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[MasterN]

Finding the proper section for posting my questions is a bit tricky, so I hope this section is fine...


I've recently (meaning on my current map) got some trouble breeding my cave crocodiles and giant cave spiders (yes, the raws are adjusted and it should work just fine).
For a long time I had trouble with dragons as well, but on another world they multiplied quite nicely , so the raws should be working properly.

The wiki names a certain limit concerning a total population cap per species for all animals of about 50...

"There is currently a per-creature-type population cap, observed to be around 50, past which breeding animals will not get pregnant; existing pregnancies will mature to term. Once the population drops below the cap, the creatures will begin breeding again. "
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Breeding

In my quest to breed these creatures I would like to remove any sort of limitation the game might throw at me. The wiki doesn't state if it's a map limit or a world limit, and since I play on a large world, a 50 unit limit would be pretty annoying there.

Can this limit be eased or removed alltogether?

Are there other factors not mentioned in the wiki? Another wiki page mentioned, that a nesting animal must not be disturbed during it's breeding period, but that goes against my own observation.

What I want to say is, I have no idea at the moment why I'm not getting the desired results...
My cave crocodile rests on a 50 egg clutch...^^

Ahh... Both male and female are present of course.

[AutomataKittay]

It's a per-creature limit of 50 on the embark area before pregnancy stops. It's pretty reasonable because of FPS and pathing issues. If you have 48 females and 1 male, it could easily explode into 100 plus children because the cap don't terminate pre-existing pregnancy. Egg-layers are even worse since their egg clusters tend to be bigger than live birth amount of other creatures.

And no, it's not removable, unfortunately.

Nesting animals have to be left on their nest, if they get bumped or pulled off for even a few ticks, the egg's automatically infertile. If the eggs don't hatches after a year, it's probably infertile.

Honestly, having a lot of hand-on experience in breeding animals, I'm very glad for 50 cap. It at least keep the number managable, rather than exploding until the fortress crashes.

Dunno what world size have to do with the cap, since it only applies to fortress region.

[Garath]

if they were previously wild animals and still get reinforcement taming to maintain their tame level, trainers have a bad habit of disturbing egg layers, causing them to move one tile or crouch, which causes the eggs to fail.

[MasterN]

OK, I'll remove the trainers for the time being.

Thanks so far.

[kingubu]

I've observed the cap takes a few weeks to reset.  Eggs laid the day/week after the population of the egg layers drop below 50 won't hatch.  I usually just throw out the first batch of eggs laid after I winnow the population down because I'm too lazy to figure out exactly when eggs will start being fertile.  It's somewhere around 4 weeks I think.

However this also works the other way.  Going above 50 doesn't stop fertilization for a few weeks too.  48 females and 1 males will lay two fertile clutches one after the other.  If they all lay about the same time.

For cave crocs, this will result in `~40x2x48 baby crocs.  ~3840 babies after 6 months.

I've never actually done this with crocs, but I've had 600 peafowl running around my fort and trampling all the grass and making life pretty much hell.

As far as modding goes, if you add [USE_ANY_PET_RACE] to the dwarf entity, you can just request/buy tame crocs from the caravan.  If your civ has them, which they almost always do.

[Quietust]

I've observed the cap takes a few weeks to reset.  Eggs laid the day/week after the population of the egg layers drop below 50 won't hatch.  I usually just throw out the first batch of eggs laid after I winnow the population down because I'm too lazy to figure out exactly when eggs will start being fertile.  It's somewhere around 4 weeks I think.

However this also works the other way.  Going above 50 doesn't stop fertilization for a few weeks too.  48 females and 1 males will lay two fertile clutches one after the other.  If they all lay about the same time.

The last time I looked at the code, it checked the baby/child cap (for animals) at the exact moment of fertilization and did not cache the result. Furthermore, the exact criteria for animal breeding are as follows:
* No more than 50 existing animals of that race
* No more than 3 children per adult

I first located this logic in version 0.23.130.23a, and I'm pretty sure it's the same in version 0.34.11, at least for live births - I don't know the location of the code for egg-layers, though I could probably find it without too much trouble.