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[Melting Sky]

Cave crocodiles and jabberers are amazing for this. For animals you can embark with turkeys and pigs are good.

[Beast Tamer]

Cave crocodiles and jabberers are amazing for this. For animals you can embark with turkeys and pigs are good.

Then I'll be on the lookout for those when I finally breach the caverns.

[Elagn]

Personaly, I like using wild boars, similar to pigs, no food required, quickly reproduce, domesticatable, and they also give ivory for your craftsdwarves when slaughtered. I will often get pigs to start, then upgrade when posible.

Also, Rocs aren't all that great, i have gotten them and bred them, they are rather slow actualy with small clutch sizes, though extremely quick (for a megabeast) to mature

[Linkxsc]

I usually bring some peahens (1 pair) and turkeys (also 1 pair), right off, and a pair of pigs. I'll not touch any of them until theres been at least 2 batches of chicks from the turkeys and peahens, and i leave the pigs to breed till about year 5-6. Usually that will set me up to be fully self sustaining on food without even farming (plus cheese is always a plus). Although I'll often also set up massed cage traps, and waste about 10-15 dorfs as full time animal trainers, domesticate everything, and feast on all.

Recently though I've done an embark on kinda a peninsula with a bay to the south (8x8 embark, TEH LAG) Started off ok, opted for 2 of every domestic bird, and some pigs. Didn't bring much for equipment though. Started carving into the ground, made it to summer... 2 whales beached themselves, 1 regular sperm, 1 Giant sperm. within a half a month of eachother. Literally had to build a bucher next to each one, and a minecart system to bring the food to the fort before it all rotted (only had 11 dorfs total), now I'm after the main caravan, looking at my food stocks menu showing >20000 meat. Also anybody need some bone bolts? I think I'll have me a master bonecarver soon enough.

Wonder if i'll get any more whales? already have food for 200 dorfs for like 20 years, even if i cook it all down (right now its quantum stocked, but i have nowhere near the space for the actual food/bone storage) i'll still end up with 5000+ meals

In hindsight though, is there ever gonna be a change to make it so that larger animals produce more hides and thus leather, than smaller animals?

[Beast Tamer]

If only dwarves could fish for whales, then I'd have some use for the dozen or so fishermen that always come to my fort.

[Linkxsc]

If only dwarves could fish for whales, then I'd have some use for the dozen or so fishermen that always come to my fort.

Actually, fishing a river can be a very effective way to supply yourself with food. Even murky pools can often turn out 50-100 fish to feed your dorfs in the early stages of fort development.

But yeah, damn whales. I just hope I don't have a dead one on the beach when a necromancer shows up (On a small continent, not an evil biome, but im DAMN close to that tower) Have already had 2 zombie seiges, but no necromancer has shown themselves, and nothings reanimating... yet.

[Snaake]

-snip-
In hindsight though, is there ever gonna be a change to make it so that larger animals produce more hides and thus leather, than smaller animals?

You can mod this in now, doesn't even require a regen iirc. I can post the raws later tonight. (edit: added the following:)

To be able to get several pieces of leather out of larger animals:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

add the following to the skin template (just tack them on at the end, before the next one) in material_template_default.txt:
   [STOCKPILE_GLOB]
   [BUTCHER_SPECIAL:GLOB:NONE]
   [DO_NOT_CLEAN_GLOB]
   [REACTION_CLASS:SKIN]
Also, in reaction_other.txt, under [REACTION:TAN_A_HIDE], change
   [REAGENT:A:1:NONE:NONE:NONE:NONE][USE_BODY_COMPONENT][UNROTTEN] to
   [REAGENT:A:4:GLOB:NONE:NONE:NONE][REACTION_CLASS:SKIN][UNROTTEN]
I recommend 4 globs per leather, that should stop turkeys from giving you 2 skins (which they do with 3 globs per leather) IIRC. Basically the idea is that poultry = 1 leather, dogs/pigs etc. = 2 leather?, Cows and such = ~8 leather? Considering helms are material size 2, leather armor material size 6 etc, that sounds about right to me.

That will cause butchering to give stacks of skin globs . Tanning jobs take a whole stack and produce multiple pieces of leather. I recommend turning the globs/raw skins/whichever category they get stored off at all stockpiles and just having a tanner right next to the butcher. I recommend this even if you don't mod your raws as above.

Also, if you want to make leather items from crocodiles, monitor lizards and other scaled creatures (which have no skin, just scale instead), add the 4 lines above and [MATERIAL_REACTION_PRODUCT:TAN_MAT:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:SCALE] as a 5th line. The material properties of scale are slightly different, so I don't know if it's better or worse but at least you'll be able to use cave crocodile (or dragon!) leather/scale (I can't remember what it's called when tanned) for decorations, bags, clothing etc.

Those mods should work without a regen iirc, I've used them before but it's been a while. I didn't invent them, it's from a small mod. It won't work with stuff that's already been butchered, but it should work with any live animals or corpses you butcher right after applying it.


Regarding your sperm whale woes, yea, the hauling on those is a project in it's own right, but it seems you've done that bit. Some other stuff:

• I guess you have the bugfix for the "I'll use this whole stack of bone to make 1 item" bug?
• Sperm whales are POPULATION_NUMBER:30:50 (and giant 15:30), so I'd guess you'll get more. In CLUSTER_NUMBER:1:5 at a time (giant ones 1:1), no less.
• Also, those population numbers are per biome afaik, in case you have 2+ separate ocean biomes on your embark
• Cook a Giant sperm whale meat/intestines/fat/spermwhale meat roast, it will give a stack of food up to 11k in size! If all the stacks are too large to fit in barrels, you can save 75% space by cooking them into roasts, since 1 stack takes at most 1 tile anyway. The amount of meals provided by food doesn't changed by cooking it or depending on how to cook it (2-4 ingredients), so the only reason not to cook roasts is if you don't have 4 types of food... or if the first type ends up spoiling before the last is hauled to the kitchen. Save and give it a go, dfhack die (or windows force close) if that happens?
• Also, it's not just the size of your embark, it's also teh ocean waves = TEH LAG. It's effectively constant liquid flow.

[Linkxsc]

Well my game is the... Perdexis Errant LNP r45 (every start does run a butt-ton of hotfixes) with a handful of minor mods a friend of mine added in (honestly I don't know what they all are, but there are peregrine falcons on literally EVERY biome. Also he increased the extinction caps on all the creatures in the game by a large margin, so their virtually impossible to kill off. Also fishing can be done for decades in the same pond before they show running out problems)
The whales are getting ridiculous though. My games a bit slow, but im up to 34 dorfs, and now I'm looking at building a drowning chamber to get whales, because theres a pod of 4 of them thats been lolygagging around by the shore for a season now, and you can never have enough whalemeat roasts. And yeah, 20-30fps is my current norm, but its not really ad. I've had forts down to 5fps before literally giving them a stack of manager orders, and just leaving the game on and going to bed.

TY for the leather mod though. Nifty, just wondering, does it scale globs generated based on the size of the creature being butchered (thus whales with huge bodies should be putting them out by the hundreds?)

[Snaake]

That's the idea. The globs-to-leather ratio is a constant with a value of 4, but the size of the glob stack depends on the creature size +some other factors (I hear large hoofed animals give slightly less proportionate to their size, because the hoof body part doesn't have skin). Have fun with sperm whale leather everything . Oh, and for dwarfbonus, capture the whales alive and breed them. The merman thread may give you some pointers with that.

edited for typos

[MerkerBenson]

My favorite animal to breed for both food and booze is the plump helmet man! From a handful of these things I can feed a 170 population fortress. My dwarfs eat plump helmet man bisques, plump helmet man omelets, plump helmet man roast, and they drink plump helmet man wine! Of course every time a caravan drops some other types of booze half the fort is at the trade depot drinking themselves into a stupor .... I can also train them as hunting or war animals and they protect the fort to the best of their weak ability. Also, they hunt vermin!

Careful though, these Plump Helmet men breed really fast, and, especially at the beginning of a fort when you have a handful of dwarfs, they can easily overwhelm the dwarfs and nuke the fort. You have been warned!

PS: Masterwork mod

Cheers