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[Misterstone]

Can anyone give me tips on how to set up a selective trap bottleneck that will apply one group of traps to certain sizes of critters, and a different set of traps to another?

In short, what I want to do is have a bottleneck leading from the underworld to the shaft that goes up to my main fortress levels.  There will be two routes that comprise the bottleneck, one that is full of slice-n-dice weapon traps, and one that is full of cage traps.  I want creatures such as ant/cave swallow/cave fish/ men, troglodytes, crundles, etc. or smaller to be forced to take the weapon trap route, and larger tastier, funner creatures such as elk birds, cave spiders, rutherers etc. to be forced to take the cage route.

I figure the way to do this is to set up pressure plates that close the inappropriate route via locked doors or floodgates when a creature of a certain size steps on them, leaving the preferred route available to the given creature.

What I am not sure about is whether it is feasible to have a pressure plate and door that automatically resets itself, how to determine what size to set the plates to, etc.  I admit it, I would make a terrible engineer.  Has anyone ever done this before?

[Khift]

You could always use one way trap doors. It won't work vs. flying creatures but will stop all the landbound creatures for sure.

If you could figure out the exact breakpoint you want to separate the mobs at (say 10,000) you could do this:

W___W
WPWPW
WHWHW
WCWTW
WCWTW
WCWTW

W = Wall
_ = space
P = pressure plate
H = hatch over empty space, attached to pressure plate
C = cage trap
T = weapon trap

Set the left pressure plate to trigger when a creature size 9,900 or less steps on it -- so when something too light steps on it, it prevents passage -- and set the right pressure plate to trigger when a creature size 10,000 or more steps on it.

Also, one thing to remember is that weight is not static. Not all rutherers weigh the same. Also, young adult (old enough to be considered an adult but not yet full grown) creatures will often weigh half as much as a full adult, so you'll get a lot of false negatives with this design if the game ever generates young adults when migrating onto the map (not sure if it does).

[Nameless Archon]

Hatches can also be destroyed by building destroyers (like trolls) so keep this in mind when designing your setup.

[AdeleneDawner]

Hatches can also be destroyed by building destroyers (like trolls) so keep this in mind when designing your setup.

Not only that, but they do their destroying from two squares away, so a building destroyer could take out that setup without ever triggering a pressure plate. Common building destroyers won't be able to break stone hatches, though - they need to be [BUILDING_DESTROYER:2] for that, which is rather rarer. (I think FBs might be, though, and ogres. Check the wiki.)

[Misterstone]

I think voracious cave crawlers are the most dangerous, stuff like ogres probably only smash wooden stuff.  Anyway, if the very very end of the bottleneck has weapon traps, it will be fine.  Anything that destroys the plates etc. will still end up getting sliced and diced.

[Uristocrat]

Hatches can also be destroyed by building destroyers (like trolls) so keep this in mind when designing your setup.

Building destroyers can be distracted by a statue near the entrance to this setup that is surrounded with spikes.  Put those spikes on repeat while they're messing with the statue.  If you use an artifact statue, you won't even have to replace it, because it will be indestructible.

[franti]

Build a walkway next to a downward stairway. The upper walkway leads to one trap, and the tunnel hallway leads to another. A series of pressure plates in front of both would open/close the doors based on weight. One would be, for example, minimun weight to moderate (~troll weight) and the other would be for heavy things and would be moderate to max weight.