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[Kirk]

Hey everyone, came here today to discuss something that really bothers me, as I can never create a perfect way to do this. Everyone hates animals hanging out in their meeting halls, cows standing all over the tables and such. The topic today is creating an animal pit that is air tight. The issue I have is even no matter how many doors I create that are tight, animals pass through when a dwarf goes into the room to get a dog to train. How do you guys go about creating a locktight animal pit?

[Mantonio]

Use a double or even triple door system, with all the doors not being pet passable.

As long as regular dorfs have no reason to go through that room, you should be okay.

[Xenos]

Between the doors that are pet impassable, channel out the floor and put retracting bridges over it.  Have the tunnel underneath lead back into the animal pit.  This way if animals sneak through a door, you pull the lever and they get reloaded into the pit.  Sure its not as efficient of a pit as a 1x1x1 with absolutely no access but it is close to airtight (with some maintenance.  The more airlock sections the less worry about escaping animals.) and it lets your dwarves access animals readily.  Or you could stuff them in a cage

[doctorspoof]

Have a seperate pit for your trainable animals?

[ISGC]

make a pit that no dwarves want to go into?
alternatively, use a cage.

[Kirk]

The issue is I want to breed animals, I thought cages prevent that? They can still have kids, but they can't breed sex it up and get pregnant?

[Sphalerite]

Attach them to chains.  Animals can become pregnant and give birth when chained.  Admittedly, you can only put one animal per chain, so you may need a lot of chains.

[Hyndis]

Pit/pond the animals into a holding pen just 1 Z level deep. Make the floor of the holding pen be made out of 3 or 4 retractable bridges, linked to levers.

Mark all animals for butchering. Yes, all of them.

When you need meat/bones/leather pull a lever. It'll drop 1/4th or 1/3rd of the animals down one level, where butchers can now path to them. The remainder of the animals are immune to butchery because no dwarf can path to them.

Downside to this is that you need to periodically designate all animals for butchering via the stocks menu.

Upside is that they can freely breed, can never escape unless you pull the lever, and there are no pathing issues.

[Xenos]

The issue is I want to breed animals, I thought cages prevent that? They can still have kids, but they can't breed sex it up and get pregnant?

As long as you have your annual "running of the animals" (a month long break from the cage) you could breed them...Or you could use my pit idea...or just toss them in a 1x1x1 pit that has the ramp removed and has some sort of non-door entrance (floodgate/drawbridge/floor hatch)  This results in animals doing no pathing calculations (or nearly none as they have access to only one square and will not think they can go through the raised bridge like they do with doors.)

[Dorf3000]

If you're comfortable with needlessly complicated mechanisms, you can make a 1x1 animal pit and butchers shop in a lockable room, when you lock the room (with a lever), the pit fills with water and the animals swim out.  The butcher does his job and then drains the water, pits all the remaining animals and then finally leaves.  It would take some micromanagement of the butcher to ensure he gets let out and doesn't fall asleep etc. but you'll not have to worry about pet-passable doors or animals wandering about.
You could also adapt this to training war dogs, with the bonus that you can set the job on repeat and it'll notify you in-game when the job is cancelled.

[kronith]

when i get enough animals i build a few cages (one for each different type) and cram all useless animals in them. once one of them grows up ill train it into a war animal or butcher it

[Pilsu]

Couldn't you just mark the pasture as a meeting area? Or do they still occasionally leave? You can keep most dwarves out of there with burrows.

[Veroule]

My strategy is a 3x3 room for each type of animal I wish to hold seperately.  In the center of each room is a hatch linked to a lever.  When the lever is pulled all animals standing on its hatch will be dropped done one level.  It is important to use a hatch instead of a bridge, because hatches do not fling the animals.

The setup looks something like this:

Code: [Select]

WWWWW
WWWWW
WP...    Top level path to elsewhere
WWWWW    P=Pit Zone
WWWWW

WWWWW
W...W
W.H.D    Door out, stays fully locked once built
W...W    usually about 4 of these per fort
WWWWW

...UU    Butcher's and Tanner's workshops,
...UU    generally in an larger room with
...UU    a pet impassable door whatever
...NN    drops gets marked for slaughter
...NN    miasma stays enclosed as well

[Vattic]

I'm not sure it would work but perhaps:

<- To Fort
#########
###...###
..+...+.#
###...#.#
#######.#
........#
#########

Animals could be dropped into the room from above. The red door would be locked tight and forbidden. The animals would end up against the red door trying to take the shortest route. Dwarves would take the longer route and through the green door.

[DwarfyDwarf]

I like the hatch'bridge over pit approach, but what if, instead of 1 zlevel drop, what about 5? that way, the animals would (probably) die instantly and you would get loots! You could put it so they drop into a 1x1 room next to the butcher room.
This setup would take a lot of time to setup, and a lot of time to make it so you have enough animals to not kill off your breeding stock.

Alternately, you could set it up like this.

Code: [Select]

#########
#S.S.S.S#
#A.A.A.A#
#.@.@.@.#
#..___..#
#..___..#
#..___..#
#.......#
####D####
#=wall
.=floor
S=chain
A=animal
@=cage
D=door
_=pit

Then, the chained animals breed and you put the offspring in the cage. When/if you want, you dump them in the pit so they can breed. Then, pull the lever and send them plummeting to their doom! Maybe just a 1x1 pit in the middle of the pit so you can onlly kill off 1/9 of your stock at a time.
Possibilities include:

Code: [Select]

#####
#h.h#
#.h.#
#h.h#
#####

Code: [Select]

#####
#.h.#
#h.h#
#.h.#
#####

Code: [Select]

#####
#h.h#
#h.h#
#h.h#
#####
h=hatch cover/retracting bridge, to kill and fraction of you animals you deem neccesary!

(Credit goes to Plumphelmetpunk from his LP of Fallout mod)