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[Corthalas]

Awesome !Science! !
I also have trouble seeing any sea creature since 40.xx.
The ocean spawn seems to be bugged. Maybe the z level is important?

[RedReign]

Awesome !Science! !
I also have trouble seeing any sea creature since 40.xx.
The ocean spawn seems to be bugged. Maybe the z level is important?

Perhaps my next test will be to build a similar aqueduct where the water is, but 1 z-level higher. Regardless of what experiments I try, I'll definitely report my findings.

[cochramd]

I wanted to see what I could do in Dwarf Fortress without resorting to 3rd party scripts, and while region-pops is useful, I don't want to cheat by building walls or killing off species, or doing things with hacks if there's a genuine method to do it!

Good sir, eliminating the wild population of a species in order to increase the chance of a different species showing up is completely legitimate! You just need to do it by a legitimate means. That means either capturing them in cage traps and taming them, or killing them by legitimate means (hunters, military, stonefall traps, weapon traps, magma, etc).

[RedReign]

I wanted to see what I could do in Dwarf Fortress without resorting to 3rd party scripts, and while region-pops is useful, I don't want to cheat by building walls or killing off species, or doing things with hacks if there's a genuine method to do it!

Good sir, eliminating the wild population of a species in order to increase the chance of a different species showing up is completely legitimate! You just need to do it by a legitimate means. That means either capturing them in cage traps and taming them, or killing them by legitimate means (hunters, military, stonefall traps, weapon traps, magma, etc).

Of course it's legitimate! I'm not saying that it's not! I just wanted to get straight to the intended experimentation without using hacks. Drawbridges seemed to be the most straightforward way to do that. Killing/trapping all the land animals would take a while.

[FantasticDorf]

This is a interesting development, especially in which to note, that sea creature spawns are often blocked by freezing ocean temperatures such as the polar glaciers and seasonal ocean freezes, which if your research shows to be promising, may trigger the rapid spawning (if there are any regionally at all just off map unable to access) of sea creatures native to that environment (on top of leftover vermin not killed in the freeze).

Giant sperm whales are particularly striking, because they offer immense amounts of food living in those regions, and though contact breeding (im personally experimenting with fishery designs with common domestic conger eels as test subjects, its difficult to obtain and keep said fish alive since they die on embark and it consumes time to obtain them from the mountainhome through traders, but im working on it *change the entity to OCEAN PRODUCTS and they'll trade them + trade goods related to conger eels*) and some [PET] tags, you could have a fully functional whale farm (they only take 1 year to grow up, mostly the same for most marine life) for these long lived creatures that give plentiful meat and calves (ontop of side experiments to weaponise them in conjunction of raw fiddled fish men military as work animals *aquatic crossbow sea hunters anybody?*)

If you do try a tundra sea/glacier embark to test this out sometime after your initial efforts, try a aquifer channel lined with cage traps and a floor grate ceiling + structured walls + floors to stop the refreezing of the channel. (4x4 recommended for continuous long line of 2x2 grates)

Only thing i could really suggest to keep the off embark ice away is a small pool of of lava or something.

[RedReign]

This is a interesting development, especially in which to note, that sea creature spawns are often blocked by freezing ocean temperatures such as the polar glaciers and seasonal ocean freezes, which if your research shows to be promising, may trigger the rapid spawning (if there are any regionally at all just off map unable to access) of sea creatures native to that environment (on top of leftover vermin not killed in the freeze).

Giant sperm whales are particularly striking, because they offer immense amounts of food living in those regions, and though contact breeding (im personally experimenting with fishery designs with common domestic conger eels as test subjects, its difficult to obtain and keep said fish alive since they die on embark and it consumes time to obtain them from the mountainhome through traders, but im working on it *change the entity to OCEAN PRODUCTS and they'll trade them + trade goods related to conger eels*) and some [PET] tags, you could have a fully functional whale farm (they only take 1 year to grow up, mostly the same for most marine life) for these long lived creatures that give plentiful meat and calves (ontop of side experiments to weaponise them in conjunction of raw fiddled fish men military as work animals *aquatic crossbow sea hunters anybody?*)

If you do try a tundra sea/glacier embark to test this out sometime after your initial efforts, try a aquifer channel lined with cage traps and a floor grate ceiling + structured walls + floors to stop the refreezing of the channel. (4x4 recommended for continuous long line of 2x2 grates)

Only thing i could really suggest to keep the off embark ice away is a small pool of of lava or something.

Interdasting!

I haven't messed with frozen waters yet, as my ocean doesn't freeze over in the winters, but from what I'm finding, creatures are FLOODING through the aqueduct. As soon as a herd of sea creatures has been caged or killed, there will almost instantly be another group to replace it, running through the water tunnel. Still no ocean spawns.

I'd suggest that other people experiment with this, by blocking off their land borders with bridges and setting up an artificial waterway above sea level, but still in the ocean biome. You may still get albatrosses and other sea bird creatures (though if you really want to deal with them I suppose you could just edit them out with "region-pops boost [SPECIES] 0"). I'm wiping them out by hand for now, and the majority of the things that spawn are aquatic, fortunately.

[Khorinis]

This is a interesting development, especially in which to note, that sea creature spawns are often blocked by freezing ocean temperatures such as the polar glaciers and seasonal ocean freezes, which if your research shows to be promising, may trigger the rapid spawning (if there are any regionally at all just off map unable to access) of sea creatures native to that environment (on top of leftover vermin not killed in the freeze).

Giant sperm whales are particularly striking, because they offer immense amounts of food living in those regions, and though contact breeding (im personally experimenting with fishery designs with common domestic conger eels as test subjects, its difficult to obtain and keep said fish alive since they die on embark and it consumes time to obtain them from the mountainhome through traders, but im working on it *change the entity to OCEAN PRODUCTS and they'll trade them + trade goods related to conger eels*) and some [PET] tags, you could have a fully functional whale farm (they only take 1 year to grow up, mostly the same for most marine life) for these long lived creatures that give plentiful meat and calves (ontop of side experiments to weaponise them in conjunction of raw fiddled fish men military as work animals *aquatic crossbow sea hunters anybody?*)

If you do try a tundra sea/glacier embark to test this out sometime after your initial efforts, try a aquifer channel lined with cage traps and a floor grate ceiling + structured walls + floors to stop the refreezing of the channel. (4x4 recommended for continuous long line of 2x2 grates)

Only thing i could really suggest to keep the off embark ice away is a small pool of of lava or something.

Interdasting!

I haven't messed with frozen waters yet, as my ocean doesn't freeze over in the winters, but from what I'm finding, creatures are FLOODING through the aqueduct. As soon as a herd of sea creatures has been caged or killed, there will almost instantly be another group to replace it, running through the water tunnel. Still no ocean spawns.

I'd suggest that other people experiment with this, by blocking off their land borders with bridges and setting up an artificial waterway above sea level, but still in the ocean biome. You may still get albatrosses and other sea bird creatures (though if you really want to deal with them I suppose you could just edit them out with "region-pops boost [SPECIES] 0"). I'm wiping them out by hand for now, and the majority of the things that spawn are aquatic, fortunately.

I embarked next to an ocean, is there any other way to get bigger sea creatures to spawn? I also found out that the ocean in adventure mode appears to be empty except for the shores.

[Niddhoger]

The poster you linked even directly states that land spawns trump ocean spawns, hence the outright need to block off land tiles.  It is interesting though that the override is so strong, that it'll prefer that "land" tile that has been artificially flooded over the rest of the ocean.

He also has at least one more relevant !SCIENCE! post.  He decided he was going to go whale-hunting with ballista... which can only fire at targets on the same z-level as themselves.  He had this complicated pier system set up with chained war-dogs to spook aquatic animals into his traps or some such. 

[PatrikLundell]

Firing ballistae at underwater targets is actually not that hard (hitting a moving target is, of course). I've done it to get rid of completely submerged fungal trees blocking my ability to close off the edge access to the water.
Just dig a tunnel at the desired z level, with ample drain downwards to a map edge drain. Build a drawbridge to block the water flow when you're done, set up a ballista at the end of the tunnel, carve a fortification through the last tile separating the tunnel from the water. Fire away.

[Salmeuk]

Redreign, could you post a screenshot or two (or perhaps a code diagram) of your setup? It's worthy of it's own topic. I remeber one time in my history of ocean embarks that I had a great white spawn, and it was spectacularly dissapointing(perhaps true to life, she just sort of swam around my coastline). I imagine with this new technique an overseer might develop a legitamate aquarium.

Now I wonder if dwarfs become frightened after viewing some of the more aggressive aquatic beasts through windows.

[Niddhoger]

Redreign, could you post a screenshot or two (or perhaps a code diagram) of your setup? It's worthy of it's own topic. I remeber one time in my history of ocean embarks that I had a great white spawn, and it was spectacularly dissapointing(perhaps true to life, she just sort of swam around my coastline). I imagine with this new technique an overseer might develop a legitamate aquarium.

Now I wonder if dwarfs become frightened after viewing some of the more aggressive aquatic beasts through windows.

Sphelerite exploited this pathing behavior to easily build traps and a bridge just inside the coastline. He then channeled áway the last row of tiles between the traps and water then lowered the bridge. Critters would swim along the shore and get trapped. When enough cages were full, he raised the bridge for a section and used windmill-powered pumps to drain it. You can do this without sealing the map edges, but has a lowered output.

[Grax]

I've also noted that wildlife usually shows up in groups, and a new group won't appear until the previous group has left or been dealt with. I had a group of giant cardinals flying around on the map, and then as soon as they left, 5 or 6 wild boars showed up. After they left, a fox entered the map and ran around until one of my hunters killed it. Then the giant cardinals instantly returned.

And this can be an excellent cheating exploit on evil maps - hold one last invader in prison (not in cage) to prevent next wave of zombies/corpses etc.

[PatrikLundell]

The group logic cuts both ways. You can exploit it both above and below ground to reduce the chance/risk of another group entering (savage biomes seem to have an increased probability of dual groups, though). It also means that campers that refuse to move out will block interesting spawn from entering (motionless birds a dozen levels above ground are bad. Critters in water (including in trees in water) are nearly as bad (giant sponges, the various subterranean spheres...). Titans/FBs hovering in the air are horrible.

[nate.219]

I know this is necroing a bit, but Ive been trying to catch a heap of ocean creatures just like you. Ive already gone and put bridges around the edges of all the land tiles (and raised them, so nothing can spawn on land), however birds continue to spawn above them, or in the ocean edges tiles in the sky.

I also tried to recreate your edge tile water thing. I left a single gap in the bridges along the edge tile, and then started pumping water out from a nearby river off the edge in the ocean biome, but nothing spawns in it, just birds over the ocean.

Not sure if its been patched in a recent version of df but I'd be interested to see if anyone has tried something similar in recent times.

[PatrikLundell]

There's no reason to assume things have changed. However, in order to make room for aquatic creatures you probably have to get rid of the birds, either by ruthlessly killing them off (somehow), or by using DFHack's region-pops to reduce their numbers drastically.