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[boysfromthedwarf]

This is my first new topic post, as I could not find anything that covered just this question.

It might be a very simple no..but can I have an underground reservoir fed off my fortress cistern that I can put caged and bought fish or aquatic creatures into....therefore allowing breeding and a sustainable food source?

Any comments or direction I could go in would be greatly received......thanks

[Qrox]

Even wild creatures will reproduce if they stay in your map long enough so I think yes. The problem is how to get them out of water. Two cisterns separated by a floodgate and a drain in on of them perhaps?
Do keep in mind that most fishes bought from caravans are already processed, and so far I haven't seen any caravan bring a live fish.

[Skullsploder]

Cage trap a river by draining it, placing the traps, then allowing it to refill. That'll give you some non-vermin fish when you next drain it. Vermin fish, which you can capture, will not reproduce AFAIK, so pitting them into an artificial pool will not help you. In fact, I'm pretty sure they'll spontaneously despawn.

However, dwarves can definitely fish in an aquifer. I have a save with hundreds of pond turtle shells sourced from a single tile channeled out of an aquifer layer.

[The Bard]

Do river creatures spawn correctly in 40.24? I've never had anything enter my map from the water after embark.

[Corona688]

Embarking near the coast, one of the things which showed up in my brook was a sea lamprey.  I'd never seen anything in the water before in any other embark.

So yeah, I think there's a bug somewhere, where it won't generate large aquatic animals in biomes far from the sea.

Whether they can fish or not depends on what corner of the map they're in.  It's a statistical thing.  The pretty pictures of lungfish can only be caught by cats (and turned into useless remains).

Here's an idea for a modded creature:  Something that can be trained to bring raw, or even live, vermin.  It'd make sense for a trained eagle to do that.

[Wheeljack]

The issue with aquatic spawns is they compete for map space with land creatures. Sometimes the rng is slanted toward the fish, but mostly it spawns land creatures. An easy fix would be to have two spawn lists and two spawn events, one for land and one for water. But that means more units on the map and that could mean less fps for some of us.

I have a tendency to cull a lot of animals from my raws that are reduntant or I don't care about. It helps fish spawns tremendously.

[Corona688]

Oh.  I guess that makes sense.  Toady has added tons and tons of sea creatures but not so many river ones.

[boysfromthedwarf]

Thanks to all for your experienced words.
Gutted it looks like I can't..... Maybe have to wait a while for a mod or newer version

[celem]

You might be able to get some captured/bought fish into it yes, but this makes more of an aquarium rather than a fishing pond if memory serves.

Unless its been changed (please point out if it has), dwarves with the fishing labour are catching vermin fish, not the things you see on the units list that happen to be in water.  And vermin, while trappable with the right trap/labour or buyable from merchants, dont breed, they kinda spawn.

[Corona688]

It has not changed, dwarves with the fishing labor are catching vermin fish.

However -- they are not catching the vermin fish you see dotting the brooks here and there.  They go to the river and stare a while, and raw fish miraculously appears.

The only thing which cares about vermin objects are cats, and possibly animal traps.

Hey!  I wonder, if you built animal traps underwater, it could catch vermin fish!  That'd be something new, having live vermin fish.

[Qrox]

But you can catch some carps from a river and then release them into a cistern and... Carp meat for everyone! (Carps do reproduce don't they?)

[Corona688]

I believe it is possible, yes.  You'd have to catch them again to eat them, which could be as simple as draining an appropriate section.

Actually moving live fish is difficult, though.  They can be caught in cage traps (not animal traps -- again, those are for vermin).  They'll probably die in ordinary cages now, I think glass cages might count as aquariums.  Also you can shove them along with a wavefront of moving water like any other object -- but unlike, say, goblins, they will be drowning in air while that happens.  Even 1/7 water, on top of 7/7 water, causes them to drown sometimes.  In other words my carp cannon was doomed.

[Niddhoger]

Aye, carp, sharks, whales, merfolk, etc can all be caught with traps and bred in a cistern.  However, you have to air-drown them to butcher them and thus the trick is seperating what you want to butcher from what you want to keep.  Sphelerite once used a convulted system of dogs, chains, retracting bridges, and windows to separate sea monsters from their children for butchering purposes, but this was back when we had spore-breeding. 

All in all, its not worth it.  If you just -really- wanted to breed a shark pull you can do that as a mega-project, just don't think about getting a reliable aquaculture meat industry going. 

[oasis789]

Do hunters hunt aquatic creatures? How do they recover the corpses?

[Corona688]

No idea.

I imagine if you sent your military to kill it, it'd end up being hauled and butchered.  I've seen that happen often enough for land animals.  If it just suffocated, perhaps not.

You could do it without weird tricks, but it'd have to be big.  Just keep a few tanks, cull the population of one, then put them back together.