Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[fizmat]

Merpeople should be visible on the map, dispite underswim. From my experience at least.

You need to embark on a good ocean (not lake) and possibly you will need a low amouth of savagery due to their 'benign' tag.

I think it's just that you can have exactly one herd of wild animals on the map at a time, and that slot is filled by 3 whales that just float in the middle of the bay, not moving. When I'm casting the dam gonna try to scare them away with magma (failing that will just encast them in obsidian).

Will I need to mod mers to be tameable (and tame them) for them to breed?

[Grimlocke]

Merpeople should be visible on the map, dispite underswim. From my experience at least.

You need to embark on a good ocean (not lake) and possibly you will need a low amouth of savagery due to their 'benign' tag.

I think it's just that you can have exactly one herd of wild animals on the map at a time, and that slot is filled by 3 whales that just float in the middle of the bay, not moving. When I'm casting the dam gonna try to scare them away with magma (failing that will just encast them in obsidian).

Will I need to mod mers to be tameable (and tame them) for them to breed?

Im quite sure they allready have the tamable tag, but you dont need that for them to breed. Note that you cant butcher them either way, as they are talking creatures and your dwarves still have some traces of this silly thing called 'ethics'. You can only kill them and use their bones.

It is possible to edit ethics and make anything butcherable, but its bugged and only works untill you save and load the game.

[aurixdarastrix]

All right, I think I have an idea for a sustainable two-lever mermaid pitting device, but three questions: 
First, can someone confirm that aquatic creatures travel up and down z-levels in water?  Namely between depth 1 and 2 in a two z-level pool. 
Second, around how long does does it take for a merperson to air-drown? 
Third, how much do they flop around on land? 

[askovdk]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've found a location where mermaids enter the map on land.
I haven't dug deep into the situation yet, but I tried to restart with a rebuildt world at the same location, and I got the same wave of mermaids on land.
(Another restart didn't give the mermaids, but a shark in the ocean.)

My plan is to dig a small basin close to their entry point and possibly build some walls, so fair fish doesn't enter the open ocean, - after that experiments can begin. 

Anyway, if anyone wants to play with this, then the seed is : 3444866524
My installation is a pure current version of DF.

Locaton:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've only seen them the two times I played on the shown 5x6 area, but that may just be random bad luck.

[o_O[WTFace]]

I guess this is beyond horrible but...

Has anyone tried asploding them with a weapon trap as they airdrown?  They should go unconscious and trigger it even if they normally wouldn't right?  It looks like merpeople have 10 separable body parts, each capable of leaving behind a perfectly good merperson bone if... liberated before death.  You would have gotten a skull and bone stack from the corpse anway, so completely severed one could theoretically give 8 extra bones, or ~5 times the original value minus whatever goes flying into the ocean.  My guess is half that number is more realistic, assuming it works at all.

I guess its exploiting two bugs at once but hey if your going to slaughter them for profit then you might as well use 200% of each mermaid.   

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

Hrm. Ok, I've only read about half this thread, but some ideas that might work:

It seems like the primary problem is separating the mermaids from the babies. I have a system that might work.

I've noticed that when I run a waterfall down a flight of stairs, it knocks baby dwarfs out of their mother's arms; puppies get knocked down similarly --  I expect it has to due with strength of water flow, and the fact that babies and puppies can't learn swimming skill. If you have a few z-levels, the babies fall to the bottom and die by colliding with an obstacle (the floor). Either way, they're sorted.

It might take some finangling, but I bet if you built a large chamber, connected to the ocean, then periodically closed it, let the water in it fall several z-levels, then re-opened it, you might be able to time it such that

1) the shock of air-drowning OR the rush of water knocked the merbabies loose ,
2) the water flowed back into the chamber quickly enough that the adult merpeople didn't drown.

Testing it and timing it would be the main challenges. If Mer-babies start with swimming skill that might also nix it.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

I think that the best bet would be using aquifers to create a constant flow, also I believe that the clock described here can be used to automate it. With the clock you can make it so that most of the year where the mermaids are is fully submersed but once a year it will open something and create a flow that will drag the children away allowing for easy selective air drowning. The adults need to be chained for them to not be dragged away along with the children. As note to push stuff you need a non-constant flow so the clock can also be used to turn the pumps on and off to make a disrupted flow to push stuff.

[DFPongo]

Seems that the grand total of merepeople that were hurt as a result of this thread were zero.
Lots of grand plans for mermade farms, no screen shots of same.
I think the merepeople are quite safe from your evil plans.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

I am currently genning a world to test my clock idea, Otherwise you are correct. I hurt more merpeople when I did experiments on the inextinguishable !!lignite!! in a bin.

[askovdk]

Modified quote from Douglas Adams:

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet, dwarves had always assumed that they were more intelligent than merfolk because they had achieved so much -- the magna trap, Blockedlance, =Kitten leather gloves= and so on -- whilst all the merfolk had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the merfolk had always believed that they were far more intelligent than dwarves -- for precisely the same reasons.

But the hunt WILL continue!   

[chaos985]

if i had a map for this, i have an idea for how to capture them.

first dig several 3 tile wide hallways 2 tiles away from the ocean.


{Ocean}
[][][][][]
[][][][][]
[] ___ []
[] ___ []
[] ___ []
[] ___ []
[] ___ []
[] ___ []
[] ___ []
[] ___ []

Make sure there is good drainage near the back, its about 10-15 tiles long, and that your dwarfs have access to the inside.

On the inner wall from the ocean, dig out the two outside squares, and replace them with flood gates.

Fill the entire thing with cage traps.(you probably would only need 2 or 3 rows, but this is dwarf fortress, the moment you have one, 50000000 others will suddenly decide to swim through unharmed.)

{Ocean}
[][][][][]
[]X[]X[]
[]^^^[]
[]^^^[]
[]^^^[]
[]^^^[]
[]^^^[]
[]^^^[]
[]^^^[]
[]^^^[]

Now channel out the wall connecting it to the ocean, and start the drainage.

When the floodgates are open, there should be enough current to pull anyhing that gets close into the traps, hopefully they will get caught before being air drowned.

when the floodgates close, the drainage will empty it, allowing your dwarvs to retrieve the cage traps.

Finally, with creative use of magma, you could probably force creatures to path near enough to get caught in the current.

[Earth Striker Lurin]

I will bring this thread to the attention of the dwarven Triumverate (Digger Lurin, Digger Asmo, and Trader Khash) and we shall see if we can master this new industry.


(my god, did we just create the first Dwarven guild?  Can single player games have guilds?!)

UPDATE: 2/17/10
Well, I only got one of the other two interested so this effort may flop.  I'll post updates if I get any.

[Lord Dakoth]

If there is a guild, I think we should call it MSNBC: The Ministry for the Slaughter of Naive, Benign Creatures.

(May I have a rimshot, please?)

[MC Dirty]

If there is a guild, I think we should call it MSNBC: The Ministry for the Slaughter of Naive, Benign Creatures.

(May I have a rimshot, please?)

BA-DUM TSH!!

[BitLooter]

I've read this thread, and deemed this idea awesome. Awesome enough, that I've decided to play one last fort before DF2010 to experiment with this. I'm having trouble finding a good place to work with, though; anyone have a good worldgen (with magma, preferably) I could use?