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[DuckBoy2]

Simple question this time round: is it possible to make a pressure plate which will be pressed by adult animals of a given species, but not by their children?  Like a plate that would be triggered by bulls and cows, but not by calves?

(That way I can dump all my cows in a pit, and put a one way exit that blocks if a cow or bull stands on it while all the calves happily walk to my butchers shops)

[Argonnek]

It requires much less micromanagement to use chains instead.

[fivex]

Just chain them

[DuckBoy2]

So lets say I wanted to do it with something that tends to eat my dwarves when they try and chain it, like say, Jabberers...  And lets say the path to my butcher's shop was filled with weapon traps...  I would consider that the definition of not micromanaged at all, newborn jabberers would walk to their deaths directly on top of my food piles...  And if you've ever tried to chain up a jabberer, well... you were probably eaten by a Jabberer...

[DuckBoy2]

Ah, to anyone who cares, Jabberer adults weigh 4,500,000 Urists, Jabberer children weigh 2,000,000 Urists, so this should work great , assuming of course they can have children... only one way to find out.

[AngleWyrm]

Like a plate that would be triggered by bulls and cows, but not by calves?

Build a plate and customize it's trigger range. If the animals in question fall into two different weight categories, then the trap can be set to trigger on the heavy one, but let the light one through.

[Sphalerite]

This was fairly easy to to in 40d.  In may last 40d fortress I built an automated breeder engine, which used weight-sensitive pressure plates and a complex system of water-powered logic gates to maintain a fixed-size population of adult animals and their children.  Any excess adults over a certain number were automatically diverted to a slaughter chamber.  This worked well in 40d because all animals of a species were the exact size, all children were all exactly half that size, and a creature's size would jump from the child size to the adult size instantly when it reached adulthood.

Animal size is a bit more complex in the current version.  Not all animals are the same size - the body size token in the raws is an average size, but an individual creature's size will vary depending on creature-to-creature variation.  I suspect that children don't instantly jump from child size to adult size, but rather smoothly ramp up from child to adult size as they age.  Also, the interface for setting the weight range on pressure plates is a bit screwed up at the moment too.

[proxn_punkd]

So lets say I wanted to do it with something that tends to eat my dwarves when they try and chain it, like say, Jabberers...  And lets say the path to my butcher's shop was filled with weapon traps...  I would consider that the definition of not micromanaged at all, newborn jabberers would walk to their deaths directly on top of my food piles...  And if you've ever tried to chain up a jabberer, well... you were probably eaten by a Jabberer...

... So, tame the jabberers before chaining them up?

[Xenos]

So lets say I wanted to do it with something that tends to eat my dwarves when they try and chain it, like say, Jabberers...  And lets say the path to my butcher's shop was filled with weapon traps...  I would consider that the definition of not micromanaged at all, newborn jabberers would walk to their deaths directly on top of my food piles...  And if you've ever tried to chain up a jabberer, well... you were probably eaten by a Jabberer...

... So, tame the jabberers before chaining them up?

then the automation doesnt work.  tame animals would not be killed by traps that wont also kill dwarves (unless wooden training spears) and even then they would not be butcherable.