Print

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

[jerank]

Ok, so I started a new fortress, and I brought four cats with me, whom I mostly ignored. Five years later, I have a giant fortress with menacing adamantine gates, with a wealth of nearly four million. I have fifteen cats from two breeding pairs in five years, with no deaths to compensate for population expansion. My other fortresses have also never had more than twenty cat births in all their history, sometimes lasting as long as twelve years.

I’ve seen people recoil in terror at the very notion of bringing just two cats with you on embarkation, and I hear dread tales of high-end machines being brought to a screaming halt by unending legions of dwarven-brain-washing cats refusing to be put down or caged. Yet, as far as I’ve seen, cats are never more than an extremely mild nuisance for a fortresses frame rate. Have a large number of people here been playing some kind of grand joke on us for the past three years?

[Vicomt]

It's like a lot of things in DF. At one stage in prior versions, or maybe just one random instance on someone's machine, maybe due to some modding, it may have happened. The meme grew until it attained legendary status and was immortalised.

While technically it is very easy to initiate a catsplosion, just by modding a couple of tags, it's usually not the FPS killer that is claimed, but never underestimate the varieties and intensities of Fun that can seen in DF

[orbcontrolled]

Well, all other animals start out unadoptable by default, and so their population can always be brought down if it becomes a problem. Cats can't be stopped from adopting short of being caged, and once adopted, are there to stay unless you want to risk tantrums by killing them. In other words, they have a potential to get out of control if left unattended in ways that just wouldn't happen with other animals.

You're right though, there is a lot of potential for mayhem that generally just doesn't occur. But human beings are always prone to worrying about statistically improbable things while ignoring everyday dangers.


(Also, I swear I've heard somewhere that recent versions of DF have an absolute cap on the number of animals that can be running around your fortress. Can anyone confirm, because if that's true, then the threat is basically gone.)

[The Dog Delusion]

human beings are always prone to worrying about statistically improbable things while ignoring everyday dangers.

And Dwarves are well-known for ignoring both. 

[darthbob88]

(Also, I swear I've heard somewhere that recent versions of DF have an absolute cap on the number of animals that can be running around your fortress. Can anyone confirm, because if that's true, then the threat is basically gone.)

I believe so; IIRC, there can be no more than 50 animals on a map at any one time. This is not enforced by killing animals, just by preventing pregnancies; if you have 49 pregnant females and get one more, you'll still wind up with 8 dozen animals that must be culled.

[lucusLoC]

i believe that is 50 animals *per species.* and i routinely hit that cap with any breeding pair unless i manage them. cats indeed are a pain because they seem to get adopted at a high rate, which means that i cannot cull them down to 1 or 2 breeding pairs easily.

[PotatoDaddy]

I can't remember what version, but yes at one point bringing 2 cats was death.

They expanded rapidly (and this was before the fps upgrade) so it would grind DF to a halt.

[smokingwreckage]

Loss of FPS is the number one killer of Dwarf Fortresses, and cats can get out of hand. I started with two and had close to twenty even with regular culling. That is, they would peak at about twenty then I'd murder 'em all.

I really like cats, it'd be nice to not have to kill, skin, and render them down for fat.

[o_O[WTFace]]

It depends, bring a few cats and forget about them for a while and they adopt someone and generate babies all the time.  Not really a big deal but then 200 dwarves later your FPS drops to 10 and you really wish that each of them didn't have to path around 30 pet cats on their way to do anything.  Crowding causes extra pathing as creatures avoid bumping into one thing by jumping right in front of another, especially if your fort isn't built to handle it.  Sure its way overblown by the community but why deal with all that kitten management and vermin corpses when you can just toss some dogs in a pit instead? 

[bmaczero]

Oh, it's definitely possible.  I never leave more than two or three cats out at once, and my cat cage has more than three pages of cats and kittens in it just from me caging their offspring.

[Biag]

I'm not so sure about that 50-per-species cap... If memory serves, in my last successful fortress I had somewhere around 100-120 animals, all of which were dogs and cats except for a few particularly vicious ones I had caged in the entrance. Connected to pressure plates.

[MC Dirty]

Another problem about cats which is, in fact, not that unlikely, is the existence of a handful of Crazy Cat Ladies. Considering how fragile cats are and how fast some dwarves become significantly badass, a cat-liking dwarf can spark a serious tantrum spiral. Also, since they're still critters, a large number of them can slow down dwarves quite a bit in narrow passages.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Also, a link to TV Tropes. There goes your free time.

[sunshaker]

Well the problems with cats depend a lot on your fortress, its inhabitants and the mods you have enabled. The more domestic animals and/or animals with the common domestic and pet tokens you have in the raws the less chance you are going to have problems with cat adoptions (roughly a 1 in 6 chance of liking cats per dwarf (dogs, cats, cows, horses, mules, or donkeys), but if you have 50 domestic animals you have roughly a 1 in 50 chance of having a dwarf like cats).

It also depends on how many kittens get born (cats are not multiple litter rare) so if you get unlucky and have your cats give birth to 3 kittens every year then you will have a problem.

[Akhier the Dragon hearted]

It can also be luck. If you have someone who instantly adopts all the cats they can and your cats tend to have females instead of males then it has hit the fan.

[NW_Kohaku]

My dogs have been going insane with their breeding... I swear, they must horny as a... well, a dog.  I can't cage them, since they're mostly war dogs already assigned to my woodcutters in packs of four for ambush protection.  Each one of those female dogs will give birth to 3 puppies per year... and even after I started simply executing all the females, I still have at least a dozen out there.

But yeah, there's apparently an absolute pregnancy-preventing cap at 50 animals (so just keep any dog you don't need in a cage, where they don't do TOO much to your FPS), but they'll go beyond that, since they become pregnant again as soon as they have given birth.  (Which means that if you have 12 impregnatable females, 11 will already be pregnant when you hit cap, preventing more pregnancies... and if those 11 still give birth to 3 at a time, that "cap" of 50 will still result in up to 85 dogs in a worst-case scenario.)