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[Ehndras]

"Hmm... Perhaps we can dig trenches covered with leaves/plants to camouflage, and line them with the spear tra- I mean, caltrops. Leave a fresh animal corpse or two in the middle for them to eat, and watch as they bumble in, all hungry-eyed, and get a damn spear through the foot! Hoof... Claw... Whatever those damn creatures have. Set up some rocks above the pitfall trap and lets get to hunting!

...Hmm... Wait... Do we have a chemist or a doctor here? If we can get our hands on certain plants, we can poison the meat and increase our chances against this thing. Maybe it won't feel it immediately, but it'll either die slowly or take quite some time to purge its system, buying us valuable time to grow, build, and fortify ourselves."

Find a location we can bottleneck the creature through spear-lined pitfall traps and poisoned meat before crushing it with large stones while it eats.

[kaian-a-coel]

Agree.

[Nadaka]

areyoua: that was more of a way to get you in without having to wait until fall. 5 sailors arrived on the spring fleet, your captain was one of them, even if he wasn't particularly active in the previous month.

Yes, food is an issue. With the current resources that have been put towards food, you are 10 to 30 food short each month on average for the summer.

With the dock completed, you will get a bit more use out of fishing, plus you can train fishermen. currently you can put 35 fishermen out at sea (+5 sailors to run the ship) between the ship and 3 boats, plus another 4 fishermen at the fish traps on shore. This will put you a little ahead until the end of fall, but you will be more than 100 food / month short during the winter.

The thunder gods are getting hungry and will begin to be a problem in the next month. The caltrops are large enough to inconvenience, injure and slow them down.

The reason I went with trapping the natural cave is that digging an artificial one large enough to hold a pair of 18 foot tall animals would have been prohibitive. Even your quarry wouldn't be suitable at the moment. In order to find another location for a drop trap would mean luring them into onto the far eastern shore underneath the mountainous cliffs. This cave trap can be used to attempt a kill or capture. That is up to you. it can be used in conjunction with other traps.

Note: the suggestion to build a temple under the quarry last month was not ignored, but we pretty much just ran out of labor.

[Ehndras]

I say we use my spiked pitfall trap + someone's stop-drop idea in conjunction with the natural cave idea.

Place a lone corpse in front of the cave and leave two-three larger ones inside the cave. Pitfalls with pullable covers(to be activated via rope-pull after the beast(s) enter the cave to feast, ensuring they aren't injured beforehand and frightened away) will line the entrance while large stones are piled atop the cave entrance to block it off and or crush anything that tries to leave.

If something manages to escape, it'll mangle its feet/legs/torso, or be crushed by stone.

If it doesn't escape, we can just forget they exist.

[areyoua]

How can a pit have a pullable cover and still be able to withstand 8 ton lizards? The construction needed to build a firm support network under the cover would be prohibitive, and collapsing that structure every time we need to catch a lizard is, frankly, not a very efficient use of material. We might as well just set up some more conventional pitfalls and just cover it up with branches, leaves, etc. Also, 8 ton lizards? What are they, trucks?

Oh, yes, and I realize that the way I was introduced was because of my being brought in before a ship came, but I still prefer Comrade to Captain.

[Ehndras]

8 TON LIZARDS?

Fucking hell!

I was expecting something a bit more... Manageable.

[Alternatecash]

So, considering the artifact stave, what's the level of functional magic in this setting, and how much can a very devout priest access?
Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punji_stick These should be easy to set up. I concur that we need more farmland, and Setos is reasonable enough to not press for instant construction of the temple.

[PyroDesu]

"Hmm... Perhaps we can dig trenches covered with leaves/plants to camouflage, and line them with the spear tra- I mean, caltrops. Leave a fresh animal corpse or two in the middle for them to eat, and watch as they bumble in, all hungry-eyed, and get a damn spear through the foot! Hoof... Claw... Whatever those damn creatures have. Set up some rocks above the pitfall trap and lets get to hunting!

...Hmm... Wait... Do we have a chemist or a doctor here? If we can get our hands on certain plants, we can poison the meat and increase our chances against this thing. Maybe it won't feel it immediately, but it'll either die slowly or take quite some time to purge its system, buying us valuable time to grow, build, and fortify ourselves."

Find a location we can bottleneck the creature through spear-lined pitfall traps and poisoned meat before crushing it with large stones while it eats.

Who says poison needs to be organic? There are plenty of poisons elements/metals. At some point I do need to get around to finding arsenic.

[Tidal]

Forget killing them! We want them ALIVE. We will ride them to victory!

[Ehndras]

Well, why don't we set up a 2-3 man team of prospectors to find something we could use as poison on our weapons and traps?

It'll render the meat inedible, though it'll vastly improve our chances of survival in a life-or-death situation.

[PyroDesu]

I agree. I will go with 5 other miners. Me being the metallurgist, after all.

Good point. I second another farm tile adjacent to the current one.

Also, caltrops that size may be able to irritate one of the lizards, maybe even put a hole in it's foot, but not much more.
Also, the problem with being able to shoot through something: You can be shot back. I propose a Ledge wide enough to stand on halfway up the swamp wall, with access to the ground on the inside. Then, the second half of the wall will be made with arrow slits, like these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_slit

Anyways, continue construction of the gold fort. Captain Raset will take another 5 miners and prospect for any poisons metal/element. And perhaps have some herbalists trained? For examining plant poison potential?

[areyoua]

I'll just let you go without an armed escort in a land with giant lizards, but do we really want to poison 8 tons of potentially perfectly good food? When Winter comes, our stores of food will be in the floor, and the only way we'll ever make up the difference is if we have the 8 ton lizards hung up and salted. Poisoning them will only result in us having repelled a threat to no gain for us except perhaps more combat-readiness, but a few starving colonists isn't too great at combat.

[Ehndras]

Its a last-ditch effort, not a first-try solution.



Just incase things go south.

[kaian-a-coel]

wait, if we use vegetal/animal poison, will cooking the meat destroy the poison? i mean, its proteins, and heat make proteins non-functionnal.

[Ehndras]

Feeding insectivorous and omnivorous reptiles

    * Insectivores. Avoid spiders, ticks, centipedes, millipedes, scorpions, and fireflies. Fireflies are especially toxic because they contain a self-defense toxin called lucibufagin, which is extremely poisonous to reptiles. One firefly can kill a small reptile. If your reptile is not native to the area you live in, your local insects may not be safe to eat. Check with your veterinarian before feeding him native bugs.

--- --- ---

Can we somehow use this to our advantage? Somehow use this toxin? I remember as a kid we used to capture hundreds of lightning bugs, just two or three of us.

I'm pretty sure you could get thousands via netting and/or getting the local kids (are there any? I'm assuming there's women and children around here) to collect them. Mash them all up into a paste and use it as a sort of last-ditch cyanide bomb to be thrown/speared into the lizard to kill the fucker.

We can also use a smaller amount of this as a pepper-spray sort of deterrent which will annoy the hell out of the giant lizards and give us a moment to make a move while they're blinded/spitting/confused.