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[ioi101]

I want to capture wild creatures, but I'm playing with the fortress defense mod so I get tons of invaders. So my usual tactic of having long lines of cage traps away from my entrance leads to trapping too many invaders, which are then annoying to kill off.

I'm thinking of using a different design to trap lots of wild animals, but few invaders. Basically I'm thinking of a cross-shape of long walls, with cage traps in the center, i.e.:

       w
       w
       c
wwcccwww
       c
       w
       w
where w=wall, c=cage trap. I'm hoping this would mean that many creatures will randomly path through the traps and thus get caught. Of course, so would the invaders, but if I only use a few traps then they would quickly get filled up as the siege progresses and I would just have a few invaders caught at the end.

Does anyone (who understands pathing behavior better then me for example) have better suggestions/improvements as far as where I should place it or maybe something else I could do?

Also... this is somewhat unrelated, but I seem to get tons of elephants and relatively few more exotic creatures (like say giant leopards), even though I embarked on a savage biome. Would killing lots of elephants lead to more spawns of other creatures or not really?

[FleshForge]

re: animal variety, In my experience, "not really" - the animals you're going to get seems to be determined when you embark, and doesn't vary all that much over time.  Your elfy neighbors may bring some other stuff to trade though.

I don't think there is a good way to automatically sort animals from invaders, although with the FD mod you have the siege warning so you could throw some switches - leave a cage path as the only path until a siege comes.  Ambushes you're not warned of, but those are much less an issue.

[NecroRebel]

Um. Could you use tightly-closed/pet impassable doors? Make structures like this:

=====
=^^^=
=+=+=
++D++
++D++
=+=+=
=^^^=
=====

Where Ds are pet-impassable doors and ^s are cage traps. Invaders will walk straight through the doors in the middle, totally bypassing the cage traps since that path is much less efficient, but animals, who can't pass through the doors, will instead go through the cages when they path through the structure.

The biggest problem with this is that buildingdestroyers would wreck the doors, so it might be beneficial to be able to seal the structure with drawbridges at either end.

[ioi101]

Hmm. So I take it that wild animals cannot pass through doors? In that case that sounds like a good idea. Building destroyers aren't all that common in this zone so that shouldn't be a problem.

[NecroRebel]

Hmm. So I take it that wild animals cannot pass through doors? In that case that sounds like a good idea. Building destroyers aren't all that common in this zone so that shouldn't be a problem.

Animals can pass through doors, but not doors set to be kept tightly closed/pet impassable. Only creatures with the [CANOPENDOORS] tag, which most humanoid creatures have and most other creatures don't have, can open tightly closed doors.