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[nocpur]

CASOTOXA: Striketrampled
The eternal jail for all forgotten beasts.
With a little bit of beast science on the side.

A new fortress in a new world with a new 800ish forgotten beasts ready for capture. Gotta catch em all*.

*Except for web shooters.

How do I do it? Do you want to catch your own beasts? Read this guide I wrote.

Have any questions? Want to discuss? Ask! I love to talk about this, it's my favorite way to play DF.

Current progress. 743.

Below is an outdated summary, so you can follow along for more recent updates by checking my own post history throughout this thread. The original introduction:


Welcome to Casotoxa, Striketrampled. A fortress of my own personal modded race, but for sake of not explaining my dumb roleplaying, we'll just call them dwarves. This is a fortress that prides itself on catching forgotten beasts and having a nearly always absent god that gets annoyed when he has to actually pause the game and work out trade agreements with the liaison, because that means wasted time for more forgotten beasts spawning.

I've done multiple fortresses that try to catch a ton of forgotten beasts, but this one is my most successful and, even better, seems to be ongoing. There's usually a steep slowdown in the number of beasts that spawn after ~50-80 or so, which is really annoying when you're trying to catch em all. Or I get burnt out. This time, my goal is really and truly to catch as much as I can, no burnout, no quitting. Legends mode says there are 748 forgotten beasts waiting for me out there and I intend to take them alive.

I made this fort to be as self sufficient as possible so I can leave it unpaused for long swathes of time, so Casotoxa itself is pretty underwhelming. Its real meat and bones are in its jail cells. FB's can sometimes take anywhere from 1 game tick to IRL hours between appearances, and actually sitting there watching and waiting for one to appear is really, really boring, so I try to AFK as much as possible. There's not much to this really! Just a ton of waiting, at this point. Gui/timestream helps things go a lot faster.

I also have to thank Ngonos, the only web-shooter that I haven't killed. He's the one doing all the capturing after my GCS population 1. died of old age and 2. went totally extinct from my caverns. He's doing a great job!

Some clarifications:

- I use DFHack for aesthetic purposes (regionmanipulator, tiletypes), ease of access, and FPS safeguarding. Not for OP purposes, and (see the rules for the exceptions) almost never for beast catching. Commands like timestream and gui/teleport are allowed, commands like lever pull are not.

- I did say modded, but my mods are only edits that I made to the raws that aren't even public anywhere else, and I don't use anybody else's mods. I made no changes to items or anything like that, it's only a few creatures that I added in that I wanted to play with. These have absolutely no impact on beast trapping and are just to make things a little more fun for me.

Rules, for transparency:

In my previous fortresses I did everything as legitimately as possible --- this one is still mostly legitimate! In a similar amount of time that I spent on this fortress, I would only capture ~30-50 FB's max before I'd end up getting bored. Where a lot of my issues came up were just the sheer amount of time FB's would take to get to the trap. I have reached the point where I can always trap them without fail, it's just whether they wander off for months at a time to pick fights everywhere that it becomes a problem. It gets super annoying to just wait and watch for so long... is it getting close? Oh, no, it magically heard a crundle spawn as it was entering the trap, repeat.

With this fortress, I gave myself some new rules. Because I know with almost 100% certainty that if they enter my trap, I can capture them, I figured I can cut myself some slack and save a bit of time, essentially skipping to the inevitable.

• I can teleport the beast CLOSE TO, but not INTO, my trap - IF and only if it is 1. taking a long ass time to get into the trap (this usually means the FB is killing cavern wildlife or is stuck splashing around in water) or 2. if it's made of something really fragile and is about to start fighting cavern wildlife, like steam, water, or fire (it will lose those battles almost always). This is a huge QOL improvement. I leave this fort running in the background a lot until an FB notification pops up, so this means more time I can let it run automatically, less time I have to spend watching to get ready to pull the trigger on the trap. Teleporting it close to the trap doesn't guarantee that it goes in right away anyways, it just sometimes helps orient it in the right direction and remind it that it's supposed to be rampaging at my dwarves, not the crundles. In old fortresses, I wouldn't teleport, but I got burnt out really quickly because I was wasting sooooo much time just watching them. This works much better for me and saves a ton of headaches, and I don't consider it even that cheaty, since I would have eventually captured them anyways. If I'm really going to 800, I have to be efficient with my time.
  
  I should also note I am not allowed to teleport a FB AWAY from the trap, in case I did not get the trap up in time (has not happened, thankfully) or to save a dwarf's life (has happened...). Typically, I also have to deal with stuck beasts (i.e. trapped on top of a tree, blocked off in a corner of the cavern) in a completely vanilla way, unless there is really nothing I can do about it.
  
  
• Kill web shooters. There is currently no known way to cage them, besides Ngonos I don't need them for anything, and they're a waste to put in my bridge traps, so I let my militia deal with them. I do like to put their bodies on display though.
  
  The reason I am not trapping them to put them elsewhere is because, when they are not chained/caged, I believe they contribute to a sort of soft cap of forgotten beasts. It seems like, at least for a while, having one around prevents another from spawning on the same level. If I keep too many web shooters around, uncaged, I think I'll be slowing my whole operation down significantly.
  
  As of 10/30, I believe I have no more web shooters in my world. 114/115 are dead, besides Ngonos.
  
  
• For forgotten beasts made of flame, I am allowed to cage them with wooden cages by turning off temperature. Sorry, no metal cages. It's just a hassle. I do chain them with metal chains, though, so that they don't burn through my ropes if I turn temp back on.

I know this might be disappointing that I'm even involving a teleport option at all, and I'm disappointed myself, but I've played 4-5 fortresses like this and it just gets so tiring. I'm sure there's good ol dwarfy vanilla ways to solve my problems, but until every cavern level animal goes extinct, I'm giving myself a break with the teleporting solution for now. Once I don't have any cavern creatures to worry about, I'll stop the teleporting, because I don't really want to do it either. Crundles went extinct recently, and I hate those more than anything.

(As of 10/30, the only cavern wildlife remaining are mud men, flesh blobs, large/giant rats, and giant moles. There will be very little, if none at all, teleporting from now on.)

And despite all my attempts and all my testing, if there is ever a method devised to cage web shooters (no, cave-ins do not work)... I would love to know how.

Follow along for beast science.

I'll keep updating this here once I hit another significant milestone, something notable happens, or if something goes terribly wrong.

What will I do when we're done? We'll see. A tournament could be fun. We could find the Unforgettable Beast.

Check-in milestones:
135 - the beginning
168
178 - last R acquired, can now spell dwarf fortress
206 - broke 200
221
238 - a small vomit crisis
268 - second hall filled
334 - 100th birthday
350 - raw digging, tally modifications, and some beast science
401 - third hall filled
435 - coughing blood, tally modification 2
500
535 - 4th hall filled... and bugs
600 - fortress tour
654 - small update, home stretch
677 - 5th hall filled
705 - last milestone
727 - E
PROBLEM DISCOVERED: 5 settled beasts will not arrive to the fortress by any natural means.
743 - all forgotten beasts that are available have been captured. Beginning to plan on how to recover the last 5.

[Enemy post]

This is brilliant. Never thought of making a FB zoo before, but I may have a new reason to actually interact with the caverns.

[neblime]

soooo... can you make them fight? 

[King Zultan]

Sounds way more interesting than pokemon, who cares about catching little critters when you can catch big ones that eat people!

[delphonso]

Interesting task! Here's to another 700 captures!

[nocpur]

Little update. We're at 168 now, expanded my hall a bit for any newcomers. Haven't had too much time to play lately but I'll be getting back on track here in a few. Still missing that R...

[HakuryuVision]

Amazing!
I hope your game/computer can keep up with over 800 units on screen!
Also didn't know the number of FBs is finite!

[nocpur]

Amazing!
I hope your game/computer can keep up with over 800 units on screen!
Also didn't know the number of FBs is finite!

No FPS issues (besides general old fort slowdown) yet. Because I chain them and wall them in in a 1x1 area, I think that might help save a bit of FPS. If you leave their walls open, some actually try to continuously jump (yes, jump) away from their chains. It doesn't work, obviously, but they try over and over and over, which probably leads to some lag. The walls stop them from doing that.

I'm playing in a large world, which typically have around 800. I think medium worlds typically have 200? Can't quite remember the exact values but last time I tested there was a very specific range for every size of world you made. So FB frequency does increase with world size, but they are finite, for sure.

The only ones that I get concerned about are the ones with gaseous noxious secretions - they are always producing these clouds of gas, which may lead to some issues later down the road. At the moment I only have 4 of those, though. I'm not too worried yet.

[nocpur]

A little bit of a sooner update than usual, but that's because the R finally showed up. Kulur Bakturepo, a rattlesnake.


Bloated body makes me think a little bit of a gaboon viper.

Anyways, I can now completely spell out "Dwarf Fortress" and my username with forgotten beasts. This was a minor little goal but took way longer than I expected because, turns out, there are very few animals that start with R. Even less that are represented in dwarf fortress. I think it's only rhinos, rattlesnakes, rats, and raccoons that can be forgotten beasts, unless I'm forgetting some. Rhinoceros beetles are represented by I, as are most insects. I don't know if rabbits can be forgotten beasts (I'm pretty sure hares can be beasts, but those might be H, unsure) or if ravens can be forgotten beasts.



(Dimetrodon > Wolf > Alligator > Rat > Frog > Fantail > Oxpecker > Rhinoceros > Tick > Rattlesnake > Eagle > Scorpion > Salamander)
(Newt > Oriole > Crab > Pterosaur > Viper (yes, I cheated a little, it's a V. But as far as I'm aware, there are no U's). > Rattlesnake)

Spelling out "forgotten beast" might be a pretty fun goal next. Just need one R for that and two E's, I have plenty of the rest. E's are gonna be a problem... elephant. eagle. echidna. emu. elk. For as many as there could be, wondering why I haven't seen that many... gonna look through the raws to see which E's I actually have. (Edit: Bad news. I think there's only one more E available for me to catch, an elk. I have no elephants, no more eagles, no emus, no echidnas. Earwigs are I's, pretty sure. Perhaps this is an impossible goal.)

New progress: 178, just 10 since yesterday. There's a few gaps because I'm waiting for ones with a different color to show up - I get a loooot of white/gray forgotten beasts, but I like to space them out so it looks a little more chaotic - I don't put ones that are the same color or the same tile next to each other.



Fun fact: I forgot this recently. There are lobster forgotten beasts, and these are not represented by an L or anything like that - they keep their normal tile. I think they're the only FB with a unique tile, "¥". I don't have one in this world, but I checked on a previous save and remembered I had captured one there. Hopefully this world has one eventually.

[King Zultan]

Spelling the dwarven way.

[nocpur]

Another update. We're at 206 now. About half of my new hall is already filled. Let myself get distracted by raiding a bunch which slowed things down, but I'm giving it a rest so it's time to hunker down and catch more. Literally just as I was typing that last sentence, after I had taken all my screenshots below, this guy popped up. And, a sparrow landed on my windowsill like 15 minutes ago, too. Good timing, I guess.


Anyways, progress:



I should clarify that I subtract 1 from the total since I'm not including my web-shooter. Technically, I haven't captured him.


.... + more, more, more.

Casotoxa has arrived at its 65th year.

[delphonso]

An interesting note: Vesh means dust in Dwarven, and it has deadly dust...

[King Zultan]

I find it funny that the list has the forgotten beasts listed as chained guest.

[Strik3r]

I find it funny that the list has the forgotten beasts listed as chained guest.

I find them being listed as "Unwelcome Guest" when they're free and rampaging through the fortress just as funny for some reason.

Anyway, this whole project is a pretty dwarfy one. So, good luck on it, nocpur.

[nocpur]

I find it funny that the list has the forgotten beasts listed as chained guest.

Funny enough, if you start the game with a titan/some other megabeast already living in your embark (such as in a ruins or cave), they are a "Current Resident." Which can then become "Current Resident (Caged)" or "Current Resident (Chained)". Same thing happens if you tame something like a dragon and let the training wear off back into a wild state - it becomes a resident after that.

This happened once, I had a mountain titan living with me in one of my old fortresses, when I was still experimenting with trapping. It's at the very bottom.



In this fortress I've also captured most titans that have shown up (although a lot in this world seem to enjoy the use of webbing) but they're still guests. I have no current residents aside from some dragons.