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[Gatleos]

I'm currently trying to set up a meat industry, see? I need a place to store animals for slaughter, but it's problematic. I need my butcher to be able to get in/out, but I can't find a way to do that without letting everything out every time he enters the room with the pit zone. Does anybody have any good pit designs that can accomplish this?

[Osdeath]

My suggestion would be to restrain the breeding pairs with chains/ropes, I believe breeding is still done by "spores",as in the animals don't have to be next to each other, and since kittens/puppies/calves/whatever follow the adults, should solve the problem I think.

My other suggestion would be some sort of "closed system" where a few dwarves are "trapped" in the pit with the animals and some bare nessecities, they get booze dumped in, and they dump the meat out into the rest of the fort.

[Hyndis]

Allow butchering of sentients in the raws, await your yearly shipment of goblinite, meat, tallow, bones, and leather.

Either that or create armed squads and have them defend burrows. Create a burrow that covers all of the caverns. They will actively hunt down dangerous creatures, kill them, and then those dead creatures can be butchered. As almost everything in caverns are hostile your dwarves will be very, very busy.

[Gatleos]

I guess you mean I should make single-tile pits that the butchers drop prepared meat into. could I do that with a stockpile? Would I make that stockpile at the bottom of the shaft? I'd prefer all meat to be moved to the main stockpile rather than use quantum storage on that one tile.

Also, is there an efficient way to slaughter animals constantly without killing the last breeding pair, or would I have to micromanage that (select "ready for slaughter" as new animals come?)

[Sphalerite]

In 40d, I built an elaborate breeding engine which contained a dozen adult wild animals and their children.  As the children matured, they wandered away from their parents into an automatic trap that dropped them down a deep pit onto a refuse pile next to a butcher's shop.  Unlike tame animals, wild animals which die from falls can still be butchered, so the result was a constant supply of meat.  I haven't bothered setting up anything like this in DF2010 because animals now generate so much meat and meat by-products, it's far too easy to end up with too much food with an even moderately successful breeding operation.

[nomad_delta]

Here's what I do in my fort, anyway, seems to work alright for me:



--nomad_delta

[Alcoholic]

Here's what I do in my fort, anyway, seems to work alright for me:



--nomad_delta

Very informative, Thanks ill have to use this.

[Hyndis]

Still is a lot of micromanagement.

You could just let the animals wander around the meeting hall. Allow some animals to be adopted as pets. Like 2-3 males, 10-20 females. (Always plan on extras in case of Unfortunate Accidents!) These will be your breeders, and immune to butchery because they are pets.

Then periodically butcher all non-pet animals.

[rodya_mirov]

Still is a lot of micromanagement.

You could just let the animals wander around the meeting hall. Allow some animals to be adopted as pets. Like 2-3 males, 10-20 females. (Always plan on extras in case of Unfortunate Accidents!) These will be your breeders, and immune to butchery because they are pets.

Then periodically butcher all non-pet animals.

This works fabulously on all non-cat animals.  I recommend not having cats (or only having males, since they do kill vermin).

[Psieye]

The first step in an efficient meat industry is to distinguish genders in your livestock, especially for the young. Go to the raws, look up how it's done for Cows vs Bulls, do similar things for all other livestock, e.g. "Colt" for a young male horse. Now you can separate them just by looking at their names.

Second step is to not use pits unless you're doing something really fancy and elaborate. You want chains for the females + 1 alpha male - this lets them breed and be milked. Livestock that will grow to be slaughtered are all stuffed in a cage at birth, right next to the butcher's shop.

If you want something with less micromanagement, you'll need to make something more complicated to compensate.

[Gatleos]

My Idea:

I currently have two wild alligators outside my fortress. They are opposite genders. As soon as the Dungeon Master arrives, I'll set up my butchery shop using nomad_delta's layout and Sphalerite's automated slaughter trap (I'll keep the alligators wild). As soon as the alligators have one male and one female baby, I'll take them and train them as war alligators, then drop them in my moat for defense (it's an empty moat). Then, the automated butchery will be set up and I'll have war alligators in my moat. There's only two problems with this plan:

1. When the time comes to collect the wild alligators and take them to my fortress, my dwarves get scared and run off before they can do anything. My current fortress, Ashenblade, is in a swamp and the alligators are trapped in a murky pool. The dwarves always run away when they get near, so I can't get the alligators out of the pool. To see what I mean, click on the link to the DF map archive of Ashenblade in my signature. The pool with the alligators is a point of interest. Actually, here's a link straight to it.

2. Do war animals breed? I'd want the alligator population in my moat to increase exponentially. This isn't so much of a problem, it would just be more convenient, so I'm curious.

[Sphalerite]

1. When the time comes to collect the wild alligators and take them to my fortress, my dwarves get scared and run off before they can do anything.

This is why I use cage traps to collect the wild animals in the first place.  Actually, I don't think it's even possible to have your dwarves just grab a wild animal and stick it in a cage.  You'll have to build a corridor with some cage traps and then lure or chase the animals into it.

2. Do war animals breed? I'd want the alligator population in my moat to increase exponentially. This isn't so much of a problem, it would just be more convenient, so I'm curious.

War animals breed.  Unfortunately, exotic wild animals don't breed until the Dungeon Master arrives, and he seems to not show up in DF2010 fortresses yet.

[Hyndis]

Still is a lot of micromanagement.

You could just let the animals wander around the meeting hall. Allow some animals to be adopted as pets. Like 2-3 males, 10-20 females. (Always plan on extras in case of Unfortunate Accidents!) These will be your breeders, and immune to butchery because they are pets.

Then periodically butcher all non-pet animals.

This works fabulously on all non-cat animals.  I recommend not having cats (or only having males, since they do kill vermin).

Cats should be exterminated. All of them. On sight. No exceptions!

Cats are also bugged so they don't even produce meat or bones anymore! Just a skull.

[Double A]

Wait, really? So there's no reason to even consider keeping them around, other than vermin patrol for males and cavern exploring for females?

Oh, and intentionally causing tantrum spirals. I did that once, it was fucking hilarious. My leader got smeared all over 3 z-levels. There wasn't even a corpse.

[Gatleos]

1. When the time comes to collect the wild alligators and take them to my fortress, my dwarves get scared and run off before they can do anything.

This is why I use cage traps to collect the wild animals in the first place.  Actually, I don't think it's even possible to have your dwarves just grab a wild animal and stick it in a cage.  You'll have to build a corridor with some cage traps and then lure or chase the animals into it.

Well, they're trapped underground. I'll have to see if I can dig a tunnel directly into the pool...


Also, that leads me to another two questions:

1. Can I brute-force it? Is there a way to alter the init.txt file and get the dungeon master, or another way around the bug? He's supposed to arrive around the time the baron does, so I'd do it after I get him.

2. This one's almost off topic, but I might as well ask: how does exporting wealth even work? The reason I ask is that I have all the requirements for a baron, except for 10,000 exported wealth. Right now it's at zero and nothing seems to change that. I'd like to meet those requirements before I try to get the Dungeon Master.

As a side note, my fortress is crawling with cats! Several have been adopted as pets, and I can't get rid of 'em. I guess I'll just kill any new kittens...