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[Mysterious Tree]

So I just got into fortress mode today and I think I'm doing pretty well so far. I got some migrants, water is not a problem and everyone sleeps in a bed. However food is a bit of a problem. I have a custom race that is purely carnivorous but I have not been able to effectively hunt animals despite giving the task (at the butcher's workshop) to hunt live animals. And not only that, my people also do not butcher dead animals and instead move the corpses to refuse stockpile tiles where they will eventually rot and cause miasma clouds to overtake at worst 3 stockpile rooms. And they also won't move these corpses to the corpse stockpile room where I designed the entrances to be diagonal so that miasma cannot escape into other rooms. I tried dumping the corpses but this task has so far also been ignored. It's giving me a bit of a headache and I don't want my beloved people to die of starvation in the first year. Especially since my spot is incredibly calm, away from all the fun stuff so that I can mind my own business. Anyone that can help me out with all of this?

[Ramiel.]

"Capture live animals" at the butcher's shop refers to capturing vermin using an animal trap, which can then be tamed as pets or, in a few cases, used to create extracts.  It's the same as the option at the Kennels.  Actually hunting animals requires a dwarf with the Hunter labor enabled (Ambusher skill), who will then go and hunt wild animals automatically (so long as he has a crossbow, quiver and bolts).  He should bring the kills back to the butcher's shop for butchering automatically.
Any wild animals that are killed should be butcherable regardless of how they died, but they need to either be in a nearby stockpile or within a short range around the butcher's shop.  Once a corpse is in range a butcher should automatically grab it and butcher it.  Note that corpses are considered refuse, so if they are outside and not brought to the butcher by a hunter you have to enable 'dwarves gather refuse from outside' from refuse orders (commands 'o'-'r') or else the dwarves will just ignore it.  This also applies to anything you've marked for dumping, it'll be ignored if it's outside and the above isn't enabled.  Only way to forcibly move something from one stockpile to another (that I can think of) is by using linked stockpiles, though you want to be careful as linked stockpiles and workshops usually only give or take stock from their specified links (stockpiles can toggle this behavior, workshops can't).
Also note that tame animals cannot be butchered, only slaughtered through the animals screen.  If they're killed through any other means they cannot be butchered afterwards.  This is generally regarded as a bug.

[PatrikLundell]

I think that giving the task to hunt vermin without having any animal traps will block the butcher's shop from performing the butchering task (only the top job is performed, and that is to hunt vermin, waiting for an animal trap to become available...).

You also need citizens with the butchering job enabled and them having time to perform it.

However, you should probably rely on livestock instead of hunting, as that depends on getting lucky with the animals that appear (you won't get much out of a regular kea even if you manage to shoot it down, and hunting flying critters isn't working that well).

[Mysterious Tree]

Ok so I need to make bolts for my hunters and relocate the refuse stockpile so that the miasma stays in one room but how can I breed livestock then? Is it as simple as just creating an animal pen and letting the animals all do their thing? Also how does dumping work exactly? All the corpses that I want to dump are inside but they still won't dump them.

[NW_Kohaku]

To add on to this, your best bet for feeding carnivorous creatures is to raise poultry.  Geese grow to full size in just one year, and multiply quite rapidly (~5 baby geese per clutch) if you forbid their eggs from being collected (I also put the breeder nest box outside all burrows once it is built to make it require no oversight), and they can be butchered for half a sheep's worth of meat without requiring any pasture land (although you need nest boxes).  Turkeys take longer to grow to maturity, and therefore give less meat over time, but they give more eggs, which is a much more reliable way to get lots of food.  And by "more eggs", I mean that 1 turkey laying eggs will be enough to feed a couple dozen residents until the day she dies.  You can easily feed whole fortresses with nothing but the eggs of about 8 turkeys.  You can easily raise both (just have about 4 food egg turkeys, and 2 each female breeder turkey and geese, plus one male turkey and goose for the breeders), which will maintain food variety.

To make your geese and turkeys breed, you should set up a pasture for each female that consists of one tile for their nest box, and at least one tile further away from there, towards a central common area.  Space out the pastures at least one empty tile between pastures/nest boxes to make sure there is no crowding that can lead to animals fighting.  (You raise "free range" turkeys.)  Then, place another pasture for a male turkey that overlaps with the pasture range of any breeder female turkeys.  The male will fertilize those females, and the population will explode fairly rapidly.

[Mysterious Tree]

Alright I have saved my fort from the brink of death. They finally got some meat and went hunting with the bolts they crafted. 4 people died from starvation, and they are buried in coffins so their ghosts cant haunt the fort and in their place arrived some migrants. The population went from 19 to 15 and then from 15 to 34. This has been a very unique experience!

(Also how do you make mammals breed? Also with nesting boxes?)

[PatrikLundell]

Creatures that are not egg layers (such as mammals) breed by having males and females adjacent to each other. Thus, all you need is a pasture, although grazers need "grass" on it (cavern fungi count as grass), and enough grass for them to eat without overpowering the grass regrowth. It's said you can even cage a male and have the females outside of it such that they get adjacent to the cage and he'll impregnate the females (I've never tried that variant).
Once gestation is over you get an announcement that baby animals have been born (and you need to add those to the pasture).

[Salmeuk]

Ranching is difficult, if only due to the large herds needed to sustain your dwarves. Excluding the aformentioned God-Bird known as a 'Turkey', and a few other poultry species, your options are limited.

A milkable animal like cows might be a good choice, but then you are defeated by the long growth period. I have raised pigs before, just letting them breed for about ten years, but it was ineffectual at actually producing consistent meat supplies. A helpful supplement, sure, but to feed more than a couple dozen off of livestock? Difficult, if only for the lag induced from roaming animal types.

As they always seem to be mentioned in these kinds of threads, you might consider editing your raws allowing for domestic Cave Crocodiles - these have ridiculous clutch sizes and are as prolific as Turkeys. And considerably more dangerous. You could also catch and breed wild ones.

[Mysterious Tree]

How do you get a consistent source of meat then? Hunting seems like a good choice, even if it's up to chance as it has saved my fort before (even though 6 people died from starvation, not 4). I suppose something good did come from all the sadness as one of my hunters has now made an earring artifact, my first one too.

Right now I have some time to prepare for the next hunger period and I want them to be able to eat when that time comes again so I must get a consistent meat source because otherwise more people will most certainly die. I have no turkeys or geese and I don't think they are very common in scorching temperatures so do I just rely on the migrants and the animals they bring with them for slaughter or is there a better way to do this?

Edit: I removed the [CARNIVORE] creature token because after doing some research I also found out this token was bugged in world generation, so I'll be starting a new world with a new fortress with the updated raw files.

[PatrikLundell]

Well, asking how you'll be able to play the game with modded behavior and be surprised by it not being geared towards that is somewhat odd.

Expecting to live only off hunting is definitely optimistic, so if you were going to aim for only/mainly meat as food you'd have either have a rather small hunter(without gatherer) "tribe" (and make a bee-line for the caverns, to get more [dangerous] critters to hunt), or live off livestock you bring on embark (which can be complemented later on with wild caught and tamed animals [rutherers!] and hopefully elven brought trade animals).
Turkeys and geese have the advantage that they can be fully tamed as adults, but other animals can be fully tamed in their child state, so you can basically use any kind of bird for eggs and meat (the latter requires you to catch a breeding pair).

Avoid elk birds, though, as they're a pain to manage because they're both grazers and egg layers, resulting in the mothers starving to death sitting on their nest boxes unless you micro manage them.

[Starver]

I've avoided[1] hunting for so long, because it's not reliable and tends to just put hunters in harm's way. Though it may have been tweeked significntly over the ?decade? since I started to ignore it.

I primarily rely upon crops, for food, so that's not really useful to the thread question, but I take it as a matter of honour to pasture and (where possible) breed every creature I receive (wagon-haulers, any pair I have points to add to embark, any caged creature to come by trader that adds usefully to my stock). I used to cage-trap out in the corners/edges of the map a lot (and pinch-points, as I sprawled ever more defensive barriers), for wildlife and hostiles alike, but the logistics of that changed significantly and I don't do that so much.

For pasturing, I tend to set up 1x5 strips and put both male and female[2] in them, which tends to not overcrowd everyone. For grazers, the strips tend to be straight above my Z-1 subterrainean farms (until and unless I convert that area to Z-1 sunken surface-exposed ones by removing the 'roof' ground) within my walled-off area, and are created ASAP once any trees are removed.

Depending on the grazer, they may need regular moving to the next 'virgin' strip along. I always make sure I have spares (or recovering ones) and there tends to be no normal walking across them for other purposes. If I get a plethora of impossibly hungry grazer-species (elephants were bad at this, but I can't remember how long since I got them other than as wildlife) I get time to arrange further strips, and as a last resort I butcher them all off.

For non-grazers, I do this in 'stables', perhaps rooms dug near the farm-levels (depending on how I progress through the expansion scheme). I underuse "underground grasses" as an option, for some readon. For egg-layers, I tend to revert to one or more standard 5x5 plot with either breeding pairs (and enough nest-boxes to satisfy) or the same-sex 'spares' that I'm not yet slaughtering. The nestbox rooms can be locked to prevent egg-disturbance (prior to making it explicit) whenever other access is not needed.

The young that are born/hatched I tend to leave with the mother for... sentimental reasons..? I'll move the bull onto the 'next' pasture early to reduce the resulting crowding. After some time (or immediately upon notification of maturity) they'll go to the creche/pre-butchery (non-family) holding areas. I may be a little less ethical about the crowding of, say, ducklings (once I've got a high number produced each hatching) but only because I'll be too busy. I keep meaning to have an egg-factory for food (unlocked breeding nest-area, perhaps with my second-best males and females) but mostly I tend to only get 'accidental eggs' in my food-chain.


My butcher's shop, BTW, I tend to put near-surface with an open roof (or sometimes on the surface) with upper access walled-off from invaders and bridge-roof-offable from aerial invaders. That's for anti-miasma purposes, if I can't stockpile/dump[3] enough of its product quickly enough. I try to make this 'chimney' a feature, if it's more than just one level of hole, though I really don't think it adds much (and I think it just needs to be the central tile, not the full 3x3 footprint).


But I'm more adhered to long-held habits that maybe once were fine-tuned, rather than an ever-tweaking (and experimenting) perfectionist. My system is far from optimal and may have dangerous flaws in it. That I deal with, perhaps, but in ways I haven't thought to mention right here - being down to a side-issue or general habit of mine not directly related to what I've just decided to describe.

But if it helps to flesh out 'options', on top of all the others already given, you're welcome to this. It's far too much to solve your immediate problems, but perhaps 'food for thought'...



[1] Actively discouraged. A migrant with a hunting skill enabled (as with fishing) gets it disabled on arrival, but they'll have skills useful for my military (that I also try my hardest not to use in anger, but is there if I need it), and a crossbow! (Ok, not the fisherdorfs... They're effectively haulage-peasants, usually.)

[2] Though I've not established it works this way, I'll butcher the least-large (or maybe fat) of the males/females of any species, until I'm left with the Prime Pair who may tend to give larger-biased offspring, and so by animal husbandry I breed my own idea of pedigrees, theoretically selecting for increasing utility in whatever purpose that creature is best put to. This is a holdover from before Gelding and when map-wide spore-breeding was a thing, so I now know I don't need to be quite so hurried to prevent runts from getting involved in this process, upon attaining adulthood. But that's what I tend to eventually do, anyway, just for my own self-satisfaction. It also means that 'pet' runts shouldn't be a problem in despoiling the theoretical gene-pool any more (at one time I'd have perhaps caged them, cages being spore-proof).

[3] My primary refuse/dump-piles are are always in "safe aboveground" spots, for similar reasons.

[Mysterious Tree]

Well it's fair to say I learned a lot from all this. I'm thinking of just making a massive farm now because the next hunger period was starting to set in with everyone failing to get food and my hunters not hunting anything because the animal population was exhausted so I knew I wouldn't survive especially since I needed to feed 41 people now instead of just 15 so I just removed the carnivore token because 1 it was bugged and 2 it would prove to just be too difficult for a new fortress mode player such as myself to handle so now they're omnivores. I think I've been lucky so far as the custom race isn't alcohol dependent like dwarves because I also didnt have any plump helmets. I'm pretty happy though with how my first fortress went. I survived for around about a year, creating 2 artifacts in the process and getting my population up from 7 all the way to a max of 44 (one of them went berserk from the possession and killed 3 people). I kind of wanted to start over anyway because my fort just didn't have an organized layout. There where bedrooms here and bedrooms there, workshops here and there and stockpile rooms that just weren't big enough to hold all the resources that were gathered along with a little farm that didn't have anything planted and an ugly interior with some rooms that just didn't serve a purpose.

[orius]

I go with a pretty straightforward battery farm like this:



There's 10 turkey hens with 1x1 pastures on nest boxes with a male in between 2 of each.  Pretty efficient for egg production and the population is easily maintained.  There's also 10 pairs of pigs each on a 1x1 pasture.  Pigs don't need to graze, so once you get a stable population, it's steady meat and leather, and you can also milk the sows and make cheese.

[Mysterious Tree]

Yep I have no clue how that works lol
I'll probably discover it eventually but for now I'll just gather plants..

[orius]

It's not that hard.  You just put each individual animal on their own 1x1 pasture so they don't go wandering through your fort.  Pasture a male next to a female so they can breed.  For birds, you want the female pasture on top of a nest box so she can lay the eggs.  When the females lay the eggs, you go in and forbid the eggs so they stay in the nest and hatch or else your dorfs will carry the eggs off to a food stockpile or kitchen.  If you're running DFHack, it's got a plugin that tells you if a clutch of eggs is fertile or not, so you can just forbid one or two clutches and let the dwarves collect the rest, and you only really need to hatch a clutch of eggs once or twice a year to maintain your bird population.

Grazers are harder to raise because they need grass which either means keeping them on the surface somewhere which is dangerous, or digging out a soil layer underground. 

You can also let your cats breed and butcher what you don't want.  Generally, I keep cats pastured over food stockpiles to control vermin.  I keep a pair of male and female cats over my main food and booze stockpiles so they'll breed and a single cat over other food related stockpiles like the harvest stockpile, seed stockpile and so on.  As the cats pop out kittens, I just butcher the oldest cats to keep the population from getting out of hand.  Cat's can't wander when they're pastured, so they stay where they're needed to kill vermin, and they're less likely to adopt cat dorfs too.