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[GiglameshDespair]

i want to make a fort of bones. It will be underground (as all true forts should be), so grazers are out. What animal should I use? I'm planning to use pigs. Is this the best option?

[Slayerhero90]

i want to make a fort of bones. It will be underground (as all true forts should be), so grazers are out. What animal should I use? I'm planning to use pigs. Is this the best option?

Do you have a mod that allows you to make buildings and furniture out of bones?

[forsaken1111]

It will be underground (as all true forts should be), so grazers are out.

I believe grazers work fine on cavern moss and such, so breach a cavern and you'll have plenty of grazing area since it will spread to any soil or muddied tiles underground.

[Deepblade]

Yeah, cavern moss works just fine. Wall off an area in the caverns and you got a safe spot for pastures. If you're super serial about it then you can check what you have available before each outing, sometimes there will be more exotic critters, and check the wiki on them.

Sheep are a pretty good all around animal that is almost always available. They can be milked, sheared, they don't take forever to mature, and they're good on a cold lonely night they require little pasture to survive. Alpacas and Llamas do the same thing, and are bigger, but at a cost of more pasture land. All 3 only take 2 years to become fully mature.

2 things to note right now though. Currently there's a bug preventing Fortress born animals and dwarves from maturing properly. And, you can remove the grazer tag from every creature so they're less hassle to keep alive. Certain animals have such a high grazing tag they can't keep themselves alive, like the elephant.

[Garath]

I'd go for quantity of stacks over huge stacks. For that, cave crocs are probably the best, but other egg layers usually have the advantage over regular animals in having large numbers of offspring and taking less time to mature to bone producing size

I know someone who made something similar about.. a year ago? there was a special reaction to make blocks from bones for construction, but I forgot how it worked and what was best. Lots of stacks or big stacks, but I think it took a stack and made a block, so many stacks would be best in that case

[slothen]

pigs may not be the best for bones specifically, but they are excellent general-purpose domestic animals.  They have decent sized litters, are NOT grazers, and can be milked.  Plus you can probably go into the raws and rename pig-meat to bacon or something, which is also awesome.

[forsaken1111]

I'm pretty sure the masterwork mod has bone in as a construction material but it has other things you probably don't want. Still, my fortress guard in their drakescale armor are awesome.

[Impedocles]

In masterwork, at least, bone blocks take an entire stack of bones to make.  So you will want whatever animal breeds fastest. 

Therefore, I think you will want to make it from kitten bones.

[forsaken1111]

In masterwork, at least, bone blocks take an entire stack of bones to make.  So you will want whatever animal breeds fastest. 

Therefore, I think you will want to make it from kitten bones.

Most things that use bones take the whole stack.

[Sutremaine]

The hardcoded boneworking jobs use bone stacks accordingly, so perhaps you could make a craft or something whose only purpose is to be converted into a bone block. Crafts themselves may not work out so well unless you have a single craft / instrument / toy available to your civ, as dwarves will make particular crafts randomly. Ammunition, ranged weapons, and some kinds of armour are one bone to one item, but using those as a block base is... odd.

I can't think of anything that would be really appropriate.

[Impedocles]

Just use the animal that gives the most, tiniest stacks.  As I said before, a fort made of kitten bones.  Make the catsplosion work for you.  It would be incredibly dorfy.

You could also dismember animals and butcher the parts to get more stacks from one animal.  I'm not sure if that works, though.

[kingubu]

"Best" is a vague term.  I'm guessing you mean volume of bones.

Peafowl and geese are best for bone quantity and a steal at 6 embark points each.

If you want to get nuts, and who doesn't, embark with 48 females and 1 male of each.  You'll have 1000 birds by winter.  And a nightmare of butchering logistics.

Because of the growth bug, you don't need to wait for them to grow up, they never do, but about 1/3 of them give bones right out of the egg.