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[TC]

Quick question:

Where can I find the weights of domesticated egglaying children, stones, bars, blocks, and logs?


Long version:

I find it hard to produce enough leather for my fortress. To solve the problem, I've designed what I call the "Raw Hide Automat". It works like this: I put some nest boxes and some hens into a room, then I block all entry so my dwarves can't get in to collect eggs. Inside the room is a trap door. As the birds lay eggs, the room fills up, and eventually wandering birds trigger a pressure plate which opens a hatch causing other wandering birds to fall to the level below. The fallen birds are accessible to my dwarves and are autobutchered for an easy, endless, no maintenance supply of raw hides.

Before I can complete the prototype, I need to figure out how to calibrate the pressure plates. I'd like the plates to trigger when a single instance of the lightest bird steps on them. So, what is the lightest bird and how much does it weigh? I can't find that documented anywhere.

I suspect that pressure plates cannot normally be calibrated to trigger when a single small bird steps on them. However, I'm hopeful that some combination of stones, bars, blocks, and/or logs dumped on top of the plate would bring it to the verge of triggering, such that a single small bird would tip the balance. Finding that combination requires knowledge of stone, bar, block, and log weights, however, and I can't find those documented anywhere. Does that information exist?


-TC

[Urist Da Vinci]

http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Weight

[TC]

Thank you for that link, but can you elaborate? That page doesn't have a table of weights; it has a table of volumes, and a note that density is "found in the raws". What are the "raws" and how do I search them for density?

[Necrisha]

under the data file and in objects are the raw data files for most creatures and materials in the game. I recommend under domestic animals text file.

[TC]

Thank you. I did not know about those files, and they look like a great source of information. I can find density for most things there, but density seems to be missing from all the creature files, including creature_domestic. Could that data be somewhere else?

[SixOfSpades]

I find it hard to produce enough leather for my fortress.

What the hell are you making?!? How can you be raising any animal and not have leather coming out of your ears? The humans bring craptons of it every summer! It sounds more like you have a bottleneck in Butchery/Tanning/Leatherworking, rather than a problem with your actual supply. Either that, or you've got some mod where a single shoe takes 8 entire hides to make.

[doublestrafe]

If you want not to run out of leather, talk to your Outpost Liaison. One notch of demand guarantees that the next caravan will bring one bin of that type of leather. Request them all and they'll bring several hundred pieces. I'm not sure how much they'll end up bringing if you bump the demand over one--I've never had to try.

That said, your bird dispenser is aweome. Only problem I see with it is that it's theoretically possible, though unlikely, for males to eventually crowd out the females, which would bring the whole production to a grinding halt.

[TC]

Yes, I thought about the males vs. females problem. I believe females will be less likely than males to fall through the hatches because they will spend more time sitting on nests and less time wandering, and that bias will make male overcrowding unlikely (although theoretically possible, as you say).

[Sheb]

The thing is that even if unlikely, it is bound to happen. It might be more efficient to chain your females to the nestboxes.

[Larix]

Domestic birds are too light to trigger pressure plates.

Only a few "exotic" egglayers are heavy enough for that purpose - swans and of course ostriches, emus and cassoaries. (Crundles, too, but they only lay sterile eggs if you don't mod them.)

The concept has two crucial problems:
- a creature-triggered pressure plate will activate as soon as a "heavy enough" creature steps on it and will remain active for 99 steps after the trigger has been removed (wandered off). If a new triggerer steps on the plate in the meantime, the "recovery" timeout will simply reset. Once you start crowding, the plate will be activated and the trap door open practically permanently.
- pressure plates are not activated by inert weight. They can be activated by minecarts of specific weights, but that's still a separate trigger condition from creature triggers, you can't combine them.
EDIT: to prevent misunderstandings - the _conditions_ don't combine. You can put multiple trigger conditions on a single plate, but they do their checks independently of each other. If any one condition is fulfilled, the plate goes active, but the condition must be truly met, you cannot combine "partial" fulfilments (say, you have a creature weighing 50% of the requirement and 2/3 of the required water on the plate - nothing happens, because neither condition is met, the partial fulfilment of either isn't taken into account on other checks). Furthermore, since a plate only has two possible states - "activated" and "inactive", fulfilling multiple trigger requirements at the same time gives the same "active" result as fulfilling only one condition.

You can make an "overflow" chicken farm by building a small platform largely surrounded by open space:

Code: [Select]


#######
#.....#
#.+++.#
#.+N+.#
#.+++.#
#..+..#
###D###

# - wall   . - open space    + - floor    N - nest box   D - optional door for later access

As the mother hen breeds, chicks and eventually chicken will accumulate on the platform. Once the platform gets crowded, they'll occasionally peck at each other, and if the attacked party dodges out of the way of the attack, it may dodge off the platform and land one level down. You need to use non-flying egg-layers for this construction.

[TC]

- pressure plates are not activated by inert weight.

I am sorry to hear this, since this fact does, indeed, invalidate my design. Thank you for the information. I've updated the wiki page to include it.

-TC

[doublestrafe]

Ok, thinking out loud here. Chickens can go through unlocked doors, right? Unlocked doors can hold back water. Water can trigger pressure plates. What about this?

# = grate
^ = pressure plate
D = door
%% = pump

Code: [Select]

=====
#^D≈=
===%=
   %
Set the pressure plate to trigger at 3 or so. If a chicken tries to go through the door, they'll get pushed back by the water being pumped in, and the water will trigger the plate and drain through the grate.

[Loci]

Why do you need the birds to trigger anything? Just create a room with nestboxes on the periphery and a retracting bridge in the center. Link the bridge to a repeater, so it will trigger occasionally (a pressure plate in a dwarf-traveled hallway is fine). You can designate the area over the bridge as a meeting hall (to encourage your critters to congregate). It would also work with other animals (dogs, for instance) if you chain the females up around the edge of the room (though you will need to add more females occasionally).

Of course, critter-dropping ingenuity aside, you can simply modify the settings to the "autobutcher" plugin in dfhack to retain a larger number of adult females, thereby generating more babies and, consequently, more leather. 

[TC]

If a chicken tries to go through the door, they'll get pushed back by the water being pumped in, and the water will trigger the plate and drain through the grate.

I like this idea; I'll try it at the first chance.

Why do you need the birds to trigger anything? Just create a room with nestboxes on the periphery and a retracting bridge in the center. Link the bridge to a repeater, so it will trigger occasionally (a pressure plate in a dwarf-traveled hallway is fine). You can designate the area over the bridge as a meeting hall (to encourage your critters to congregate). It would also work with other animals (dogs, for instance) if you chain the females up around the edge of the room (though you will need to add more females occasionally).

The repeater is an excellent idea. It is certainly the best design so far. But why do you recommend a retracting bridge rather than a hatch? I can see that a bridge may be better than a hatch because it covers more squares with the same number of mechanisms, but did you have something else in mind?

Of course, critter-dropping ingenuity aside, you can simply modify the settings to the "autobutcher" plugin in dfhack to retain a larger number of adult females, thereby generating more babies and, consequently, more leather.

This defies my understanding of how egglayers work. I thought egglayers would not multiply as long as dwarves are able to collect their eggs. Thus, egglayer breeding requires either active management or a scheme like mine; simply configuring the autobutcher plugin will not work. Am I mistaken?

-TC

[doublestrafe]

This defies my understanding of how egglayers work. I thought egglayers would not multiply as long as dwarves are able to collect their eggs. Thus, egglayer breeding requires either active management or a scheme like mine; simply configuring the autobutcher plugin will not work. Am I mistaken?

Well, you can go into the z > (k)itchen menu and turn off cooking the eggs, and also forbid them from your food stockpiles.