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[taptap]

For the sake of Armok

1) remove animal relations from the relations screen - or at least do not treat all of them completely like dwarven relations. I have to scroll through pages of voracious cave crawler acquaintances in my animal trainer and animal haulers that are completely meaningless since most of them are not present anymore - slaughtered / traded away whatever.

2) make different animal selection screens available to each other, particularly galling that you can't cross-check for bonded animals and the descriptions in the z menu where you assign available and slaughter and you get no additional information when assigning to cages. (For items you often can expand the selection menu and look at the item, but not for animals.) So it is really tedious to ensure you trade away the scrawny specimen and keep the muscular.

[Chimerat]

So it is really tedious to ensure you trade away the scrawny specimen and keep the muscular.

Huh... I wasn't aware that did anything.

As for your suggestion, I'd like to add the ability to tell gender more easily when placing animals into cages (some you can tell by name, but not for dogs [Dogs and {I'm not sure if I'm allowed to use the term...}] and cats [Toms and Queens]). Also, it would be helpful to have all types of animals clumped together. From what I can tell, they seem to be sorted by age? Or...something?

[LMeire]

So it is really tedious to ensure you trade away the scrawny specimen and keep the muscular.

Huh... I wasn't aware that did anything.

...

As a rule of thumb, large/muscular/fat animals fare better in combat and have better returns when slaughtered; and the stats of bred animals are based mostly on the stats of the parent animals and a little bit on random chance.

--

Definitely support, I don't know how people can keep a decent meat industry going without DT to tell them which animals they're culling.

[taptap]

Definitely support, I don't know how people can keep a decent meat industry going without DT to tell them which animals they're culling.

I guess most people just make it somewhat random then? Leaving a breeding pair or two?

Ok, this finally made me succumb to DwarfTherapist (didn't realize it is available for MacOS earlier). Still, would very much like changes in game for that. (Cage assignments and relationships are not covered in DT, anyway, so this is still relevant.)

[neblime]

Definitely support, I don't know how people can keep a decent meat industry going without DT to tell them which animals they're culling.

I guess most people just make it somewhat random then? Leaving a breeding pair or two?

thats what I do... with dogs say, I just slaughter based on sex (and age), I don't see why you need to keep track of individual animals if all you want them for is meat?

[Bumber]

thats what I do... with dogs say, I just slaughter based on sex (and age), I don't see why you need to keep track of individual animals if all you want them for is meat?

It's more necessary than ever now that you can end up with animals that won't breed (due to sexual orientation.) It's especially bothersome if you keep only one adult male at a time.

[Chevaleresse]

thats what I do... with dogs say, I just slaughter based on sex (and age), I don't see why you need to keep track of individual animals if all you want them for is meat?

It's more necessary than ever now that you can end up with animals that won't breed (due to sexual orientation.) It's especially bothersome if you keep only one adult male at a time.

Generally, keeping two or three around is better anyway to provide insurance in the case of unfortunate accidents, kitten rot, accidental presses of "b" on the wrong animal, giant steel pterosaurs, et cetera.

[LMeire]

Definitely support, I don't know how people can keep a decent meat industry going without DT to tell them which animals they're culling.

I guess most people just make it somewhat random then? Leaving a breeding pair or two?

thats what I do... with dogs say, I just slaughter based on sex (and age), I don't see why you need to keep track of individual animals if all you want them for is meat?

It's also important for war animals, you don't want the giant grizzly bear gene pool being polluted by a sow that could die if goblins breathe to hard near her. As you slaughter the weakest in the population, the remaining animals will get stronger much faster.

[taptap]

Ok, a bunch of questions and comments: I am really delighted to have DT now. As far as I can tell, the fact that you can't tame (to "tame") the newly breeding creatures without child states recognized by animal trainers is a bug (DT shows them as babies etc. but in game they are shown as full animals regardless of size).

So, while I can have a fully trainerless tame draltha population by the third generation, and trade away my original (bonded) breeding pair, my voracious cave crawlers will need reinforcement even in 2n, 3rd, 4th generation leading to trainer bonding, which makes me shy away from slaughtering them even if the bonding isn't that strong anymore with the trainer now up to legendary.

Now with DT transitioning from one generation to another is much less gambling than it was without. I guess I can with proper care = separation and tedium identify infertile females, but how can I possibly even make a call in game for the males without using DT? (I would keep more than one male anyway, a single animal dies too easy for no particular reason at all.)

War / hunting (or other dangerous) animals:
Even if I selectively breed my animals, apart from scientific value, does it really make a difference in warfare outside of challenge play (defend only with animals etc.)? I always saw the war animals as of somewhat limited use in military roles.

Livestock:
Wish my sheep had survived the FB attacks - sheep (and stoats) are also the most popular animal in my dwarves, nobody even likes the exotics I made available for adoption Can I increase wool / milk returns by selective breeding?

Purring maggots:
Despite years of trapping more than a hundred of vermin I have yet to see a single purring maggot. Do they have special biome preferences? In absence of sheeps they would have been my second best guess for milk->cheese.

GCS:
I have a working GCS farm (with a wild GCS), not fully automatic but producing batches of several hundred silk at a time, but I start to worry about the future. As they breed now according to the wiki, if I manage to catch a complementary spider, can I train them temporarily to make them breed and wait for the offspring to go wild again? Would this make them / their offspring trapavoid? (Big question mark!) Or can I operate the silk farm easier with tame animals anyway? How is the behavior of trained GCS - do they even react to normal opponents anymore?

[LMeire]

Suggestions thread isn't really the place for this discussion but I'm already involved so:

War animals: Depends on the animal, really. If it has a high litter-size then you can use it for zerg-rushing by packing them into hallways. If it has a large number of limbs and and/or a good body size then it should make a good bodyguard for your more important soldiers. If it has a syndrome attack, then your priority should be breeding for survival ability (fat + size) to maximize the number of attacks it can make before dying.

Generally speaking, war animals make really good cannon fodder 'cause you don't need to make special arrangements to keep their numbers up and it's unlikely to cause a horror-fueled tantrum spiral when they die since dwarves don't usually care about "natural things" by default. (Might result in some vengeance though, but that'll happen just from having someone witness a kobold de-stealth.) Before you get a decent army, they're your best possible option for defense; and after they help provide another set of limbs to distract your enemies with while increasing the chance to land a lucky hit.

Farming: I think milking always produces a set amount regardless of animal (Might depend on fat, as in RL, but I haven't done much science on it since cheese tends to raise value really fast and I've got a more cautious play-style.) but wool numbers seem to depend on overall body size. (Again, not much science on my part; I'm comparing mammoth yields to yak yields, so it might depend entirely on species.)

Purring maggots are found in one of the caverns, IIRC. You won't get any from trapping on the surface biomes.

I haven't really looked around for a GCS, but I haven't had problems recapturing formerly trained animals so I think they lose their trapavoid. Might want to try it out on weasels or something else that's harmless first though, just to be sure.

[taptap]

Sorry for mixing this up with questions.

To reformulate the suggestions:

1) animal-dwarf relations
- do not treat them as equal (in dwarf relationship)
- remove them (or at least the smaller ones) at some point when animal is permanently not available anymore
- at the very least remove unnamed, domestic animals from the slab engraving screen (cluttered easily when listing all crundle acquaintances of my animal trainers)
- give a chance to check the relation in the opposite direction

2) menu transparency
- make the different menus where you interact with/select animals/pets available to each other, so you can cross-check what you do
- in particular allow more information from animal assignment menus
- allow sorting or at least sort the different menus identically (in a way that puts all animals of one type next to each other)

3) "branding"
- this could be as simple as allowing nicknames to animals

4) no-child, breeding animals
- the impossibility to tame them (to a no further attention needed state) even in xth generation is likely unintentional / bug (although I am happy they breed at all).

5) infertility
- add any option/possibility to detect infertile males from within the game

6) wool/leather colour
- transfer obvious colours (black wooled sheep, cave crawler leather) to the sprites similar to how dyes do