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[Teiwaz]

My fortress is being overrun with cattle. While I cull their numbers regularly, I find it quite annoying that they all gather in my meeting halls and statuary gardens, blocking thoroughfares and, presumably, pooping all over the place.

In the past, I've tried designating animal pits with securely closed doors, but every time I have a cull, the butchers end up letting all the animals out and I end up wasting a bunch of time having to designate all the animals for re-pitting again.

I've also tried chaining the mothers up to keep the babies in line, but that takes a lot of maintinendce, a lot of chains that could be made into armor and weapons, and as my population grows I keep having to do it all over again.

Does anyone have a reliable method of getting the cattle out of the dining room that doesn't take quite so much time?

[Jim Groovester]

Stuff them all into a single cage.

b - j, q - a - enter over every cow.

They won't be in your dining room, but they won't be able to breed while they're in there. Any animals that were pregnant will give birth, however.

[Derakon]

You have two options, basically. The first is cages; just toss all the animals into cages and they'll of course stay out of the way. However, they stop breeding once they're in cages.

The second is to abuse traffic designations. Animals ignore traffic designations, so they'll always prefer a short, but marked as low-traffic route over a longer, but high-traffic route:

Code: [Select]

##########
...HHHHHH#
##R#####H#
##R#...#H#
##R+...#H#
##.#...+H#
##.#...#.#
##.#####.#
##.......#
##########The animals will cluster around the door leading to the Restricted path, while the dwarves will always come in via the other door.

Edit: note that in the latter case, the animals will be continually spamming the pathfinding algorithm to try to find a way to your meeting zones. This is a drain on FPS. Thus, I suggest putting a drawbridge or floodgate down the access corridor to physically cut off your corrals from the rest of the fortress. That should stop them from trying to go to your meeting areas. You can restore access when you need to cull the animals; during that period you'll experience an FPS hit, but the animals shouldn't actually get out.

[Teiwaz]

Yeah, caging's out due to their not breeding - if I was willing to kill my meal / leatherworking industries, I'd just have them all slaughtered and not even have to worry about the cages.

The path cost idea is interesting, though. I don't have a problem with blocking access to the pit entirely when I'm not culling the herd, it's just the mass escape that happens when I do - I'll try this, thanks.

[Sevrun]

Maybe I'm just old fashioned... but why not just use chains?  have to do something with all the plant fiber other than make pants :p

[Quietust]

Chains usually work, but if they're too close to a meeting hall, they'll continually spam the pathfinding code to try to get there - when they do this, they'll constantly flash with a dark brown background (meaning "prone"/"lying down" - they're actually constantly yanking at their chains and falling over).

[Teiwaz]

Also, chains are a substantial amount of work to place and maintain, and creates a demand for more and more of them as the animal population keeps growing.

[garfield751]

why not build a pit with 4 retracting drawbridges linked to their own levers and when you need more leather you pull one of those levers dropping roughly 25% of the animals down like 10z levels for your butchers to cut up and your bonecrafters to use.

http://www.mkv25.net/dfma/poi-17411-thepit

[darkflagrance]

why not build a pit with 4 retracting drawbridges linked to their own levers and when you need more leather you pull one of those levers dropping roughly 25% of the animals down like 10z levels for your butchers to cut up and your bonecrafters to use.

http://www.mkv25.net/dfma/poi-17411-thepit

I think that only works for meat/leather if the animals are wild though.

[Jim Groovester]

If resources are an issue with building chains, make ropes instead. Cloth is much easier to come by than metal.

[NecroRebel]

why not build a pit with 4 retracting drawbridges linked to their own levers and when you need more leather you pull one of those levers dropping roughly 25% of the animals down like 10z levels for your butchers to cut up and your bonecrafters to use.

http://www.mkv25.net/dfma/poi-17411-thepit

I think that only works for meat/leather if the animals are wild though.

Designate every animal in the breeding pit for slaughter, drop them only 1-2 z-levels into a non-pet-exitable chamber with a butcher's shop in it, and then when part of the floor disappears beneath them some of your animals will drop down and relatively quickly get butchered. It works fairly well; the main difficulty I've had with such a design in the past is that animals will often not move around inside the breeding chamber, so they all are clustered on top of one bridge, so it's sort of all or nothing. Making multiple entry pits helps mitigate this, as does making that place a meeting zone (though that makes the animals pathfind around and thus eat some FPS).

[Skorpion]

What I do is have a few chained up, and stuff the rest in a cage.

[Hortun]

So, curious question, but if I stuff cow calves into cages, will they still mature into adult cows?

[Jim Groovester]

Yes.

[Hortun]

Yes.

Awesome, thanks.