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[Newton]

I'd like to create a fort that specializes in the processing / slaughter of narwhals but I'm not entirely sure it's possible to get them to show up.  The main issue being that in all arctic zones, it's always below freezing, so there is never liquid water for narwhals to swim in.  I've even started a fort on the borders between an arctic ocean and a non-freezing ocean biome and haven't had any luck there either.  Do I really have to bring magma up from the magma pool, because I simply can't imagine them showing up naturally. What am I doing wrong, and have you ever seen a narwhal in any of your games?

[Fleeting Frames]

I imagine you have to bring magma up, yeah: Furthermore should wall up map edges with raising bridges so the game is forced to spawn ocean creatures.

Make sure your magma has uneven height; sometimes ice refreezes above magma, in which case the "waves" will unfreeze the section. The narwhal may be dead by then, but it beats the alternative.

Though then again, you need constant supply of magma flowing off-map to keep the map edge clear. Maybe some spirits of fire/etc. fire creature bodyparts could be hot enough to not vaporize water while keeping it from freezing, but I've failed to see it work out in practice so far.

[Bumber]

Maybe some spirits of fire/etc. fire creature bodyparts could be hot enough to not vaporize water while keeping it from freezing, but I've failed to see it work out in practice so far.

Caged fire imps? They're [HOMEOTHERM:10095], which is hotter than warm stone but lower than water's boiling point. Look's like that's safe for wooden cages, too.

[Newton]

Maybe some spirits of fire/etc. fire creature bodyparts could be hot enough to not vaporize water while keeping it from freezing, but I've failed to see it work out in practice so far.

Caged fire imps? They're [HOMEOTHERM:10095], which is hotter than warm stone but lower than water's boiling point. Look's like that's safe for wooden cages, too.

Caged fire imps don't seem to melt ice around them.  Even after letting them out of the cage surrounded by ice walls, there is no change to the ice. (Probing the area is a stable 9991U).

Melting the ice with magma under it is easy enough, but the ice along the edge of the map will not melt unless you melt it from the top, and this seems very problematic and temperamental.  I think the only way I can probably solve this is to write a dfhack script to convert arctic ocean into a real arctic ocean with a solid 2 layers of ice before getting liquid water, but I'm not sure how possible that is.

[Bumber]

Caged fire imps don't seem to melt ice around them.  Even after letting them out of the cage surrounded by ice walls, there is no change to the ice. (Probing the area is a stable 9991U).

But do they keep the water in their tile from turning into ice?

Melting the ice with magma under it is easy enough, but the ice along the edge of the map will not melt unless you melt it from the top, and this seems very problematic and temperamental.  I think the only way I can probably solve this is to write a dfhack script to convert arctic ocean into a real arctic ocean with a solid 2 layers of ice before getting liquid water, but I'm not sure how possible that is.

Magma crabs are the same temperature as magma, and won't cause obsidianization. They may cause vaporization, but that's less an issue at the map edge.

The script would have to keep the temperature above freezing, otherwise the water would immediately refreeze. Maybe you can mess with the default temperature somehow without changing the creature spawns.

[KevinM]

The best way is to probably modify narwhals to be in any ocean, or make them land creatures.
Oceans usually freeze solid, instead of a real ocean that has several z layers of ice (maybe just one z layer) or stays liquid in the cold.  Because of that, you won't get arctic sea life.
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=2673
Until that's fixed, I'm not sure that we can do anything.

Even if you could get a spot to melt, with the temperature and re-freeze behavior, I'd expect that to kill anything that entered (not to mention dwarves trying to retrieve the things.