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[pisskop]

Ive mostly either avoided kennels since they stopped training dogs or built one for aesthetic purposes.

Recently Ive made the effort of making and using them, but Im kind of fency on them.  Maybe its paranoia, but I think Im getting more vermin related bad thoughts and I wonder about its capacity to produce food.

Yay or Nay?  Worth the effort and wood or what?

What are your experiences with it?

Does it hold any value, RP or otherwise?

[BlackFlyme]

I don't personally find vermin too worthwhile.

Most don't live long, and they don't really serve much of a purpose. They can be pets like normal critters can, but normal pets have a better life expectancy, and aren't as likely to get mauled by a cat. I suppose it nets your animal trainers a bit of experience, for what that's worth.

There are quite a few hateable vermin that you would want to avoid, however. Even just seeing the vermin in a cage will spark a thought, though the thought is not as bad as encountering a wild one.

Any vermin that flies in swarms will be able to annoy dwarves, even if they do not normally detest the vermin.

[Larix]

Currently, kennels and the trapper job are pretty much useless. Vermin can be adopted as pets, but they have minimal value, so the owners will get very little happiness out of it, while dwarfs who have a hate for any vermin found around your place get many more chances of seeing detested creatures on display, which causes fairly strong unhappy thoughts. Adopted vermin birds also tend to utterly bug up the game with endless cancellation spam.

The economical value of vermin-capturing is extremely small - some vermin have extracts, cave spiders can be farmed for webs (the low-value cave spider silk, but they're much more productive than a wool industry), creepy crawlers[1] can be butchered for ~2 meat (completely irrelevant, since you usually have two or three total in the lifetime of a fort). I think vermin must be tamed in order to fetch any price when selling to caravans, and they're rarely worth more than the food needed to tame them.

Trappers can replace cats, but that's solidly in self-challenge territory.

[1] as far as i know, all other vermin is too small to butcher, i.e. it has no food value whatsoever, apart from constituting a very small and inefficient (and massively tantrum-promoting) last buffer against starvation.

[slothen]

on the other hand, if you ever want to force a dwarf to eat his own pet, you have to give him a vermin pet.

[taptap]

Gonna necro this.

I am playing around w/ kennel and small animal catching / taming as well, mainly because I have plans for a zoo and a location in mind already. While it kind of works to run the fortress catless atm, I have yet to see a dwarf adopt a vermin pet - is there anything I can do to speed up adoption other than toggling availability that does not seem to do anything or do they ever only adopt preferred animals? (What is not to love about a tame olm, seriously? I would add a lovely glass terrarium if someone wants to adopt it.)

I have a problem w/ fire snakes who are trapped from time to time, but escape with a destroyed trap but no additional damage usually. How do I guide the trapper to ignore fire snakes for the moment, and even if I end with some nethercap traps / cages at one point, how do I ensure the trapper uses them for trapping fire snakes and not just the next best rat while going for the fire snake with the next copper trap?

[Astrid]

I fear you cannot order them to ignore a certain type of vermin etc pp.
But look at the bright side, depending on how long your traps survive the firesnakes you can do this.

Wiki:
"Liquid fire is an extract derived from fire snakes at a butcher's shop by a dwarf with the animal dissector labor enabled. It has no known use except as a trade good. 1 Fire snake will yield 5 units of liquid, worth 100☼ each, for a total of 500☼ per vial. Extraction kills the fire snake. "

[Larix]

Trap escape happens so quickly that chances of processing a trapped animal are very bad. In my experience, copper traps melt much too quickly. There's no good recipe against fire snakes apart from cats.

In the .40 versions, underground vermin properly repopulates - in areas close to the caverns, you'll get a steady stream of cave spiders/fire snakes, and creepy crawlers usually make their first showing in a veritable invasion (can be a bountiful if slightly disgusting source of food).

[Col_Jessep]

I make all my cages from glass. (I don't use traps.) They look nice, are easy to produce if you have sand and trees, their resources are renewable and they train your glassmaker. Since glass is magma safe it can probably hold firesnakes?

[taptap]

There's no good recipe against fire snakes apart from cats.

... but I want to tame them, not to kill them. You know, for the creatures of the magma sea room in the local zoo.