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[xtw136]

   I am not good at english.so please forgive my terrible grammer
   first,i was tame a couple of dragons and a hydra,and i want to train them for my military,but caravan and visitors always attack them so i.have to hide them in the depth, how could it happen?and i want to know why my dragon eggs can not hatch.
   then i think there have some bug in.recent version,I love tavern and i think it is great to hire other races join my fortress,but visitors sometime attack each others.and then my whole fortress missing in the civil war.how can i.solve it?

[Thisfox]

I would love to breed dragons as well. So far, I've never captured a male and a female. You will need both genders to breed them. Wild animals which are captured and tamed, I'm told, won't ever be truly tame, but their babies will be. It's possible the caravan/visitors can tell the things aren't completely tame.

The eggs issue: I'm guessing you've already checked the wiki on this issue. Are your eggs being incubated, without the dwarfs interfering?

Any of these (and many more things) can prevent hatching:
- The dwarfs collect the eggs from the nest box.
- The Female is disturbed.
- The Female doesn't get touching contact with a Male of the same species (for fertilisation).
- Anything or anyone interrupts the process.

My recommendation is lock the male and female dragon in a closed area with a nesting box, and lock that door solid. Let them out when the eggs have hatched. Also bear in mind baby dragons aren't big, and stay small for many years.

The second problem: The tavern is giving visitors and citizens so much alcohol that they are getting drunk and starting fights. This is a common problem. The best thing to do is to not have a barkeeper, this usually makes the tavern a little less problematic. I've stopped having taverns because they're more trouble than they're worth at the moment.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Bar fights don't start fortress-wide civil wars though. Must be something else. There was a bug half-way through the current release where tavern fighting would cause mass destruction (due to family conflicts triggered by a siege) but that should be fixed in 43.05.

[PatrikLundell]

Also note that you can never get fully tame dragons, as some creatures, including dragons, are born adult (but still rather small), and fully taming an animal requires a trainer to train it while still in the child state. Giant Cave Spiders also produce offspring that are adult at birth.

Apart from fertilization of the eggs requiring contact transfer of sperm, it also requires the male to be interested in females (yes, DF has homo-, bi-, and a-sexual creatures). I'm not sure if the female has any say on the issue for non sapients, as I've had supposedly uninterested female animals give birth (sexual orientation is not available to the player in vanilla DF, but you can get at that information through DFHack and Dwarf Therapist, although the latter doesn't provide the complete info).

Locking dragons in requires some care, as their training will deteriorate when locked in, so you need to time it. I would also unlock the door once the eggs are laid and 'f'orbid the eggs inside the nest box (and make sure it's the eggs rather than the box you 'f'orbid). This will allow dorfs to retrain the dragons. My experience is that the disturbance isn't large enough to stop the eggs from hatching (and I've also slaughtered birds and still had their eggs hatch quite some time later). I suspect the disturbance required to stop hatching has been increased at some point.

There is some kind of bug regarding trained megabeasts. For some reason they are "hostile" to (or possibly viewed as hostile by) militia and other military types (such as merchant and diplomat guards), causing mayhem when they get in touch.

[xtw136]

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[xtw136]

Bar fights don't start fortress-wide civil wars though. Must be something else. There was a bug half-way through the current release where tavern fighting would cause mass destruction (due to family conflicts triggered by a siege) but that should be fixed in 43.05.

My version is 43.05...

[xtw136]

I would love to breed dragons as well. So far, I've never captured a male and a female. You will need both genders to breed them. Wild animals which are captured and tamed, I'm told, won't ever be truly tame, but their babies will be. It's possible the caravan/visitors can tell the things aren't completely tame.

The eggs issue: I'm guessing you've already checked the wiki on this issue. Are your eggs being incubated, without the dwarfs interfering?

Any of these (and many more things) can prevent hatching:
- The dwarfs collect the eggs from the nest box.
- The Female is disturbed.
- The Female doesn't get touching contact with a Male of the same species (for fertilisation).
- Anything or anyone interrupts the process.

My recommendation is lock the male and female dragon in a closed area with a nesting box, and lock that door solid. Let them out when the eggs have hatched. Also bear in mind baby dragons aren't big, and stay small for many years.

The second problem: The tavern is giving visitors and citizens so much alcohol that they are getting drunk and starting fights. This is a common problem. The best thing to do is to not have a barkeeper, this usually makes the tavern a little less problematic. I've stopped having taverns because they're more trouble than they're worth at the moment.

、
well,I lock them into a small chamber with some hatching nests,and i allow my animal trainers training them. Is this the problem?
I was breeding and training elk birds and crundles many times and i thought it is similar to hatch dragon.May be i was wrong

[wierd]

With caught critters, the first batch of eggs are often infertile.

It is worthwhile to have dfhack so you can use the egg fertility tweak. (shows if the eggs are fertile or not in the game)

[xtw136]

Bay the way,the danger room assembled by training spear hurt my dwarfs in recent version.I remember it was not happen in old version.it's true?

[PatrikLundell]

Danger rooms are supposed to have become dangerous in recent versions, yes (I've never used them, so I don't have first hand experience. I did have a coin-star when it went from training to medic training, though, but that was a fair while ago).

[YetAnotherLurker]

Something worth pointing out, chained creatures can still breed or lay eggs, if they're close enough together and to a nestbox. My current fortress has a series of Roc and Dragon hatcheries, each of which consists of a 3x3 room with a nest box in the center and two chains on either side for the prospective parents. I haven't done any experimenting on whether training interrupts brooding though, I just lock the doors.

Word of warning, Hydras give live birth, and can have up to triplets. If you decide to breed them, be ready for the consequences.

[Zuglarkun]

Speaking from experience with taming and breeding a host of dragons, here are some things you might want to look out for.

As above posters have already mentioned, there is a unresolved bug involving military and visitors attacking your dragons(see: patrick lundell's response). The workaround to this is to keep your dragons away from visitors, military personnel at all times. You'll want to house their nests somewhere out of the way but fairly easily accessible. Reason being that it makes it less likely for military squad members to have a reason to visit their nests areas and risk your carefully cultivated dragon stock going bust, and second fold to make them easier for animal trainers to access. Doors and corridors to break line of sight might be useful too if they are situated near a heavy traffic zone.

Also be sure to turn off food hauling, animal trainer and just to be extra safe animal caretaker on your military dwarfs, so they won't have any reason to visit the dragon brooding area. Maybe add restricted traffic zones as a precaution. You can lock them away behind locked doors but be wary that if you don't pay attention to their training needs they will go feral.

Would recommend chaining ALL dragons at all times. If you don't lock them away, newborn dragons are very likely to go wandering all over the fortress. This can ensue in !!FUN!!. I've used chains and nestboxes to great success and this has not disrupted their training or breeding. Cages are another option but they will not breed as they need access to a nestbox. Turn off or disallow dragon eggs in your food stockpiles so you don't disturb them, or you can manually forbid the eggs (not the nestbox) as well. I think the hatching period is around 6-9 months for the eggs? Its been a long time for me, you can "t" over the eggs to check if they are fertile or infertile i think. Not sure if this requires any third party tools. Just remove the eggs from nestbox and wait for a new batch to be laid if infertile. If infertility persists, you may have a problem with your breeding pair. If you have DFHack, you can use gui/gm-editor, mouse over the dragon and go to: status->current_soul->personality->orientation_flags to change them into the correct orientation.

Dragons are expensive pets and so they take a long time to train. You can never fully tame them so they will require periodic training every now and then. However they do give lots of animal trainer exp. Do be aware that they take a fairly long time per training session, so I would recommend turning off all hauling and non-essential skills for your animal trainers. If you have only a breeding pair of dragons, one full-time trainer should be sufficient. If you want an army of dragons, get a supporting army of animal trainers.

Young dragons (and dragons in general) aren't really durable, they are more of a glass cannon, so they don't make great war animals/ military fodder. However, they make great stationary turrets provided you can find a good arrangement where they won't be shot back by enemy archers. Dragonfire only shoots at the same z-level and melts pretty much everything (a few versions ago, steel was the go to material for resisting dragonfire, this is no longer the case). Cave dragons are far more sturdy and make great war animals to bring into combat.

[PatrikLundell]

Checking fertility on eggs is provided by DFHack, so it's not a vanilla feature. Pet locking the door to the dragon breeding facility can mostly keep the newly hatched ones contained, and if you chain them up (or toss them into cages) as soon as you detect them being hatched you should reduce the risk of running into the pet locked door pathing bug.

[YetAnotherLurker]

Just be very, very careful of multiple births or hatchings. I've had several cases of twins or triplets leading to a major breach of dragon containment, resulting in !!Animal Trainer!! or !!Fortress!!. Specifically, an animal trainer coming in to chain/cage one of the hatchlings simultaneously lets out the others, which then scatter far and wide until they decide to burninate some peasants. Highly recommend using multiple layers of doors, and locking in whatever hapless dwarf goes to cage the hatchlings once they enter the hatching grounds, so that all the caging gets done ASAP and there are minimal accidents.

[PatrikLundell]

It ought to be possible to pen the young dragons in the area until they can be caged/chained, as that should reduce their desire to go to the meeting area. I think the bug causing eternal hauling between a chain and a pen has been fixed, but I very rarely use chains.