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[Rotho]

Hello, all. I've never played Dwarf Fortress before and still haven't read the tutorials required to understand how the game works.  However, I know what I want to do with my fortress, more than anything else, is build a functional army out of the cats.  If they have their own kitty armor and weapons mounted on their backs, all the better.  How can I accomplish such a task?

[twilightdusk]

Might want to go ask the Modding section, in vanillia DF, cats can't even be trained for combat, the best they can do is hunt vermin and provide a momentary distraction to anything more powerful.

[NecroRebel]

Somewhat tricky at best... You have a few options.

First, add [TRAINABLE] to the cat entry in creature_domestic.txt. This will make you able to make War Cats, which should be aggressive towards any enemies that they encounter, so they'll attempt to maul anything that comes near. They won't, however, be very effective; you can't armor or arm animals, and cats are very small.

You could also do something similar to one of the big cats, for instance lions or tigers. They'd be more effective combatants, even capable of taking out goblins with some numerical advantage.

There's also the option of playing a mod that changes the playable race from dwarves to cats. There's CatSplosion, which does that for the 40d version series (so won't work with the current versions of DF), an unofficial pseudo-update of it here, and Wild World, which makes the only "intelligent" races into various common animals, including changing the playable race to cats. When playing these mods, any soldiers you make will, of course, be cats, and you can, of course, equip them with armor and weapons.

[Max White]

1) Build a large room to trap the goblin army into.
2) Put a cage in the room, and fill it with all your cats.
3) Link the cage to a level.
4) Lock a goblin army into the room.
5) Pull the level.
6) See how well your 'cat army' does against the full force of goblin brutality.

[Johnny Madhouse]

Give cats the ability to be trained into war cats as stated above, and give them natural biting skill. [NATURAL_SKILL:BITE:20] will give them legendary +5 skill in tearing stuff up with their mouths. They will probably sever limbs.

I can't remember whether the biter skill is designated by BITE or BITING or even BITER. When the wiki is back up, go check out the 'skill tokens' page. Alternately, save an embark profile with biting skill involved and look at the embark profiles txt in your init folder.

[abadidea]

I have had about 20 cats in a pit succeed in taking down one goblin. However for anything vaguely effective you're going to have to mod their stats file as aforementioned. That's one of the really cool things about Dwarf Fortress. The engine may not be open source, but so much of the data is stored in plaintext for you to tamper with.

[Max White]

Lets ignor the fact that the tags are so high level we have NO CONTROLL WHAT SO EVER. The greatest thing Toady could do for me would be make a [HIDDEN] tag for entitys, instead of the entity being hidden if its defult location is in a cave.

Sorry, modders rage...

[NightmareBros]

Disregard everthing in this topic - what you really need to mod in is the ability for cats to shoot thunder from their eyes so you can have ThunderCats.

[Johnny Madhouse]

I know you were making a joke, but the ability to shoot thunder-like syndromes may be available. An extremely hot breath attack with the ability to melt the fat off of enemies instantly would be sweet, especially because it might occasionally backfire with interesting results.

[shadowform]

1) Settle near an elven civ that's settled in a Tropical location with a high Savagery rating and wait for them to bring you a breeding pair of Giant Tigers.

2) Train Giant War Tigers

3) Giant war tigersplosion

[Xenos]

1) Settle near an elven civ that's settled in a Tropical location with a high Savagery rating and wait for them to bring you a breeding pair of Giant Tigers.

2) Train Giant War Tigers

3) Giant war tigersplosion

Add the [VERMIN_CATCHER] tag into the raws for Gian Tigers (I very likely messed that tag up.  Just copy it from the domestic cat)

[Frogwarrior]

I fully intend to update Cat Splosion for DF2010 some time in the intermediate future...
in which you can lead an army of cats against the dwarves
and then eat them
should be Fun

[Xyon]

If you wanted to mod your cats, as has been said, you can add the

[TRAINABLE] tag into their data, along with some other stuff like...
[NATURAL_SKILL:BITE:15] [NATURAL_SKILL:GRASP_STRIKE:15] [NATURAL_SKILL:STANCE_STRIKE:15] [NATURAL_SKILL:RANGED_COMBAT:15] [NATURAL_SKILL:MELEE_COMBAT:15] [NATURAL_SKILL:DODGING:15] [NATURAL_SKILL:SITUATIONAL_AWARENESS:15]

if you wanted to make cats murder machines, so you would not need to rely on dwarfs for combat.

[That guy]

In 40d I filled a 6 x 6 room with puppies and dropped prisoners into it. It was fairly lethal.

[tomas1297]

 Hmm... That gives me an idea. What about cats as caste? You could probably arm them then.