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[mek42]

In some cage traps, now I need to figure out how animal training works.  Try to find cool stuff first, then learn how to use it.  I'm assuming that once I have tamed baby 'phants, war training is the best choice?

[Immortal-D]

Before you start war training and assigning guard-elephants to the important Dwarves, I recommend you secure a very large pasture first.  Although XL herbivores now have more reasonable grazing rates (used to be they would require more food than is possible to survive), they still eat quite a lot.  Once you are certain that your elephants are not starving to death, you can start teaching them to step on things.

[mikekchar]

If the elephants are in cages or on restraints, dwarfs with animal care giver selected will feed them from the general food pile.  They will either use plants or prepared meals.

[FantasticDorf]

Assigned war elephants are also free to move around and are generally treated as the 'pet' of the person they are assigned to and will be fed by them as long as they have okayish empathy & memory statistics to actuallly remember that their pet is starving rather than leave it too late.

Its how people manage to keep giant panda's and other such animals alive despite only eating very specialized grasses (being large animals too)

[Altaree]

If the elephants are in cages or on restraints, dwarfs with animal care giver selected will feed them from the general food pile.  They will either use plants or prepared meals.

Here is a great use for all those prepared meals.  Elephant pancakes for the elephants!

[mek42]

Thanks for sharing all the info - I hadn't picked most of this up from the wiki.  I know elephants aren't as neat as dragons, but it is also my first time being successful with random cage traps set out near where they roamed.  Had to share the excitement!

[mikekchar]

I think it's incredibly exciting.  I can imagine breeding 50 or 60 elephants and letting them loose on the goblin horde.  It would be amazing!  Though, having fought elephants in adventure mode, I suspect you would get heavy losses.  Still, it's enough to cause confusion so that your normal military can do serious damage.

[FantasticDorf]

Takes 10 years each for a elephant to grow up to adult and mostly they have 1 offspring at a time, so consider it a mass trapping & patience exercise before you get your desired elephant stampede.

[mikekchar]

One of my real wish list features would be an easy way to reitre a fortress, and wait 10-20 years before unretiring it. Although I'm all about the automation, I've never actually managed to get a fortress working acceptably (to my control-freak standards) that I can let it go for an entire year unsupervised.

[Fleeting Frames]

If your fortress isn't somewhere safe, it might get conquered, but otherwise you could retire, embark in thin and safe 1x1 embark space with 1 popcap, wall off the map edges (to block caravans) and maybe something else to ensure keas won't get in, make backup of announcements.txt and then remove all -s in the document and leave 6 dwarfs to ponder with 1 herbalist/brewer/manager. (Or grower instead of herbalist, I suppose - easier to wall yourself off from keas underground, even if I rarely use farming.)

Oh, and set fps cap to something like 4000. Don't know how fast you'll actually go, but at tenth of that you should pass 20 years in 5 hours and 36 minutes once set up.

Adventure mode version would be to set up a macro to create an adventurer, retire them, and return to title screen, then create 480 adventurers. Would need to take 42 seconds or less per adventurer to beat the 400 fps fort case, but you can't tab away from DF while doing this and won't get up to 6 scholarly migrants as byproduct.

For breeding the elephants faster, though, iirc wild animals of same type on the map are counted towards "25% adult population". It might be faster to just capture 60 elephants from your biome by rampant caging.

[mek42]

The 10 years to adulthood just means I've got a good reason to keep the fort going.  Can dwarfs ride yet or is that still just for invaders?  I've got this picture of four marksdwarfs on an elephant mounted platform.

[FantasticDorf]

No timeline on riding them at the moment its just a development goal, the best you could manage right now is to buddy them up & train them for war to release on your enemies and cause some major damage.

Or eat them for plenty of rations.

[Flintfakeer]

Setup an area for some wild elephants with a doorway filled with cage traps after a door or bridge. That way they can breed without having to be fed. After that you can catch an elephant or two for war training so you have only a couple of elephants to worry about instead of a herd.

A negative to this setup is you have to recapture ALL wild elephants before new animals will spawn on your border.

The positives are: no feed necessary , they can be slaughtered from the cage OR just killed then butchered in their pen, increased fps as the non breeding elephants can be kept in cages or on chains, you can setup a beautiful auto butcher using a deep pit and a cobalt floor leading to the butcher and tanner, target practice without hurting any dwarfs feelings, and the list goes on.

Traditionally I use these things on trogs and POWs so I can use their bones in jewelry, their flesh as target practice and their tears to harden my warriors. Sending a dwarf with an adamatium short sword to kill a pack of trog younglings is a good way to make the dwarfs turn to the dark side all the more complete.

The pit works very well with a cobalt, lead or silver floor and a bunch of spinning blades in a trap; With the blades it even works on your own dwarfs which is a drawback I've noticed some people have difficulties with when combined with aforementioned youngling killer. Damn Urist Stardestroyer tantrumming just when I needed him.

[FantasticDorf]

Restraint chains will work too for that flintakeer, putting the male wild elephants in a cage and surrounding them with a harem of chained female  wild elephants adjacent, then funnel the escaping young trying to get off the map edge through a simplistic set of cage traps.

[Flintfakeer]

Toady modeled mating through the bars? That is impressive! Never heard of that.