Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[DrCyano]

Greetings fellow Dwarf overseers!

I'd like to dip my toe into animal training, simply because I've never done it before. But... What are the benefits of training an animal? Can I turn stray dogs into war dogs? Bears into battle bears?

If I buy an animal from the tree-huggers, is there any point in training it? Or is it already trained?

Lastly, what can you do with trained animals? How would I use animals for defense (or even offense) beyond simply using them as bait?

Thanks all!

[Salmeuk]

Well, every question you asked and more is available here for you to read at your leisure.

I think the biggest thing to learn is that you can never permanently train wild animals, so if you plan on capturing bears or whatnot you need some way to produce a second generation. If you truly want a 'Stray Bear' roaming around your hallways, you need a Mr. Bear and a Mrs. Bear, and they have to be sexually interested in each other. This is one reason those stories of Cave Dragon armies or Roc hatcheries are so astounding, is that it takes quite a bit of luck to have male and female counterparts captured and reproducing before your fortress succumbs to FPS death.

Elves sell pre-tamed creatures, and this is why their sniveling demands are tolerated by the majority of players - easy access to loyal jaguars and all sorts of wild birds for your aviary gardens.

I'm just realizing now that you seem to be more focused on the post-training training of the animals, where you take a basic bitch stray dog and turn it into a stray War dog. This is useful, IIRC it boosts their stats, and you should always go War dog since Hunting dogs are lackluster in fights. You can train any animal in this list at the moment, and I believe there is a TOKEN you can add to the raw files to allow even more animals to be trained.

Animals are guilt-free cannon fodder, so an ideal situation is to have so many you can throw %30 of your stock at the invaders, while the remaining %70 continue to safely breed behind your walls. They are tough to control and can sometimes behave in an unpredictable manner when confronted with enemy troops.

For instance, I was playing a human fortress for a change, and my civ had tamed grizzly bears, so at *250* a pop I could embark with a population of trainable grizzlies. Wonderful, right? Well, before I had gotten around to training, the grizzlies encountered a few wild hippos. You know, the most dangerous animal in Africa? The two parties apparently exchanged some harsh words, because the ensuing gore-fest has no other explanation, beyond some deep-set racial hatred towards fat purple creatures.

Untrained animals will sometimes cower in fear when exposed to invaders, so training helps them actually fight and not just die.

[DrCyano]

I'm just realizing now that you seem to be more focused on the post-training training of the animals, where you take a basic bitch stray dog and turn it into a stray War dog. This is useful, IIRC it boosts their stats, and you should always go War dog since Hunting dogs are lackluster in fights. You can train any animal in this list at the moment, and I believe there is a TOKEN you can add to the raw files to allow even more animals to be trained.

Animals are guilt-free cannon fodder, so an ideal situation is to have so many you can throw %30 of your stock at the invaders, while the remaining %70 continue to safely breed behind your walls. They are tough to control and can sometimes behave in an unpredictable manner when confronted with enemy troops.

Awesome! But, how do you do that? Can you add war animals to squads? Or do you have to put a pasture on the investing force?

[Salmeuk]

Awesome! But, how do you do that? Can you add war animals to squads? Or do you have to put a pasture on the investing force?

What do you have to work with? I'll pretend you have a few Stray Dogs lying around, maybe in cages, generally neglected and taking up CPU cycles.

Make sure you have Animal Training enabled on one of your dwarves. Skill does not matter when training, since the finished product is always the same.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It certainly affects taming, and it is wise to wait for a highly skilled trainer to immigrate since Animal Trainer is, ironically, tough to train.

'b' --> 'k' lets you build a Kennel. Using the Kennel, you create a 'Train War Animal' task. One of your trainers will then drag a random

oh right this changed recently. You need to create an Animal Training Zone ('i' --> 't') and place it anywhere you want. From the z-screen Animals menu, scroll to the dog you want trained and select either 'h' or 'w' for hunting and war training, respectively. You can assign specific trainers to each training session, though that function is only really important when you are taming and want to prevent the creature from returning to a wild state.

The assigned trainer will drag the chosen animal to the training zone and spend a day or two teaching it how to kick ass.

[DrCyano]

Aha! I now have a BATTLE BEAR!

I bought a grizzly bear from an elf caravan, put a zone in a room, made the zone both a pasture and a training zone, pastured the bear in the room, then went to the 'z' status screen, hit Enter (Animals tab selected), then assigned a trainer for the bear and set it to war training. The trainer went in, stood there for a moment, then bam! War grizzly bear!

Now the bear follows the trainer everywhere.

If I send the trainer out on conquest mission, does the bear go to? How can I assign the bear to another dwarf?

[Urist9876]

To assign a war or hunting trained animal:

[v]iew a dwarf
[p]references
[a]ssign animal (edited, wrong keybind)

Without this, trained animals will stay at home during raids.

I often put cages near corners outside and at several in the caves to get untrained animals. For me training of captured animals is preparation in case I manage to get something interesting. When a trainable megabeast shows up I'm ready.

[PatrikLundell]

Since war animals tend to follow their trainer/owner, you should avoid grazers (giant war elephants are great - until they starve to death in the depth of your fortress rather than munching away in the pasture they've been assigned to). Meandering animals might be problematic as well, although I don't actually know if that's the case (Animal people meandering is known to be problematic).

[anewaname]

There are two non-military reasons to train creatures; a dwarf might like them as a pet or as food. For this, I often train some creatures, breed them, make a couple of the pups available as pets, and then butcher the remainder.

[kaijyuu]

For captured wild animals I often train them briefly so I can butcher them. They will meekly follow any dwarf to the butcher's shop so long as they have a single rank of training.

[Radipon]

The larger animals are pretty good at defending against werebeast attacks; fighting an unarmored opponent, can't get cursed, and their deaths don't register as heavily as a trained soldier. The only problem is that everything else can roll over them like a tide for the same reasons (armed like goblins or simple enormous).

[Sarmatian123]

You could keep wild animals cages, so you can train all your crossbow Dwarves into hunter profession. It makes simpler, when looking for them in u-menu, when they are civilians. I do this to guard squad lead by guard's captain.

Else civilian soldiers do pop up all over place in u-menu, unless they are peasants, which can be confusing sometimes when you look to assign some free Dwarf with new profession. An alternative is to make militia fortress. Then all Dwarves get to be soldiers and craftsmen. Though sending them out, can be detrimental on how your fortress work. The positive is all Dwarves get barracks quality time for focus and happiness.

[Urist9876]

How:

Open up first cavern layer. Place about nine cage traps at the entrance from the caves to your fortress. This is just to capture cavern critters. Build something for the more monstrous denizens of the caverns as well.

Wait for crundles. Tame those and put in a room with nest boxes. Forbid eggs and wait till they hatch.

Crundles cannot be fully tamed, as they go from egg to adult. Only creatures that have a child stage can be fully tamed. if you are unlucky getting crundles, any tamable creature that cannot be fully tamed will do. This will keep your trainers somewhat busy.

Meanwhile, allow a few dwarves to hunt, either on surface or caverns. Once the total number of trainers, trappers and hunters exceeds nine they might as for a ranger guild hall and do a little extra animal training training there.

It will take a long time before your trainers become legendary.

Taming a wild animal results in a creature with quality modified taming status. A -creature- will revert to wild fairly soon, while a =creature= takes a much longer time to revert.

Trainers will allow creatures in cages to go wild before retraining. Pastured creatures will be retrained before that.

A creature that reverts to fully wild will pause the game. If you have no dangerous animals or all animals are caged, it becomes very annoying. It can be turned off in announcements.txt: look for TRAINING_FULL_REVERSION and remove P and R behind it, so it looks the same as TRAINING_DOWN_TO_SEMI_WILD.

The real danger in trained animals is dangerous animals that can revert to wild again. If you have too few trainers that are too busy accidents can be expected. You also have to make sure animals are accessible at all time so they can be trained. Build cage traps near the exit of the pasture for dangerous animals like dragons as failsafe.

This might be a bit theoretical. Except for stupid mistakes, like disabling a training zone or keeping animals behind a locked door, training never gave me any issues.

[PatrikLundell]

Also note that there are serious bugs with tamed megabeasts. Military character (including caravan guards) and those have tendency to attack at sight.

[callisto8413]

I found dogs are really good with werebeasts.  As the werebeast seems to like attacking them and almost ignores the Dwarfs until they are almost on top of it.  Also good for hunting.  And putting them in the entry tunnel is a great alarm system.

[tonnot98]

Also note that there are serious bugs with tamed megabeasts. Military character (including caravan guards) and those have tendency to attack at sight.

I think that might have something to do with them often being enemies of all the local civilizations.

Anyway, if you feel like dipping your toes into modding the raws, I've been having lots of fun adding the [TRAINABLE] tag to Crundles. They're an otherwise benign cave creature that comes in numbers large enough to put your animal trainers to good use, and they lay eggs. But on top of that, they've got little knives for fingers and are exceptionally entertaining to watch crash against invaders in the dozens, or just fluff your numbers on missions. There's nothing quite like reading that the enemy commander was slain by a particularly plucky Crundle.