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[smeeprocket]

Okay so I'm desperate to get one of these and maybe one will show up on my new beachside resort. But, is there a way to trap them and subsequently train them, possibly even breeding them?

This would be great for my meat and soap industry.

[Tacomagic]

Yes, you can, but it's a difficult prospect to say the least.

The way it works is first you create a chamber that you can flood to be open to the ocean and then seal off and drain at will.

Next, while it's drained, cage-trap the living heck out of it.

Finally, hope stuff wanders in and gets trapped.  So long as the chamber is submerged, anything caught in the traps will remain perfectly fine when the chamber is drained.  From there you can move the animals whereever.

Get two whales in there, and they'll happily spawn.  Keeping them wild will hold up a wild-animals spot, but it's probably easier to keep them wild and just harvest whales whenever you need food (every 100 years or so  ).

Taming is another story.  That's a LOT harder, but not impossible.  There was a thread a long time ago about building a tame carp farm. Have to see if I can find it.  Basically you have to do that.  And with the pathing changes involving jumping and climbing, it may not be doable anymore as I know that getting dwarves to actually go into water these days is nearly impossible.  Haven't tried doing any fish taming since 40.xx was released, so I don't know how viable it is.

[Button]

Taming them isn't that hard. What you do is you let wild ones breed, then flush the tank into a cage trap tank. This is easy to accomplish if your holding tank has a bridge for a floor - just open the bridge and, if your tank is more than one Z level tall, slowly drain the tank. Then you tame the calves while they're still in cages, and release them back into the holding tank when you're finished.

[Tacomagic]

Taming them isn't that hard. What you do is you let wild ones breed, then flush the tank into a cage trap tank. This is easy to accomplish if your holding tank has a bridge for a floor - just open the bridge and, if your tank is more than one Z level tall, slowly drain the tank. Then you tame the calves while they're still in cages, and release them back into the holding tank when you're finished.

Hmm, interesting.

There is still the issue of getting them butchered since you can't simply air-drown them (they become unbuthcerable due to bug 1275).  You /might/ be able to flush the whales into traps by forcing them to dodge recipricating training-spear traps placed next to cages.  I honestly don't know if a whale can/will dodge, though.  I also remember that pathing was fubar on tamed fish.  They pretty much never move from the spot where you drop them.

[Tacomagic]

All that said: if you have them in the area, Giant Elephant or Giant Leopard Seals are a much easier Oceanic solution.  They're amphibious and give a ton of meat and fat.  Unfortuantely, they're arctic only, so that's a bummer if you're not at one of the poles.

Unfortunately all the temperate and tropical seals / sealions aren't in the game.  Next time Toady opens up the creatures for donation additions (if ever) those should be on the list of ones the community should sponsor.

[smeeprocket]

huh I swear I saw sea lions early on. Haven't seen them since I moved in though.

This is a temperate climate. It is perfect and I am not going to let anything take this fort away from me. Clay, sand, flux, iron, freshwater river, beach, tons of trees.

It is beautiful. When I lose it, I will reclaim it, I'll even suffer through reclaiming all the trash littering the map.

I have kept an eye out for the whales. I am hoping.

[GavJ]

Why would you want to tame them? You can't pasture them or lead them to a butcher anyway, so taming seems sort of pointless.

I'd just have a cage trap bay, then release into a separate water tank with a bridge to a ground (flooded) level with traps as well, let them breed up above in the untrapped area, and open to trap when desired. So whenever they have a calf, you drain it, trap all of them, release the ones you don't want to eat back into the tank, and air drown the one(s) you do.

Since harvesting them will be infrequent, I'd just use mechanism-controlled cages.

[Tacomagic]

huh I swear I saw sea lions early on. Haven't seen them since I moved in though.

You'll only see those if you've modded the game.  I double-checked the raws and we still don't have sea lions in vanilla .

[smeeprocket]

yea it was sea otters.

Air drowning won't work though, right?

So I would have to set up a trap based butcher shop, would that wreck the delicious meat in any way?

Supposedly they give about 11k units of food. If I put the butcher shop right next to the tank, and assuming they get the whale there in time to be butchered, how would I best store the meat and such to not rot before it all gets stored?

I haven't seen any whales yet. (

[pisskop]

Yes, you can, but it's a difficult prospect to say the least.

The way it works is first you create a chamber that you can flood to be open to the ocean and then seal off and drain at will.

Next, while it's drained, cage-trap the living heck out of it.

Finally, hope stuff wanders in and gets trapped.  So long as the chamber is submerged, anything caught in the traps will remain perfectly fine when the chamber is drained.  From there you can move the animals whereever.

Get two whales in there, and they'll happily spawn.  Keeping them wild will hold up a wild-animals spot, but it's probably easier to keep them wild and just harvest whales whenever you need food (every 100 years or so  ).

Taming is another story.  That's a LOT harder, but not impossible.  There was a thread a long time ago about building a tame carp farm. Have to see if I can find it.  Basically you have to do that.  And with the pathing changes involving jumping and climbing, it may not be doable anymore as I know that getting dwarves to actually go into water these days is nearly impossible.  Haven't tried doing any fish taming since 40.xx was released, so I don't know how viable it is.

That sounds suspiciously like a cut-paste from the old mermaid threads

yea it was sea otters.

Air drowning won't work though, right?

So I would have to set up a trap based butcher shop, would that wreck the delicious meat in any way?

Supposedly they give about 11k units of food. If I put the butcher shop right next to the tank, and assuming they get the whale there in time to be butchered, how would I best store the meat and such to not rot before it all gets stored?

I haven't seen any whales yet. (

Patience.  they dont spawn often, and more common critters (crabs) have both a higher frequency and more room to spawn on.

[Tacomagic]

Air drowning won't work though, right?

Air drowning doesn't work on tamed animals.  I think it works if wild animals air-drown.  Would want confirmation on that as I haven't played around with fish traps in 40.xx.

In any event, you probably want a few butcher shops near the beach in case you see anything with the [breaching] token wash up on shore.

[GavJ]

Air drowning should definitely work. I've butchered tons of wild animals that died in random ways in Df 2014. Make sure to have butcher shop near the air drowning area, and a stockpile with a LOT of empty barrels and a food stockpile next to that with space for them. Just forbid all the barrels until you're moments away from butchering a whale. Everybody should be able to run up, grab meat, put it in a barrel, store it and go back for more in a few seconds, and a fortress full of idlers should have no problem safely storing it all away. But you would need to be prepared with the empty containers.

Probably would actually want to actively build a butcher shop AFTER the thing dies, right next to it, since the butcher will walk incredibly slowly carrying it. You only want him to have to move a couple of tiles.

[smeeprocket]

ahh yea so then don't tame them at all and just let them breed. Nice.

I'm not 100% sure how to go about properly building a tank. I am on an aquifer. I might have a level I can dig out though. What would up my chances of any whales that happen by swimming into any locks I make?

Can whales be transferred safely between cages while wild without attacking or air drowning? I will have to move any whales to the same cage.

[pisskop]

Chasing the elusive Mermaid
On the farming of Sea Serpents
There are designs listed in those as well.

Ideally, even just channeling an area out in advance, trapping it, laying down floodgates, and including draining will let you build one at sea level. Perhaps consider  'helping' the whales into your traps with some currents.


---
And this
Capturing underwater creatures

[Tacomagic]

I'm not 100% sure how to go about properly building a tank. I am on an aquifer. I might have a level I can dig out though. What would up my chances of any whales that happen by swimming into any locks I make?

Aquifer will complicate things, but it shouldn't be impossible.  If you've got 1 layer, you'll probably have to work within that, or work on mining and walling off a large section within the aquifer to use.

Making oceanic traps is very hit or miss.  The only really good way to improve effectiveness is to make them larger and try to incorperate flying-trap tactics as best possible.  Now, you can make more effective traps if you want to pump magma up to the surface and do some oceanic walling, but I'm thinking you want to avoid that level of mega-project.

You could also drain and dam the ocean; that would allow you to create choke points that would have a lot better chance of working.  Again, you're looking at mega-project level stuff to do that.

EDIT:  I completely forgot about the coast-edge pathing trick.  Yeah, that's your best bet right there.

EDIT EDIT:  Another thing that worked for me in the past was to embark on a small peninsula and creat a multi-level channel across it (each level individually sealable and drainable, that way you can trap all levels).  This was rediculously effective a few years ago when last I tried it.  Probably for the same reason that the coast-edge trick was so effective.

Can whales be transferred safely between cages while wild without attacking or air drowning? I will have to move any whales to the same cage.

Unfortunately, they cannot be safely transferred.  The reason they stay safe in cages after the water is draines is that the animal's status is essentially frozen to what it is when they go into a cage.  So if they're breathing happily, going into the cage maintains the breathing.  If they're suffocating/air drowning, they inherit that status going into the cage and die shortly after.