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[GavJ]

Lots of details that aren't important here, but basically I'm working on a large mod to make all food production much mroe challenging. One small part of the mod is that almost all animals are grazers, so that you can't lame-ly have pigs in 1x1 cells in a dungeon with no food and still have them magically grow meat for you, for example.

However, amongst domestic creatures, cats and dogs present a problem, because grazer for them, unlike pigs, makes no sense. But I also don't want to just make them un-butcherable, as that seems awfully arbitrary. And it also defies centuries of dwarven tradition of using cats as an important material resource and method of controlling catsplosions.

My best solution so far is to claim that in this mod universe, pure carnivores (and either all birds or perhaps only flying birds) are "poisonous to dwarves," and so when you butcher them, you get bones and skin and skull, but no usable meat. This then is accomplished in the RAWs by painstakingly replacing the tissues of all carnivores with identical tissues for combat purposes, but ones that upon butchery yield "poisonous tissue" instead of useful meats and organs.

This will work, but is a huge amount of effort to mod (since I also have to do it for non-domestic animals that don't make sense as grazers, everything from albatrosses to badgers to tigers), so I'm wondering if anybody has a better solution.


(Another thing I considered was adding [UNBUTCHERABLE] to those animals, and then having them drop special corpse items that could then be processed at some workshop into a fixed number of bones and skin. Which is much easier to mod, but feels weirder, and also makes bone amoutns non-dependent on animal type, which is also weird)

[4maskwolf]

Lots of details that aren't important here, but basically I'm working on a large mod to make all food production much mroe challenging. One small part of the mod is that almost all animals are grazers, so that you can't lame-ly have pigs in 1x1 cells in a dungeon with no food and still have them magically grow meat for you, for example.

However, amongst domestic creatures, cats and dogs present a problem, because grazer for them, unlike pigs, makes no sense. But I also don't want to just make them un-butcherable, as that seems awfully arbitrary. And it also defies centuries of dwarven tradition of using cats as an important material resource and method of controlling catsplosions.

My best solution so far is to claim that in this mod universe, pure carnivores (and either all birds or perhaps only flying birds) are "poisonous to dwarves," and so when you butcher them, you get bones and skin and skull, but no usable meat. This then is accomplished in the RAWs by painstakingly replacing the tissues of all carnivores with identical tissues for combat purposes, but ones that upon butchery yield "poisonous tissue" instead of useful meats and organs.

This will work, but is a huge amount of effort to mod (since I also have to do it for non-domestic animals that don't make sense as grazers, everything from albatrosses to badgers to tigers), so I'm wondering if anybody has a better solution.


(Another thing I considered was adding [UNBUTCHERABLE] to those animals, and then having them drop special corpse items that could then be processed at some workshop into a fixed number of bones and skin. Which is much easier to mod, but feels weirder, and also makes bone amoutns non-dependent on animal type, which is also weird)

Hmm...
It would be a pain to mod, but on the other hand I'm not sure you have much of a choice.  That is actually a really clever way around the problem, I'm looking forward to seeing this mod at completion.  I've got way too much time on my hands, so if you wanted help with the slog of placing this tissue in the carnivores you could send me the tissue definition and I can help with some of the raw files, just to speed up the process.

[Meph]

Why not use SPECIFIC_FOOD on them, make them grazers that cant eat grass, and need a dwarf to feed them? Use meat/muscle as specific food, problem solved.

[4maskwolf]

Why not use SPECIFIC_FOOD on them, make them grazers that cant eat grass, and need a dwarf to feed them? Use meat/muscle as specific food, problem solved.

Do the dwarves actually feed them?  I did not realize this was moddable.

[Meph]

Dwarves should feed them, yes. I think they do, if you have the food item available. Its been ages since I tested this. The priority is very low, just like feeding prisoners though...

I personally made a custom workshop for things like that. large, 11x11, gets a "feed animals" job, uses up a specific reagent, sets the hunger_counter of all animals pastured on it to 0. That way indoor farming of grazers is possible.

Of course you can also use this for dogs/cats. "Feeding Station" or "Dog Kennels", etc...

[GavJ]

IIRC, they need to be pets to be fed. Also, yes, they'll end up starving to death whenever everyone in the fortress is busy with anything (or, if I'm correct about the pets thing, whenever their owner is busy, even if the fort isnt)

But worth looking into.

Another option that occurred to me just now is that, since I already am going to require some processing on meat (like grinding and sausage making), I can just change the sausage material in b_detail_plan_default.txt's first two entries, and then only have to change the body detail lines in the raws for each creature, which is much less effort. 

The drawback is that you don't get a visual indicator of poisonous-ness immediately after butchery. However, that might actually be more fun. Especially if it NEVER gives you any indication, and instead justlets you go ahead and make sausages and then gives syndromes if you eat it, so that you as a player have to actually stop and think about whether an animal is going to be poisonous before butchering it, lol (the rules would be clearly and boldly spelled out in the mod description)

I personally made a custom workshop for things like that. large, 11x11, gets a "feed animals" job, uses up a specific reagent, sets the hunger_counter of all animals pastured on it to 0. That way indoor farming of grazers is possible.

How do you make it single out hungry animals? For that matter, how do you even make animals a reagent at all? If you just list animals, do they get led to the workshop correctly? If so, that's pretty awesome.  Using feed like this would be way more awesome in general.

[Meph]

I dont. I use food as reagent. The animals are pastured on the workshop. Every animal on top of it is fed.

[4maskwolf]

I personally made a custom workshop for things like that. large, 11x11, gets a "feed animals" job, uses up a specific reagent, sets the hunger_counter of all animals pastured on it to 0. That way indoor farming of grazers is possible.

How do you make it single out hungry animals? For that matter, how do you even make animals a reagent at all? If you just list animals, do they get led to the workshop correctly? If so, that's pretty awesome.  Using feed like this would be way more awesome in general.

He uses DFHack autosyndrome to get the animals hunger counter reset, IIRC.

[GavJ]

Ah. I'd prefer not relying on dfhack if possible. Although I guess you could do the same thing by using a boiling inorganic stone syndrome, without dfhack.

But also, doesn't that invite abuse in the form of "QUICK! Pasture 120 animals on this pasture for a few seconds while we run the job and feed all of them with one chunk of meat, then let them all go again before they start fighting!"?

[Meph]

If you manage to "quickly" pasture 120 animals... then yes.

[GavJ]

If you manage to "quickly" pasture 120 animals... then yes.

=P

1) Pastures are lined up on top of one another in a big tower of retracting bridges, 5 or 6 z levels high, heavier animals are assigned to lower levels.
2) Build a floor of featherwood on the bottom, and build the workshop on it.
3) Retract all bridges and feed, bridges re-deploy immediately after.
4) Dwarves then immediately begin repasturing animals above

hehe

[Meph]

Why? You can just keep them on the workshop.

[4maskwolf]

Why? You can just keep them on the workshop.

It depends on how big the workshop is, because crowded animals fight.

[Meph]

People would just build more workshops. Its less micromanagement.

[GavJ]

But if you build more workshops, you have to use more food per animal. In a mod like mine where the whole point is that food will be super precious, that would be very worth micromanaging for.