Placing your trap fence is an issue of location. Don't just start building, unless you plan on building a LOT. Look around for where creatures are. If you see some elk, then there's more likely to be elk there later. Some areas are just no good for traps, or no good for pit traps. Snares might work because smaller animals are more local.
This I "heard" before attempting to do it. I chose the area exactly because I ~regularly encountered deer (or something deer-like, didn't waste time examining what they were, never downed any) in the area when traveling to villages, so after a few failed attempts to bag a some of those buggers i thought: Here. Here i shall set up my trap fence and have access to all this free meat.
Didn't build too close to my house (well, back then a river-side cellar with a shelter) or village (didn't know whether it would scare them away), at least 5 map tiles away from the nearest settlement
Like i said, it was "highly successful endeavor", so after a while i just hung up a sign "Gone fishing" on the trap fence and went the way of the fish-eating torch-grinding
cheater businessman :-/
Maybe i'll try after the winter, I'm planning a second house on ocean side / island. But who knows, perhaps some raiders will visit during the winter or at least I'll wake up with a bear sleeping in the bed with me or something else. So far it is way too peacefull. One squirrel, one or two deers that didn't net me much cause i encountered them too far away from home and even then i got so many fish the meat managed to spoil before i could eat it (roasted, in the cellar, no fireplace to smoke it back then ...)
- If I (manage to) wipe up a village just for a bit of action, will other neighbors get mad at me ?
- I've read that i could raid village fields & I did so (in pretty hardcore style: parked a punt next to the field, harvested all day & dropped it all the boat, then went home to store it all & sleep. Repeated ad nauseum. Then I've read that it will get villagers upset, but they still peacefully traded with me. Is it just harvesting exactly on the village map square that ticks them off ? Or do they figure it out later (not all of the plants could be harvested, so perhaps it was too soon for them to go harvest & figure it out) ?
- How many
self-transporting meat-cans companions would get one through winter ? If it's a reasonable number (not to small or large), perhaps I'll try going through winter without touching any other supplies - which I've got a shitload of.
Well, at least i shall take a few stacks of smoked fish and go try to wipe a Njerpez village and be back before winter (so far i've pretty much sat on my ass in the lower-left corner of the map, so i might as well get a bit of a feeling for the time required for long-distance travel.
Along the way I'll try how villagers react to having trap-pits built in the middle of their village. And perhaps eat my first bite of hu^h^hchicken meat.
Wish me luck everyone, and I'll bring you fresh juicy Hum[an]burgers ;-)
But fire does generally spread to loose flammable items nearby. You can effectively make a "fuse" of firewood.
When setting up fields, I filled a rectangular area with wooden blocks, set one on fire and then still had to go and light each and every one of them. Also lighting a fire right next to a tree didnt set the tree on fire. So perhaps it works only with certain types of wood / wooden products ?
Torches are no longer really valuable.
Valuable enough to buy anything I required. Much less bothersome then crafting cups / other wooden crap (no tree felling/hauling/chopping, you can move a stack of ~1200 branches in just ~2 minutes, crafted relatively fast). I checked the wiki and unless it's wrong, they are worth 11 cuts of meat. They weight 1lbs each. That makes them 11x more valuable than meat for the same weight. Good enough for me.
Everybody accepted them, in case of multiple / expensive items just offering more torches then just one-at-a-time did the trick.
Unless you are talking about the 3.15 beta, which i don't have (3.14-4).