top of the wall (where he then dies of thirst).

Now that's something I should be warned about. I didn't know they could do that.

[simonthedwarf]

Oh god I want jabber