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[Tormy]

So, the only interesting thing I see in your experiment is the confirmation of the serious FPS drain they may cause. That is a risk there is and people need to be aware of it if they do decide to go for cats.

Yes it was noticeable on my old computer, but not on this powerhouse PC. 

[Deathworks]

Hi!

This just made me wonder: Has anyone ever run a regular fortress under the premises of never butchering any domestic animals, in other words allowing all cats, dogs, camels, muskox, and what else immigrants brought with them, to breed as they liked? I wonder how such a fortress would fare.

In my fortresses, cats are the only ones allowed to breed, so I don't have any information on that situation.

Deathworks

[Axe27]

My fort rules change.

In one fort, I'll have four breeding pairs, while the their offspring and such get butchered.

In another fort, I let them multiply until I can butcher a cage full of kittens.

[Tormy]

This gonna be an epic thread..I mean 2 pages already..and about what? CATS! 

Deathworks - Well I had an experimental fort what was like ~120y old when I abandoned it, and I only butchered a small part of the cat population. Most of them were dying because of old age. I dont know that how many cats I had actually, but quite a lot.. 
[Actually a couple of hundreds I would guess, and I had no FPS problems at all on this new comp]
However I must note: it was a hardcapped fortress. 10 dwarves, hardcore defense systems with a moat, only cats as animals.

[motorbitch]

cats. can not live without because the vermin, can not live with them for the catplosion and the fps hit.

i dont like to butcher cats. to few bones, make small bone bolt stacks. so it  forces me to dump the bones, but the stupid carver wull use dump designated bones. so i can not make new bone bolts until the dump is done. same goes for dogs.

so i do it like paul: i sterilize them, all cats and all dogs. i make them all male, though.
if i need new ones, i just buy them from a caravan.

[Doppel]

Hi!

This just made me wonder: Has anyone ever run a regular fortress under the premises of never butchering any domestic animals, in other words allowing all cats, dogs, camels, muskox, and what else immigrants brought with them, to breed as they liked? I wonder how such a fortress would fare.

In my fortresses, cats are the only ones allowed to breed, so I don't have any information on that situation.

Deathworks

Yes, but not by choice, more by ignorance. (or did i choose to be ignorant? hmm, maybe)
At first i didn't want to butcher animals, well my animals. And that was with a crappy computer, believe you me. Now i just try to prevent having to butcher my animals by making pits and cages and whatnot. Plus i don't like cats killing certain vermin anyways, i call it "animays". I like extracting certain things for profit. Uh, that sounded so wrong.

[Paul]

Ah, I never really paid attention. I loaded up an old fort with a lot of cats and notice that some of them DO go outside while hunting vermin. Most are still staying inside hunting inside vermin, though - I get a lot of cave spiders and lizards and such in the fort. I also have a massive pile of cats and kittens swarming the meeting room and all my hallways, as they roam around following dwarves or hunting vermin. And the guy with 50 cats had a decent sized portion, but there were 3 other dwarves with cats. I apparently just killed mostly the one guy's cats out of sheer luck (or possibly because he had walked past my cat killing machine first and many of his cats were following).

[Silleh Boy]

this topic reminded me how i once wanted to train someone up to champion level, outfit them in masterwork/artifact armour, arm them with an axe, and let them be adopted by every cat in the fortress.

i'd planned to dump all the cats onto a bridge by a volcano, then launch them into it send them on a mystical journey, before leaving the guy to take his anger out on the fortress.

of course, this didn't work, because they all adopted a butcher or something and my war dogs had all been allocated to the rest of the military already, so i replaced the cats with his family.

then i launched the guy and his cats in after them for ruining my plan.

the champion didn't go berserk from this, like i hoped, and later died when he dodged into the volcano while fighting a kobold or a goblin or something.

this is why i don't like cats in my fortress.

[Lord Dullard]

Well, regardless of any arguments, the following is indisputably true:

* You only need 2 or 3 cats to control the entire vermin population in a large fort.

* Cats are behaviorally inferior to other DF animals because it is far less easy to control their breeding and ownership habits.

I'm not saying cats wouldn't make decent 'guards', but there is zero reason to use them as guards when you could use another more easily controllable animal instead.

But if you like having tons of cats in your fort, hey, who's to tell you how to play?

[Earthquake Damage]

I'm not saying cats wouldn't make decent 'guards', but there is zero reason to use them as guards when you could use another more easily controllable animal instead.

There's one thing cats do well that other animals do not.  Cats patrol a very wide area in search of vermin.  If you don't like to micromanage (read:  tying new cats to ropes every season after the old ones get slaughtered), they're superior to dogs and other animals.

[Deathworks]

Hi!

Tormy: Well, cats are one of the basic features most users have an opinion about. They also have some unique rules tied to them (like adopting dwarves rather than the other way around). I mean, if you started a thread about "donkeys" or "muskoxes", I think you would probably run out of species-specific things to add.

And then there is of course the cat-lover and dog-lover divide :) :) :) :)

Doppel: Yes, you are actually pointing out the second problem with cats besides FPS: They kill cave spiders, so getting a silk industry up and running with a lot of cats can be something of a challenge (although, if you walled off an area regularly and opened it again only temporarily for harvesting, wouldn't that work?).

Silleh Boy: I think I see where you went wrong. :) :) :) :)

You had a very specific plan. It was so specific that the game/RNG simply couldn't resist and had to do everything it could to make you fail. But then again, we all enjoy epic fails as well (and not getting that guy to go berzerk at all is definitely epic, considering all the tantrumming you get without wanting it).

Lord Dullard: Earthquake Damage points out a good aspect I have always observed - cats end up patrolling the outside all the time and thus have a larger defense radius than chained animals (unless you want to do a lot of breeding and tying up) and a better activity cycle than owner-bound animals, given the bad habits of dwarves (if your military dwarves decide to go inside to have lunch, won't their dogs accompany them?).

However, this actually raises another interesting question:

Does vermin spawn infinitely or is there a danger of extinction as people claim for game? Quite obviously, if vermin went eventually extinct, cats may lose some of their efficiency in longer-standing fortress.

And I also wanted to ask something else. What kind of vermins are there in the nasty biomes people regularly go to? I mean, I always do normal forest/hill or good biomes, so I have birds, lizards, fairies and the like roaming the countryside and thus luring the kittens outside, but what about deserts, haunted areas, or glaciers? If there was an absence of outside vermin in the more "popular" biomes, I could see why people had the impression that cats never went outside...

Deathworks

[Pilsu]

I just chain a few breeding females in an open walled off spot and maintain a 10 or so male cat population

Wish the stupid bastards would kill the flies buzzing about. They only seem to be interested in specific areas, leaving the pantry filled with rats while killing olms in the farm


I don't slaughter cats, I consider it to be unrealistic. I removed their innate swimming ability and I toss them into the river instead. It's too bad only snatchers can put creatures into bags though

[RavingManiac]

The ability to spay cats would be nice...

...though how a dwarf would do that with medieval equipment is anyone's guess.

[Tibbles]

But if you like having tons of cats in your fort, hey, who's to tell you how to play?

Dohohohohohohohohohohohohohohoho

[Hoborobo234]

When/ if I get a legendary bone crafter I always slaughter half of the litter of kittens so that the skin goes to the leatherworks to make armour and Quivers and the bones go to the workshops to be made into bolts, instant military succsess