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[Spqrein]

I wouldn't think it would be hard but code pastures to be able to store some feed foods (like a hospital stores soap, thread and the like) to feed animals.  You would still have natural grazing but you could also have much smaller pastures with some bigger animals. 

Never understood why leather is so cheap yet much harder to mass produce than cloth which you can produce in much more massive quantities for less effort.

[Deepblade]

Part of the problem is you don't different amounts of leather based on the size of the animal. Dragon gives one, Dog gives one, Hippopotamus gives one.

If you're prone to mods there's a small one called Sackhead's More Leather Mod. Essentially it makes skin drops a glob, and those are calculated by the size of the animal. Then it'll take the "globs" of skin and combine them to make a few pieces of leather. It works best with a simplification mod, like Veok's Standardized Leather. Or, my mod in my sig which already has more leather incorporated. It simplifies most of the animal products instead of just leather though. They'll all require a fresh world to work.

As for the storing food in pastures, I'm pretty sure feeding troughs are a planned feature eventually. To save time the troughs could just be wooden or metal chests. That may be simpler than having a new trough construction/object.

[Badger Storm]

With leather, you have to breed the animals (takes much longer than growing a crop of pig tails), wait for them to grow up in order to keep it sustaining (again, much slower than brewing a keg and recovering the seeds), and, in some cases, wait until adulthood in order to get any leather at all!

Also, fleeces grow back, plants replenish themselves, and there are always spiders in the caverns.  You can only skin an animal once.

I do like the idea of animal feed.  Oats, alfalfa, those would have a reason to be grown.  You could have the same number of animals in a smaller space.

[Spqrein]

Im not against mods as long as it isn't to far removed from the basic game.  I will give the leather mods a try, but still wish for a pasture feeding way like hospitals get supplied. 

In the leather mods I see it adjusts types of leather to a simple few qualities, is there other mods that do the same for other items like that?

I like the animal industry of DwF because I have run a fairly large dairy and beef operation a one time.  I laugh when new hatched chicks run around the fortress before I can cage them and the cats don't kill them yet cat kill all sorts of other vermin and the like.

[Deboche]

If you have your military regularly kill animals outside and in the caves you'll get plenty of leather. You'll also get tallow for soap and lots of meat and bones for crafts.

But I hear each animal killed reduces FPS and I suspect that's why my last fortress died from FPS death. Now I don't kill anything.

[red_kangaroo]

You can only skin an animal once.

If ever something like the [REGENERATES] tag gets added, I can imagine skinning werebeasts or hydrae alive and letting them regrow their skin for profitable leather industry.

[Badger Storm]

If you have your military regularly kill animals outside and in the caves you'll get plenty of leather. You'll also get tallow for soap and lots of meat and bones for crafts.

But I hear each animal killed reduces FPS and I suspect that's why my last fortress died from FPS death. Now I don't kill anything.

DFHack has a command to clear the list of dead units.  I know it helps keep migrants from shying away, but no idea on if you get your FPS back.  I try to mitigate it by trading extra animals to the caravans.  One giant critter can net you quite a lot.

[Aslandus]

the pasture thing would probably be better if you could make troughs that you dump crop plants into for animals to eat rather than stuffing everything in boxes and having your dwarves go out and feed the animals by hand...

[Deepblade]

Im not against mods as long as it isn't to far removed from the basic game.  I will give the leather mods a try, but still wish for a pasture feeding way like hospitals get supplied. 

In the leather mods I see it adjusts types of leather to a simple few qualities, is there other mods that do the same for other items like that?

There are probably a few other mods that do it, but I can't really remember any others than my mod over at ]http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=145258.0]. It has the same quality tiers as Veok's, simplifies most of the animal products, excludes intelligent creatures, backups your raws, as well as giving an optional prompt for installing the more leather mod.