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[DanielLC]

Moving water tends to move creatures inside of it. If you have a chasm, you can pour the water into it and strain out the mermaids. If not, you can either continually and slowly pump the water out, or make a large, multi-z-level room that you continually empty and when the bottom of it gets to 6/7, you refill. I'm not sure which would be more effective.

[Tubi2b]

Is it possible to drop cage traps? You could pump out a large area and build a floor (walls surrounding), then above it build a bridge with a cage trap on every tile (if you can build them on bridges.. you get what im getting at), then drop them all at once by triggering the bridge, and it would be like a net of cage traps falling. The idea is that it would catch anything in that square and sink them to the floor, pump the water and retrieve.

Is this freshwater or saltwater? Because alternatively you could breed a large amount of crocodiles and unleash them into the waters... indirect genocide.

[Wahnsinniger]

Moving water tends to move creatures inside of it. If you have a chasm, you can pour the water into it and strain out the mermaids. If not, you can either continually and slowly pump the water out, or make a large, multi-z-level room that you continually empty and when the bottom of it gets to 6/7, you refill. I'm not sure which would be more effective.

Something about the way you put it "strain out the mermaids"  really funkified in my head when it mixed with my experiences of making pasta. I can't really decide if this whole concept is more like Commercial Whale hunting, or more like Killing Espers just to get the Magicite.

You couldn't use grates or fortifications to do the 'straining' though, as moving water apparently can push things through them. You'd have to use cage traps underwater. On the plus side, if the whole thing can be turned off with a flood gate, you wouldn't even have to pump the water out (if its drained into a chasm, that is.)

Unfortunately most of my trapping scheme experience was from the 2D version, where you could just dig a channel across the whole outside forcing animals into small cage-able corridors quite easily. (Caught a bunch of elephants that way once I think)

[Randy Gnoman]

Upright bars allow water to pass through while obstructing creature movement.  The water can reach dangerously low levels during draining, though, which can result in premature drowning.  I've used the straining technique on large fish before with great success; if only it weren't for the hippos... the hippos... oh god, the hippos...

*ahem*

And while I don't have a chasm, I do have an aquifer below sea level, so I may be able to generate some movement in my ocean... but again, I worry that straining might cause premature deaths.  Still, it's worth a try if I can get the merpeople back... I may have inadvertently killed my entire current population of merpeople in a small construction mishap...

Anyhow, thanks for all the contributions!  My plan now is to create "roach motel" style traps using measured lava-dropping for obsidian ring-walls, using those as a base for my screw pumps, and draining the center to place the cage traps before channeling individual sections of the obsidian wall out to place my floodgate entrances individually.  I figure the backwash issue will slow things down much less with only single inlets flowing at any given time.  But who knows?  Maybe the result will be 3X the water pressure on a normal square in open ocean pump-ring and I'll have construction workers pushed back by the force of the flow!

Here are the rough blueprints:

Code: ( obsidian ring-wall mold, 1 or 2 z-levels above sea level) [Select]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~╔═══════╗~~~~~~
~║€€€€€€€║~~~~~~
~║€╔═══╗€║~~~~~~
~║€║€€€║€╠═════¤
~║€║€€€█€█LLLL%%
~║€║€€€║€╠═════+
~║€╚═══╝€║~~~~~~
~║€€€€€€€║~~~~~~
~╚═══════╝~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The floor hatches being supported by up stairs, and made of bauxite, with bauxite mechanisms linking them to levers.  I'd already produced enough for the internal pillar component, which I intended to use in order to dig a staircase to the seabed, before even realizing that the merpeople presented such a potentially lucrative project... but if I want to do this, I may need to order more bauxite.  My stock is getting fairly low, and my lava-works will have to go further into the ocean than I'd intended... anyhow, this should produce:

Code: ( rough obsidian ring wall) [Select]

777777777
7███████7
7█77777█7
7█7███7█7
7█7███7█7
7█7███7█7
7█77777█7
7███████7
777777777
Which will be pumped out and carved into some other stuff, and then stuff.  Not this weekend, though!  I'm off now, even before I can finish posting my plans, and shall be very busy for a bit... but those frolicking finned money sacks shall be mine...

[E-mouse]

Soooooooo... anyone made a Mermaid Fortress yet?

[StrayCat]

This thread is Dwarfcore. So very, very dwarfcore.

[Time Kitten]

Harvesting their offspring will be difficult easier if they airdrown

Fixed.

Once you have them cage trapped, drop them in a spawning pool.  Once you've given them time to get preggers, open them up to an area with cage traps (possibly that fills from the spawning pool to wash them in.  wait for them to all be caught, drain, then install the traps to you can flood and re-release.  To process the offspring, simply let them out.

[inaluct]

Really, won't you just need a room with chained up mermaids that has 4/7 water and a door leading to the airdrowning room for the babies? It doesn't really seem that hard. I might try mermaid farming.

[Reasonableman]

The amount of malice in this thread is actually causing me some concern. I mean, chaining up mothers and forcing them to breed, just so we can drown their children to harvest their organs? Does this strike no one else as absolutely horrific?

[StrayCat]

*Thinks.

Naaah.

ONWARD, FOR PROFIT AND GIGGLES!\

And we're not chaining them. we're caging them. Totally different thing, you know

[Skid]

It sounds just like the standard meat industry to me.

[Reasonableman]

Yeah, well, if cows had human faces, I might feel differently about that point.

Odd how something so small can affect one's opinion so deeply.

[Eita]

Just look at the tails.

[(name here)]

Only in Dwarf Fortress would you try to catch a mermaid to butcher her and make trophies out of her bones 

I have a sig now.

[Pilsu]

The amount of malice in this thread is actually causing me some concern. I mean, chaining up mothers and forcing them to breed, just so we can drown their children to harvest their organs? Does this strike no one else as absolutely horrific?

You misspelled 'hilarious'