Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Arkansan]

What's the quickest way to get a leather industry going? Just goofing around I decided I want to do a fort where all males are in the militia. I had planned on equipping them all with leather armor, a cloak, metal caps, spears, and a shield. Of course this is going to require a good bit of leather.

My last fort I captured enough wild hogs to get a breeding population going but it just seems to take forever to wait for them to mature so they can be butchered.

[StagnantSoul]

Turkey breeding and buying it in bulk from the Mountain Home.

[Broseph Stalin]

Order it. It's pretty much impossible to create enough leather for an industry. Alternately modding.

http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=122003.0

Toady's talked about getting more leather per creature so I don't consider it cheaty.

[Immortal-D]

To have a full-blown industry (clothes, armor, bags, crafts), you would need a massive population of several animals.  There really is no 'good' way, but it can be done.

[Uggh]

Chicken and turkey breeding,  also ostriches.  Just make sure all fertilized eggs can hatch. After a few years you will drown in birds. However, buying leather is really cheap and should be used additionally.

[Ravendarksky]

I just put 100s of cats in cages. This seems to be enough when combined with the following:

• Embarking with as much cheap leather/cats as you can afford
• Requesting and buying all the leather from trading caravans
• Buying/Slaughtering all animals brought to your fort
• Having a few hunters

[/list

Cats seem to birth in cages, but you may need to let them out periodically to breed... I'm not sure.[/list]

[Naryar]

For me it's far easier to buy up the leather bins that the human and dwarven caravans bring in abundance. Same with cloth.

Or buy leather at the start. It's not expensive.

Sure I put a few tanners up to keep the leather of what I butcher, but eh.

Embarking with 10 bitches female dogs and a few male dogs may be working but the puppysplosion is a bit annoying on the second year when your fort is mostly built. Also you overproduce dog meat to ridiculous levels and the large amount of bones gets annoying as well.

[Alfrodo]

Embarking with 10 bitches female dogs and a few male dogs may be working but the puppysplosion is a bit annoying on the second year when your fort is mostly built. Also you overproduce dog meat to ridiculous levels and the large amount of bones gets annoying as well.

That's the opposite of a problem. Bolts, man.

[Sanctume]

Leather seems to be plentiful by year 2. 

I embark with 3 turkey hens + 2 turkey gobbler, and pasture and nest box them in the first season of my embark.  I would at least get 1 nestbox that is fertilize with 10-14 turkey eggs.  I seem to average 24 forbidden eggs that will hatch and grow to adult by year 2.

Likewise, I embark with 3 female dogs + 2 male dogs, that I train into war dogs, and a couple into hunting dogs.  They are all pastured in a 3x3 area in my entrance, and puppies that are born go inside for further training and eventual butchering.

Cats, I suppose are ok leather, but I only embark with a pair and cage kittens as soon as they are born.

Leather in the embark is 5 point.  So with 10 points for pig leather for example, you can make 1 Leather Armor + 1 Leather Cloak.
However, a turkey hen is 6 point, you can butcher it and gain 1 leather + meat + bone.

Hunters if you use them can bring in plenty of animals for butcher and hides. 
Or use cage traps sooner.

[nimbus25]

You only need 1 male to make the whole group pregnant, so you could get even more gain with 4 hens/1 gobbler or 4 female dogs/1 male for no extra cost whatsoever.

[Alfrodo]

You only need 1 male to make the whole group pregnant, so you could get even more gain with 4 hens/1 gobbler or 4 female dogs/1 male for no extra cost whatsoever.

Gay/Sexually unmotivated animals are more common in DF than in real life.  He brings an extra male in case one of them happens to be homosexual.

[Sanctume]

You only need 1 male to make the whole group pregnant, so you could get even more gain with 4 hens/1 gobbler or 4 female dogs/1 male for no extra cost whatsoever.

Gay/Sexually unmotivated animals are more common in DF than in real life.  He brings an extra male in case one of them happens to be homosexual.

Yep. I've had 4 females  1 male animal to unsuccessfully produce more.   3f:2m ratio seems to at least improve the odds of animals producing.

[Arkansan]

Huh so turkey's seem to be the most expedient solution. I'm also gonna give that mod a look, with that installed it seems like it would be a snap to get a decent leather industry going.

[ldog]

Peacock and/or geese, they mature in 1 year. Forget turkeys, chickens and everything else unless you've just got a "thing" for them. By your 3rd year you'll be buried in leather. Anyone using dfhack I recommend a fixster fert only:bird_goose or whatever you've got. After using modest mod for a few weeks I highly recommend it as well (1 feature is leather amount based off animal size)

Dig out a 20x10 or so room. Build up to 30 or so nestboxes (but slowly, initially you just need enough for what you bring on embark). Forbid the door until you've got the fertile eggs forbidden (dfhack plugin that really helps here). When they start hatching forbid the door again, because they tend to lay again right after.

Once your first wave of new females have matured you're going to have a lot of fertile eggs. There is a softcap of around 50 of each type of animal, but the way it works is you will get no more pregnancies/fertilized eggs until the numbers come back down. So if you've got 150 fertile eggs around they will hatch, but then you'll get no more until you butcher back down.

So you'll collect all the eggs in the meantime after a birdsplosion while you wait for them to mature. If you went with the ever popular overrated turkey, that means 2 years of this.

The reason I recommend such a large room is the more animals you have in a smaller space the more "accidents" that are going to happen. I have had geese hens break each others necks. I have had nearly 200 geese at a time. Peacocks would be even worse since they lay more eggs on average and max.

In the meantime trade for and butcher just about everything, send your soldiers to kill wild animals (much more effective than a hunter) and if all that isn't enough after a few years your dogs and cats should be multiplying out of hand as well.

Also the trick to getting merchants to bring leather (or cloth, or wood, etc) is to not have any in stock or forbid what you do have (before the caravan shows up on your map).

[Naryar]

Geese are nice because they are the only flying domesticated animal.

Embarking with 10 bitches female dogs and a few male dogs may be working but the puppysplosion is a bit annoying on the second year when your fort is mostly built. Also you overproduce dog meat to ridiculous levels and the large amount of bones gets annoying as well.

That's the opposite of a problem. Bolts, man.

Crossbows are very underwhelming. They never actually people cleanly, and marksdwarves do the dumbest things. Melee, man.

Not to mention that arming your dwarves with crossbows AND melee weapons seem to make your dwarves derp even more.

Gotta try ballistas, though. But ballistas are somewhat annoying to make work.