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[Dante]

In my current fortress I have built a simple butchery tower. Wildlife crossing the map gets caught in traps, and then released into special, species-specific rooms without taming. The 1*4 rooms each feature a hole and a hatch cover. On the pulling of a lever, the hatch opens and a quarter of that room's livestock falls eight z-levels to a messy death. The bits can then be butchered straight away. Don't use bridges instead of hatches, because mammoths and other large modded creatures won't fall through them. Much quicker than slaughtering tame animals, because you can just regulate numbers with a simple lever pull. All automatic.

So far, pretty standard stuff.

But, I have greatly increased the range of biomes that all the critters wander in, with the intention of my dwarves tasting every possible meat. Gotta catch em all.

And the problem is, a few years in, the wildlife has stopped coming. I have just five wild species in rooms in my tower. Presumably, the game is waiting for them to path off the map before generating any new creatures on the edges.

The only solution I can think of is, start again, with all the MAXAGEs set to 1000, and then wait for ages until I've caged every single possible animal before releasing them from their cages into the tower. (Since afaik animals still come in if you have caged wildlife, just not if you have things roaming around)

However, I leave the problem to more powerful minds than mine. Is there any way I can actually stock my tower with roaming creatures whilst still catching more animals from the map edge? And without messing with the life expectancies and starting again?

[Sphalerite]

Wild animals in cages won't stop new wild animals from entering the map.  Wild animals uncaged in confined spaces will.  So if you want to keep capturing new wild animals from the map edge, you will need to keep all your existing stock in cages.

In my experience, each map will only generate a handful of creature types.  So if you want to have as wide a variety of wild animals as possible, keep capturing them until you haven't seen any new animal types in a while.  Then you can just dump all your wild animals in an enclosure and let them breed.  You won't get any more from the map edge, but you will have a permanent breeding population.

[NRN_R_Sumo1]

Why no taming? a death tower works just the same really, with the added effect of not having a huge risk of angry creatures attacking you again.

[Scruga]

Why no taming? a death tower works just the same really, with the added effect of not having a huge risk of angry creatures attacking you again.

Huge risk=Point of it.

[Dante]

No, because you can't butcher exploded pets. You have to actively order pets to be butchered, and all that entails. Whereas you can butcher any wild animal's corpse, regardless of how it became a corpse.

So, it sounds like there's no solution, bar pre-catching all the animals you want and either modding them to not die of old age or hoping you get them all in time. Ah well.

[vyznev]

So, why can't you just build a huge number of cage traps, place them in a corridor outside your livestock pen and open the door?  Then wait for some more animals to enter the map, catch those too and release them all back into the pen.

You could also use the opportunity to cull your breeding stock down to, say, one pair (preferably juveniles) of each species, and keep things that way until your collection is diverse enough.  That way you won't need so many traps to recapture them the next time.  Or maybe make it one male and two or three females to save time later when you want to start active breeding.

[Sphalerite]

I suspect that even with keeping all the captured animals in cage traps, that you simply aren't going to capture one of every type of animal in the world.  It seems from what I've seen that when a site is generated the game engine picks three or four types of animals that will appear at the site, and that's all you'll ever get.

[Dante]

No, before I got my tower up and running I had at least eleven different types come wander through:
alligators, mammoth, bison, yaks, elk, deer, foxes, cats, both types of camel and hoary marmots, that I recall.

Still, I might abandon and then check it out in legends.

Maybe if I work fast enough I'll be able to trap the entire ecosystem within a few years, before they start dying in the cages.

[Garrie]

Maybe if I work fast enough I'll be able to trap the entire ecosystem within a few years, before they start dying in the cages.

Correct me if I'm wrong by all means, but I understood that the only way you got dead caged animals was when traders bought them through dangerous (to them) biomes? scorching/frigid.

[Sphalerite]

Correct me if I'm wrong by all means, but I understood that the only way you got dead caged animals was when traders bought them through dangerous (to them) biomes? scorching/frigid.

Animals can also die of old age in cages.  Which is the concern here - if Dante lets any wild animals out of their cages, new wild animals stop coming in from the map edges, but once he catches the first wild animals he's on a timer for how long he can keep them caged before they'll start dying.  I don't see any way around this, other than to pretty much line the entire edge of the map with cage traps several rows thick to catch as many wild animals in cages in as short a time as possible.

[darkflagrance]

Maybe mod the animals not to die of old age until the project is complete?

But really, as long as you let the ones you captured first breed a little, while capturing breeding pairs strategically and swiftly killing the extras, you should be fine.

[vyznev]

But really, as long as you let the ones you captured first breed a little, while capturing breeding pairs strategically and swiftly killing the extras, you should be fine.

That would be my suggestion too.

Note that (according to the wiki) caged pregnant females will give birth in cages -- they just won't get pregnant to begin with unless they first spend some time outside the cage with a male of their species.  I'm not sure just how long the fertilization actually takes to happen (might be instantaneous for all I know), but I'd expect that, say, a month should be plenty of time for the critters to get it on if they're going to.

So I'd suggest keeping one male and one female of each species in a cage and letting them out for, say, one month each year to breed.  Eventually you should find some offspring sharing the female's cage; once you have one offspring of each sex, slaughter the rest and the parents.  Then wait for the offspring to grow up in their cages and repeat the process.

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm fairly sure impregnation is either instantanious, or at least it just occurs at certain intervals (such as a check once per game-day for a male of a species, and if he is free, checking for non-pregnant females, and if they exist, turning them pregnant).

The fact that I get births that seem to occur at the same time, but at random days seems to suggest the one-check-per-gameday idea.  If you leave them out of their cages for at least a gameday, they should get pregnant.

... Of course, I'd still just tame the suckers.  If they aren't pets, nobody cares if you kill them routinely by dropping them into the room right next to your butcheries, or letting them roam in a spike chamber.

[Scruga]

or letting them roam in a spike chamber.

This=win

it's also nice to station your pet bringing migrants there. Should make quick work of both them and their bloody pets!

[Sphalerite]

... Of course, I'd still just tame the suckers.  If they aren't pets, nobody cares if you kill them routinely by dropping them into the room right next to your butcheries, or letting them roam in a spike chamber.

But if they're tame, they won't be butcherable after being killed by spikes or a fall.  Which was the whole point of using wild animals as stock, because that way you don't need to manually designate each one for slaughtering in order to butcher it.