Inspired by this thread, I've been harvesting large fish. I have no carp, but I have sturgeon, pike, and longnose gar. And, I have no immigrants, which makes failures very costly. Unlike I3erent, my goal is food production: I also have no trade, which means all I can herd are cats and dogs.
My experiences indicate the following:
- Put the cages in 7/7 water. Any less than 4/7 water and the fish will instantly drown when they hit the cage trap, leaving you with caged fish corpses. Which don't seem to rot (or if they do, they rot very slowly), so that's actually a pretty cool thing to have around. I have a complicated setup with a retracting bridge that dumps the fish, water and all, into a room twice the size, with a set of cages, and a drain out of this room to the aquifer. This is a dumb setup; just build a bunch of cage traps in a room near a bend in the river, then open a floodgate to coax the fish into the room. Then, when you've caught enough, close the floodgates, and drain the room somehow. Make sure to put a floor grate over the drain if it's going down, so the cages don't get swept down.
- Cages hold water, so you can safely fully drain the room and build the cage in your dining room, like you'd build any kind of cage.
- You can tame the fish like any kind of large animal, after messing with the raws (add the [PET] tag). But I'm not sure that's useful.
- Fish can be let out into 4/7 or deeper water. Any shallower and they drown. Note that your dwarves will cancel jobs in any deeper than 3/7 water, and won't path through worse than 2/7. If there's a flow, so that you get a coexistance of 4/7 and 2/7, dwarves will lose their grip on their babies. I tried to tie my fish to ropes, but my dwarves would cancel their "chain large animal" job due to the flow or to losing their baby, the fish would get swept over the outflow, and drown, every time.
- My dwarves seem to think that putting a tame pet into a pit is two jobs: first, release from the cage. Second, pit the pet. This isn't so great because they'll dump the carp on the floor, then walk away, and then decide maybe they should put the carp in the pit, by which time the carp dies. My survival rate with fish in cages built right next to the pit is below 50%.
- You can't butcher a dead tame carp, so that carp that just died because your dwarves were lazy will go to the refuse pile. You'll get bones and skull, but no leather, meat, or fat. That gets in the way of building a carp tallow bridge over the carp-infested river.
- I can't figure any way of butchering tame fish, in fact.
- Fish and other things can get swept through wall grates by a flow, but not through floor grates. I ended up with my herd of tame pikes in the river, rather than in the pen right next to the river. There was a fight, one of my tame pike fry beat up a wild pike fry and poked its eye out.
- Dwarves are much less dumb about putting non-tame fish into a pit: that's one job, since you can't release a non-tame animal.
- One thing I noticed, which may be a bug: none of the wild fish bred until I tamed one. Then they just started popping out fry like clockwork.
I've given up on tame fish because I can't figure out how to butcher them. The setup I'm experimenting with now is a pair of underground chambers full of water, for the fish. They're connected by a short but narrow passage, in which I have a floodgate. I dump fish in one pit by building a cage near the 1x1 opening to the pit, and telling my dwarves to pit said fish. A small opening is critical so that the dwarf can't see it's approaching a fish-infested pit.
When I want to harvest, I wait until some fish are in one chamber, some in the other, I close the connecting floodgate, and I drain one of the chambers (remember: either pump it out, or drain through a floor grate -- not a wall grate!). That leaves a bunch of fish flopping around until they drown, and I can butcher the corpses. Fill the chamber back up, reopen the floodgate (in that order: otherwise, you might lose a fish), repeat.
I'm still experimenting. The two-chamber setup works. I have a few fish in my pond, but not mating pairs yet. I only need a couple more times through the catch-and-release cycle to get a pair of sturgeons, then my dwarves will have caviar to go with their seed biscuits.
[edit: formatting]
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Topic: EuReThRa I have found it! FiSh FaRmIn, WaR cArP!!! tAm (Read 9420 times)