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[random_odd_guy]

My hyper elite military has killed several FBs already, fairly effortlessly. That's not a problem. But I decided I want to try catching this one, but am afraid I'm not familiar with the strategies used to get around [TRAPAVOID]. Anyone have any tips? This thing seems to like murdering elk birds, incidentally. It's killed so many of the bloody things it got a last name. (And GCS, and trolls...and anything else unlucky enough to spawn down there. It keeps burning them all to ash.)

[Leonidas]

To actually stuff it into a cage, you'll need to use either webs or a cave-in.

If you need it in a room but not in a cage, such as for target practice, then you used to be able to bait it into your locked room with furniture. That's not working so well in the current version, so something must have changed in building destroyer AI. I'm working on it right now.

With a fire breather, maybe you could put him behind some fortifications and have him breathe on the goblins as they walk past!

[PatrikLundell]

This FB is not a webber, so a webbed cage trap should work. Cave-ins as a method to capture trap avoiders in cage traps are useless against creatures that are NOSTUN, which all FBs, Titans, and Clowns are.

As Leonidas said, containment can be achieved by luring it into your containment facilities with bait. I typically use wooden doors, although I'd use stone ones in this case, to avoid the door getting accidentally destroyed by fire (that's usually not a problem, though, as fire breathers only use the fire against live targets).
Unlike Leonidas, I haven't noticed any change in the effectiveness of bait doors from 0.40.X until 0.44.05 (I haven't played newer versions as my fortress is subject to a crash that's worked around in 0.44.10). I've managed to bait and kill all FBs eventually (except the obvious cases where they're stuck up in trees or killed by something else before that), but it can take quite some time for them to get close enough to sense the bait.

[Leonidas]

Cave-ins as a method to capture trap avoiders in cage traps are useless against creatures that are NOSTUN, which all FBs, Titans, and Clowns are.

Toady nerfed the checkerboard? I've been playing this game too long and not often enough.

I don't know how to explain the FB behavior. He munched on a door. There was another door down the same hallway, 22 tiles away. Instead of moving forward to the next door, he took about 20 steps away from the bait. For the past few weeks, he has been sitting unmoving 42 tiles away from the bait door, 37 tiles if he's using a cube for detection.

I'm about to open a new bait door only 14 tiles away from him. Maybe that'll move him.

[Mort Stroodle]

I like to stick an elk bird or something on a restraint along with a bunch of statues (often statues of cowering dwarves) in my FB pens. The animals seem to be juicier targets for the FB's. I also like using statues instead of doors as bait, luring a lovecraftian horror into a trap using doors always feels like it's not in the spirit of things.

[Leonidas]

I was using statues before, when I had a setup that would draw the FB up from the caverns to a controlled kill room. I just switched to doors this time to avoid blocking the dwarves. Maybe that makes a difference. Maybe statues taste better. I dunno.

Edit: Now I remember! The FBs don't path to furniture. They path into the fortress, and they'll stop to destroy any furniture along the way. If they don't have a path into the fortress, then their behavior becomes less predictable.

[PatrikLundell]

Cave-ins as a method to capture trap avoiders in cage traps are useless against creatures that are NOSTUN, which all FBs, Titans, and Clowns are.

Toady nerfed the checkerboard? I've been playing this game too long and not often enough.
:

The checkerboard I've heard of was using obsidianization, so I guess you're talking about a different version. Cave-ins to kill FBs (etc.) works just fine. The only critters cave-in trapping are useful for natively are gremlins and kobolds, as those are the only trap avoiders who are not also stun immune (although you can use it against anything that would be caught in the traps normally, as well as sapients who avoid traps because they know they're there).

[random_odd_guy]

Ah, but you see, they use the pathing to furniture to *find* your fortress. If your fortress has no furniture the FB's AI gets confused. And, yeah. They will attack life in favor of buildings. And buildings in favor of nothing. Cave ins don't work anymore? Damn. Uh. So how the heck do I get a GCS to spray webs on a cage exactly?

[PatrikLundell]

Ah, but you see, they use the pathing to furniture to *find* your fortress. If your fortress has no furniture the FB's AI gets confused. And, yeah. They will attack life in favor of buildings. And buildings in favor of nothing. Cave ins don't work anymore? Damn. Uh. So how the heck do I get a GCS to spray webs on a cage exactly?

Never done it myself, but check the wiki on silk farms. Instead of dropping the silk you should first place cages on the floor (I presume, as it's hard to get them nicely on a bridge, and a stockpile requires a floor of some kind), get the cages hauled there, and then have the GCS spray the bait (and the cages with what misses the bait). Once done, remove the spraying (my silk farms have dropped the bait undead onto a cage trap for recapture, while the GCS is led away to a cage if still tame, or dropped onto a cage trap if training has decayed. Standard silk farming use wild GCS' and dorfs as bait, though).

[random_odd_guy]

The other problem would be that the giant cave spiders seem to be only spawning *in* the layer of the cavern that monster is in. That would make it easier, except that it has been incinerating all life with extreme prejudice and I'm pretty sure it's the only thing alive in that cavern layer 90% of the time.

I can't find any wiki pages that explain how to set up the webs on traps. Which is shocking, given its the only way to capture certain creatures. :/ I've been able to mostly piece together some ideas of how to go about it but the wiki has outright refused to answer a few crucial details: Do regular cave spider webs also ensnare things? It mentioned you could get tame giant cave spiders by raiding kobold caves but I can't figure out how to locate one on the map. Acquiring an actual giant cave spider would be really damn hard because the FB in question is slaughtering them all when they spawn in. The thing has killed so many it's gotten a last name for its troubles.