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[Wolfking6116]

Allo.

I've recently come across this game, and have found it quite entertaining.
Or atleast mind-numbingly hilarious in the simpler aspects of the game.

The only thing that has really bugged me to almost no end...
I've looked all over the wiki, and have even searched on here for a bit.

How the crap do you make the animals stay in a different area?
They constantly crowd the meeting zone of all my dwarves, and it just bugs me. >.<

[Yanlin]

You can't. You got no reason to.

[Sprout]

Well, since animals don't currently need to eat, you could create a pit by using the channel designation, designate a 'pit' zone, and assign all the animals into it. Your dwarves will proceed to drag them down to the pit, throw them in, and leave them there. If you want to butcher them later, you could create an exit door that's not pet-passable adjacent to a butcher's workshop.

[ShunterAlhena]

Beware though, the damn animals will make every attempt to escape from the pit. They tend to gather up near the door, waiting for the instant when a dwarf comes through and they can slip out (when someone's standing in the door, it's pet-passable for an instant). Pits are fine for animal "cold storage", but not for cases when you regularly want to remove some critters from the stockpile (i.e. a dog pit who are waiting for war dog training will have a lot of escapees). For such a case build cages, and stuff all your animals into them. It's a bit cruel to have eight muskoxen in a single cage locked up for five years, but hey, DF isn't about humanism.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

As has been stated above, there is no direct method. However, there are a few things you can do:

1. Designate more meeting zones. Creatures looking for meeting zones would then be dispersed between different meeting zones, reducing the density at each zone.

2. Cages. If you put animals in cages, they won't go into your meeting zones, obviously. This also has the additional advantage that they stop pathfinding, so they are not eating up your game speed (a.k.a. frame rate).

3. Pets. Pets tend to stick around with their owners. Cats will choose an owner if a cat-loving dwarf is available. Other pets need to be made available via the animal tab of the status screen and will then be taken on by a dwarf as a pet.

Deathworks

[Wolfking6116]

You can't. You got no reason to.

OCD is my reason~

And as the four of you claim there isn't an easy way to keep them out,
I suppose I'll just make a bigger meeting room for everyone, then. >_>

[Pilsu]

Build a pen outside and plug it with a door. Lock the door. Pet opening designation is useless, they still keep trying to path so lock it properly. Once done, build a ramp next to the wall and toss them in

If you don't want them to escape, make it a big pen and designate areas away from the door as meeting areas. They tend to stay there, though the occasional dwarf will go in when you open the door to butcher something


Make some elaborate spike trap hallway and make pet owners euthanase their breeding pets to keep more from spawning in the wrong places. Animals breed with spores

[WCG]

Beware though, the damn animals will make every attempt to escape from the pit. They tend to gather up near the door, waiting for the instant when a dwarf comes through and they can slip out (when someone's standing in the door, it's pet-passable for an instant).

This is actually a good thing, because animals don't follow traffic designations. I built an underground 'pasture' near my butcher, with a direct path and a longer path. Both doors are set to allow dwarves, but not animals.

But the longer path is designated as a 'high traffic' route, so that's the one the dwarves use. The shorter path (which happens to point directly towards my dining room/meeting hall) is designated a 'low traffic' route. So the animals all cluster around that door.

As mentioned earlier, I have a pit designated above the room, so I can dump in additional livestock (I keep the young animals in a cage in the dining room, so my dwarves have something neat to look at). Since I have NOT designated the pasture as a meeting hall, the only dwarf with any reason to enter is the butcher, and he's always intending to return directly to his shop. (Note that you might put a couple of doors in the 'long' path, if the butcher has pets that might travel with him and get stuck in the pasture. Then again, that might not be a problem for you.)

So far, this seems to work fine, but it does depend on the exact layout, I think.

Bill

[ShunterAlhena]

Wow, WCG, this is a really cool idea. I prefer to play as a purist, meaning no "exploiting" of game mechanics, so I won't use this knowledge you offered, the puppies will remain in their cages (I guess every DF player has his weirdnesses, this is mine. ) But I like the creativity nonetheless.

[Untelligent]

I prefer caging them up, myself. I have a laptop, but I have an extreme dislike of any world smaller than Large, so I need all the extra FPS I can get.

[LegacyCWAL]

I guess you could call what I do "half-caging".  There's a cage right near the butcher's where I put all the cats and the baby animals, which makes it convenient should I decide to slaughter them the moment they grow up.  Otherwise, I just release grown ones (other than cats, of course) because I try to have multiple, ridiculously large meeting areas, and spreading out the strays like that significantly reduces pathfinding problems*.



*There's still as many critters, but they aren't crawling all over each other.  So there's only the "find path from A to B" calculation, rather than the "find a path from A, over, under, around, between, and through 500 animals and dwarves, to B".

Edit: And no, 500 is not an exaggeration: my current fortress has 233 dwarves and ~255 animals.  Though admittedly, that number does include chained animals, zoo animals, and the youngsters in the kitchen-cage.

[WCG]

Wow, WCG, this is a really cool idea. I prefer to play as a purist, meaning no "exploiting" of game mechanics, so I won't use this knowledge you offered, the puppies will remain in their cages (I guess every DF player has his weirdnesses, this is mine. ) But I like the creativity nonetheless.

Heh, heh. I don't like exploiting the game mechanics, either! But I certainly didn't consider this to be in that category - not any more than using a cage, certainly.

I don't know why Toady has animals ignore traffic rules, but it could be for this very reason. This makes pastures possible, after all. It might even be just a temporary measure, but it seems to work.

And really, all you're doing is keeping the livestock from slipping through a pet-prohibited door when a dwarf opens it (by telling the dwarves to use a different door, basically). I can't imagine why that would be exploiting the game mechanics.

But then, it's none of my business how anyone else plays the game. If you don't like doing this, no problem. And to be honest, I haven't tested it much yet. I'm still early in my second fortress, and I haven't been able to increase the livestock herds much yet.

Thanks for the comments!

Bill

[Kidiri]

Cages. Seriously. Put every animal that isn't a pet in one cage. You'll only have to worry about breeding animals, but whenever you get an announcement there have been foals/kittens/puppies/... born, lock 'em up. When you have a meat shortage, butcher them.

[personjerry]

leashes (ropes/chains) work too.

[Lord Dullard]

I guess you could call what I do "half-caging".  There's a cage right near the butcher's where I put all the cats and the baby animals, which makes it convenient should I decide to slaughter them the moment they grow up.  Otherwise, I just release grown ones (other than cats, of course) because I try to have multiple, ridiculously large meeting areas, and spreading out the strays like that significantly reduces pathfinding problems*.



*There's still as many critters, but they aren't crawling all over each other.  So there's only the "find path from A to B" calculation, rather than the "find a path from A, over, under, around, between, and through 500 animals and dwarves, to B".

Edit: And no, 500 is not an exaggeration: my current fortress has 233 dwarves and ~255 animals.  Though admittedly, that number does include chained animals, zoo animals, and the youngsters in the kitchen-cage.

I don't understand why people let so many animals take over their forts, personally.

I keep about four breeding animals of each type around; these are the only ones who will live to any sort of notable age. I let them have twenty or thirty offspring and then slaughter them all simultaneously. I always have plenty of meat around (and no FPS problems).