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[jturnera]

I need help dealing with Keas! They show up, cut my FPS down to a quarter of what it is normally, attack my dwarves (giving them insane amounts of unhappy thoughts), interrupt jobs, steal things, and just generally be a nuisance. When they arrive I select my marksdwarf squad and do K>L and select all the Keas, but they never seem to actually kill or attack any of them. Any ideas about what I could do to defend against these pests (short of cheesing animal spawning or any sort of mod).

[smithist]

As fliers they're just gonna be a big hassle to deal with on the surface. If you can set things up so that they're drawn inside they should be slightly less annoying to trap/kill. If you have really active local wildlife it'll probably be a good idea to minimize surface activity anyway.

[PatrikLundell]

Marksdwarves are generally extremely ineffective against flyers, because they give up the chase the second the target becomes "unreachable" and then sneaks off to train instead, ignoring the order. "Unreachable" within quotes because it just means they might have to move first. I've had to fight marksdwarves to exterminate raven who'd gotten inside my 3 tile high courtyard at one time (probably 0.40.13).

How to get rid of them:
My method is to have a decked over courtyard that's a single Z level high with cage traps at the entrance. The buggers will try to enter and thus get caught in the traps. Since they come in reasonably large numbers, you probably want a reasonably large number of traps.
You can complement this with normal (melee) militia inside the courtyard on station, since they'd attack those pests that make in inside.

Edit:
If you've got an entrance tunnel, put your cage traps there while building the courtyard, or just skip having stuff at the surface, in which case you should have more traps in the entrance.

[Albedo]

Just when you thought macaques were bad enough. 


They're very shy of dwarves, usually doing the !terror! thing when they see them. So just don't leave anything* valuable on the surface, not even in a workshop. Once you've moved everything downstairs at once, you should be fine. A 2-tile down-stair leading to a very short hall with a dog chained right there is ample - kea comes in, dog either scares it away or takes a bite out of it.

(* I had one steal my anvil once just after embark. And a wheelbarrow later - that was an odd message. So "weight" isn't a factor.)

Keas are also afraid of animals, so pasturing them near your deconstructed wagon also helps. Most animals are afraid of them, too, so this is not foolproof.

If you put any military dwarf on guard the keas will fly away (and out of x-bow range) before the guard can react - solves the symptom, but not the root cause. :/

You could place "shiny"/valuable things as bait at the end of a tunnel and just trap them. Be sure to have many traps in line, since they often come in flocks of a half-dozen or so.

[Cheedows]

Yeah, the kill order with marksdwarves and fliers is generally ineffective. Although I've had much better success stationing them on the ground plop right next to valuable things. They will take potshots at the keas flying in, or if they are terrible shots the flying bolts everywhere will at least scare the keas away. This was with giant keas though, so the larger size may have made it easier to hit them midair at least enough to get them to hit the ground.

[Arx]

I believe this would be aided by what I think of as the 'Baghdad Fortress' approach.

They're nearly as bad as badgers. Build a couple of anti-buzzard SAM sites marksdwarf towers and your fortress will look like Baghdad in 2003 from all the aerial bolt spam. You waste a lot of ammo and everything is covered in unslightly exploded buzzard bits and broken bolts.

[Niddhoger]

Aye, fliers forced to ground level will still trip traps, so you need either a decked over courtyard or traps in your 1-tile high entrance tunnel.  If you are worried about abandoning the surface, your initial pack animals are best butchered.  They are generally too large to effectively pasture and you never get a breeding pair.  I only consider the shearable grazers to be worth keeping anyway, as they produce textiles (and milk) throughout the year, instead of just a lump sum of meat+bones+skin every few years. 

If you must keep your grazers but need to abandon the surface for now, remember that you can safely breach/reseal an entrance to the caverns to unleash spores.  Surface animals will happily graze on cavern moss that -very- quickly grows on exposed underground dirt that is oh so easy to dig out.  After realizing this, I don't even consider surface pastures anymore.  You can quickly train a miner in dirt AND get a super-secure underground pasture all at once

[PatrikLundell]

If you're not turtling completely, further immigration waves tend to bring animals, so you still have a chance of getting a breeding pair, apart from the ability to buy animals from caravans. Having said that, I don't care much for non shearable grazers, since I use birds as the main source of meat/eggs/leather (together with dogs and cats [not for eggs, obviously]).

[Niddhoger]

Yeah... but since you can't shear or the packs animals and you -might- be able to milk them.... they are worth far more to butcher immediately.  Whats hte point of sitting on a male yak for a couple of years in the hope of breeding, when your starting 7 could use the meat/fat/bones far more at embark? Again, the pack-animal grazers take up too much room to graze, and can't be sheared.  IMO, shearing is the only real reason to keep grazing animals over birds or pigs. 

[jturnera]

Unfortunately I've had a pretty peaceful embark, so my fortress is slightly based aboveground as well. I have about 25 llamas and alpacas and they're all breeding pretty successfully and regularly so that's a nice source of meat/bones/leather. Because of this I do feel some need to protect aboveground and have some of my things based up there, probably more than I really should. I've moved my timber industry to belowground (chopping mostly tower-cap and fungiwood) but this isn't nearly as high-yield as I am used to and has cut down my charcoal/steel industry significantly. Although I am in the process of moving my fortress to be completely underground (pending the completed draining of my cavern lake) I am still partially based aboveground so I definitely am still trying to focus on keeping it defended from things like keas. I even have a few barracks that are open to the sun (rain and all) just so that they can quickly respond to aboveground threats to my livestock without getting sun sickness.

Keas are confounding though because they drastically reduce my fort's happiness (at least of the above-ground workers) and they are hard to cage-trap or even kill with marskdwarves. I think I'm going to make a new marksdwarf squad soon so hopefully I can get some more kea-defense coverage.

Thanks for all the responses everyone! I've incorporated a little of everything, and although it's too late to completely move everything underground, I still get that that would have been better to do

[PatrikLundell]

I still advocate decking over the grazing grounds and have trapped and controlled entrances. Given your situation, I guess you'd rather build with rock blocks than with wood, though.
When it comes to coal, I'd urge you to locate the magma sea and set up magma based processing. That way you'd need wood only for steel making, soap making, and glazing (well, fertilization uses wood as well, I think, but I've never bothered with either that or with glazing).
With all those animals, though, aren't you having a massive over production of food?

[Albedo]

Keas are confounding though because they drastically reduce my fort's happiness (at least of the above-ground workers) and they are hard to cage-trap or even kill with marskdwarves. I think I'm going to make a new marksdwarf squad soon so hopefully I can get some more kea-defense coverage.

We've talked about this - that won't work.

The keas see further than a dwarf can shoot, but not further than a dwarf can see. So your workers still see the keas and get depressed, the Keas see your marksdwarfs and fly away before they're even in range, and nothing much ever changes. Even if you set up your marksdwarves under a roof, the keas react fast and fly faster, and your guys will pro'ly never have time to get a shot off before they're gone.

What you need is a minor project - a kea-catching tower. Build it up as high as you can (further than 20 would be nice, so it keeps them out of visual range).  Nothing too fancy, just a pillar of stairs, then do the bait/trap thing - small roofed platform on top to hold the bait and a few weapon traps (2-3 deep should do it, I'd think - call it an even dozen, using walls to channel the keas down 1 of the 4 cardinal directions) - done.  No waste of dwarf-power, no training-time lost, all self-contained - poifect.

Since all they offer is "1 skull"... spears? Or 10 lower-quality blades, aim for minced kea, and call it good?*  A nice skirt of grates or bars might be good here, to catch the ex-keas and let them rot way up high where they want to be anyway. Twice a year or so you can go up and retrieve the skulls if you want those (they will rot away otherwise).

(* If they were actually butcherable, I'd go with spiked balls and/or bludgeoning weapons, so you don't need to empty the cages and so kea-parts aren't raining down constantly - less clean up, less mess, better overall.)


If you want it to serve double-duty, you could make the 2nd or 3rd level into an archer's tower for defense, and fill in below that with almost anything. Lots of options.

[Naryar]

Yeah, you need a high platform with a stockpile of bait on it.

And then you make a ceiling to that platform, and surround it with weapon traps.

Bonus points for flying kea bits all over the map. It's not Baghdad Fortress, but it's a nice alternative.

[jturnera]

Keas are confounding though because they drastically reduce my fort's happiness (at least of the above-ground workers) and they are hard to cage-trap or even kill with marskdwarves. I think I'm going to make a new marksdwarf squad soon so hopefully I can get some more kea-defense coverage.

We've talked about this - that won't work.

The keas see further than a dwarf can shoot, but not further than a dwarf can see. So your workers still see the keas and get depressed, the Keas see your marksdwarfs and fly away before they're even in range, and nothing much ever changes. Even if you set up your marksdwarves under a roof, the keas react fast and fly faster, and your guys will pro'ly never have time to get a shot off before they're gone.

What you need is a minor project - a kea-catching tower. Build it up as high as you can (further than 20 would be nice, so it keeps them out of visual range).  Nothing too fancy, just a pillar of stairs, then do the bait/trap thing - small roofed platform on top to hold the bait and a few weapon traps (2-3 deep should do it, I'd think - call it an even dozen, using walls to channel the keas down 1 of the 4 cardinal directions) - done.  No waste of dwarf-power, no training-time lost, all self-contained - poifect.

Since all they offer is "1 skull"... spears? Or 10 lower-quality blades, aim for minced kea, and call it good?*  A nice skirt of grates or bars might be good here, to catch the ex-keas and let them rot way up high where they want to be anyway. Twice a year or so you can go up and retrieve the skulls if you want those (they will rot away otherwise).

(* If they were actually butcherable, I'd go with spiked balls and/or bludgeoning weapons, so you don't need to empty the cages and so kea-parts aren't raining down constantly - less clean up, less mess, better overall.)


If you want it to serve double-duty, you could make the 2nd or 3rd level into an archer's tower for defense, and fill in below that with almost anything. Lots of options.

Hahaha, this is without a doubt my favorite solution, maybe 2-4 spires around the map filled with expensive things and guarded by steel death What would you suggest using as bait? I'm not really sure how the "kea-stealing" mechanics work (i.e. what they search for when they look for something to steal, is it the most expensive items they can see?)

[Albedo]

The first and only time I let Keas jump me they didn't have much to choose from on the surface, but they took wooden crossbow bolts (stripped a craftsdwarf workshop of all 6 sets) and a wheelbarrow. (I had an anvil disappear shortly after embark, but I can't swear to Armok it was them. I still blame them, tho'.)

I'd think anything "nice" would do it - they're thieves, so value has some standing. I'd try dropping a 2x2 square of low-value gems or poor-quality bolts, something like that - something that has value but you won't miss. If you're training a craftsdwarf, I'd think most anything he churns out. (2x2 = 4 items, so that if 1 does manage to dodge 3 traps in and move it, there will still be other bait.)