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[kopout]

sorry about the double  post

The dragon beat it but was severely injured except when they used fire breath.. Bronze colossus has some broken toes and fingers but other than that only a few dents.Hydras don't stand a chance.

[Sphalerite]

This thread inspired me to join the forum, simply to congratulate you on the sheer awesomeness of your breeding project. Well, okay, and to ask a question regarding a thought someone else had.. WOULD it be possible to tame and breed fire imps?

Fire imps in the unmodded game don't have children or genders defined, and aren't [PET] or [PET_EXOTIC].  You'd have to do a lot of modding to turn them into something that can breed and be tamed.  If you added genders, children, and gave them the [PET] token, then you could tame and/or breed them.  Don't expect their fireballs to make any distinction between your dwarves and enemies, however.

[Vindicated_Dorf120]

Thanks, I found another thread on Fire imp based defenses that details it as well. Looks impractical.. plus the lack of any apparent source of high level magma on my current map indicates it'll have to wait, regardless. Ah well, I'll just stick to my war elephant cage release trap. :-)

[thijser]

Maybe you could use a multi z-level system to easily seperate the young from their parents? Simply make a system like this
d=door
w=water less then 7/7
W=water 7/7 
now finding out on which z-level grown sea serpents will refuse to enter and young once will and adding a system to control how much water there is in the w tiles.

ddwwww
W

[Sphalerite]

now finding out on which z-level grown sea serpents will refuse to enter and young once will and adding a system to control how much water there is in the w tiles.

I don't think it works that way.  As far as I can tell, an aquatic creature in 7/7 water won't voluntarily travel into water less than 7/7 deep.  I don't think this has anything to do with the size of the creature, it seems to be a fundamental part of aquatic creature behavior.  I'm not actually sure if a dog behind a window will scare a sea serpent into shallow water, but I suspect not, and I'm pretty sure that the behavior of hatchlings and adults would be the same in any case.

Having to chain up the adult females is the weak part of this design, and it would help a lot if there was some better way to separate the children from the breeding females that didn't require chaining the females.  I haven't found one yet.

[Girlinhat]

I fail to see how this is the weak point...  This puts your breeding stock in one location, while allowing you to scare the young off into another location.  Just, make the child pit 1 Z down, and put floodgates on the breeding level so that you can close off the breeding chamber, keeping it waterlogged, and drain the child pit for easy recovery of hatchlings.

[Sphalerite]

The problem is that chaining up water-breathing wild creatures is really, really annoying.  Chaining up a wild animal seems to succeed less than half the time, even when the animal's cage is right next to the chain.  You need to be prepared to recapture the wild animal if it doesn't get chained.  You also need to make sure no children or dogs or anything else wander in while the animal's being chained.  With an aquatic creature, you need to flood the area with water immediately afterwards to stop the creature from air-drowning, since dwarves won't chain a creature to a submerged chain.  Everything else about the project was pretty straightforward, even draining the ocean was just straightforward engineering.  Getting the sea serpents chained up in their breeding chambers was the part that gave me the most worries.

[Girlinhat]

If you're doing it right though, you should never have to re-chain the serpents.  At least, not until old age and replacements.

[Sphalerite]

If you're doing it right though, you should never have to re-chain the serpents.  At least, not until old age and replacements.

Quite true, and since sea serpents live 150-170 years, once I have them chained up it's effectively permanent.

[Girlinhat]

I'm also curious why you didn't simply mod the raws a little more, and give the serpent a population of 5 or something?

[Sphalerite]

I'm also curious why you didn't simply mod the raws a little more, and give the serpent a population of 5 or something?

If I wanted it to be easy, I'd breed elephants.  The point here was to find the most challenging exotic creature that could still be bred without modding.  If Dungeon Masters weren't bugged, I wouldn't have had to mod them at all.  Also, part of the point of the project was to explore exactly what the POPULATION_NUMBER token means.  Before I started this I wasn't sure if it was a per-site, per-biome, or per-region limit, or a yearly spawn rate, or what.  It seems from this and other tests I've done to be a per-biome non-renewing population setting, so a site that includes two savage ocean biomes has exactly two sea serpents naturally occurring.

[Urist Imiknorris]

Now the question is: If you let a sea serpent enter and leave the map uncaged, will another one spawn, and if so, will it be the same one or is it randomly generated again?

[Girlinhat]

Only one way to find out.  You must wound one and release it.  Or perhaps attempt to dismantle the rope its attached to, as this will cause it to have the rope still "equipped" due to a small bug, not that the rope around the neck has any stat boost or anything.  But deconstructing a rope from a wild sea serpent is a bit of a challenge in itself!

Alternatively, if you release a bunch of newly-matured serpents, will they eventually return to your embark, or when they leave the map do they simply disappear?

[Sphalerite]

Now the question is: If you let a sea serpent enter and leave the map uncaged, will another one spawn, and if so, will it be the same one or is it randomly generated again?

A very interesting question.  I did a series of tests before this fortress in which I modded every animal in the world to have a population of 1, and then did a series of test embarks, killed or released wild animals, and then abandoned the fortress and did a data export in legends mode to check the animal populations.  It appears that wild animals which leave the map get added back into the off-map local population, so in theory if I released a bunch of captive-born sea serpents into the wild they'd add to the local population.  I don't know if they're tracked as individuals.  I'd have to let one kill one of my dwarves and gain a name, or give one a distinctive injury or something.  The only problem is that I'll have to recage my entire breeding population to try this, since the presence of any non-caged wild animals on the map will prevent any new ones from appearing.

[Hydrall]

Truly amazing. There are no words to describe this that haven't already been said.

You're an inspiration to dwarfkind.