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[Mister Always]

So, I've recently embarked next to an ocean. I know how to filter salt water, don't worry. The fortress is mostly set up, got the booze production running nicely, two artifacts so far (useless ones, a hematite sceptre and a dog leather left mitten), had a dark strangler and a beak wolf siege before I got the millitary up, but I just holed up and waited it out.

I want to create a little something, though. A shark pit, to execute prisoners with. I'll be getting a lot of 'em, considering I'm running the Fortress Defence mod, but just tossing them into a pit with my military waiting at the bottom of it gets...boring. Quickly. It's a good way to train them, sure, but it soon turns into less of a fun activity and into more of a "argh gotta free up all these cages before the next siege rolls 'round or else we're fucked why can't I just mark these guys for executing waaargh" thing.

So, how should I go about the whole shark catching thing?

(Also, do big fish still occasionally wash up on the shore? The wiki page on whales says they do, but I've never seen it happen...)

[Mickey Blue]

I've never seen a large ocean creature wash up on shore either (and I've been playing since 40d and do prefer ocean biomes) but I am told it happens.

As for catching them.. There is a loooong thread on catching mermaids around here somewhere that no doubt would work for any sea creature, there is also one on catching sea serpents.  In a nutshell (if I recall, its been a while) you can make a sort of artificial channel with pumps and pump in a bunch of water and pump it back out but the 'out' has grates or some such thing to catch any actual creatures. 

Interesting idea, shark pit, that kind of stuff is why I love this game.  Also I feel your pain, I too play with FD mod and only use a military (meaning that training them up is super important) but I stopped using cage traps all together cause (aside from liking the extra challenge) catching enemies and then using them for training stopped being sadistic fun and started being a chore (I eventually started dropping them into a pit with a cyclops).

Like I said, these days I've just abandoned cage traps* all together and go pure military for defense.. But I may have to bring some back just to come up with interesting ways to kill them.

*I sometimes use a few for hunting purposes to get animals to raise, its hardly impossible for a siege enemy to get caught up in one, but they are seldom in strategic areas with regard to defense and there are only a couple.

[Quietust]

Read this thread.

[Mister Always]

Thanks for the replies.

[Mister Always]

Oh, and suppose I wanted to say, say, start some kind of breeding program for big fish species (hey, building a whale farm is pretty dorfy, right?)...if I set up the pit I keep them in to drain into another room filled with cage traps, will the lack of air make them pass out and be snagged by the traps?

[Sphalerite]

You can't breed any aquatic creatures in the current version of DF without modding.  I don't know if that's still the case in the Fortress Defense mod, I've never tried it.

Drowning, oddly, doesn't cause creatures to pass out, so it won't cause a tame creature to be caught in a trap.  Wild creatures of course will be caught in traps without needing to pass out, unless they have trapavoid.  And I suspect that if you trap a creature in a trap while it is air-drowning, it will finish drowning in the trap, although I haven't tested it.

[Mister Always]

Ahoy there, Sphalerite, ye great catcher of sea serpents.

The Fortress Defense mod does nothing besides adding several always-hostile civs (and some kind of stone, though I don't know what it's for), so I'd have to mod in the breeding myself (live births because fuck it).

Stunning, as I recall, can be caused by a fall as well. So perhaps I could set something up that will drain the water into several small holes in the floor with a cage trap on the bottom, and hope the whales/other big fish (tamed, of course) will be swept into the hole and be considered as "falling" (I'm pretty sure they won't count as "swimming" if the water itself is falling).

...alternatively, I could set up some way to drain the water level in the breeding room to be completely 4/7 (that's gonna take some math. Joy to the world...) and see if the dorfs would traverse that level of water to go throw the whales into a cage.

I bet nobody has ever said the phrase "throw the whales into a cage" before...

BRB, fiddling around in arena mode for an air-drowning test.

[Sphalerite]

Caging tame aquatic creatures is going to be challenging no matter what.  That's why I kept the sea serpents I was breeding wild - they were much easier to manipulate that way.  I'd recommend keeping your breeding stock wild, and only taming the non-breeding males.

Training aquatic war animals is also going to be challenging.  Animals being trained for war need to be uncaged so the trainer can drag them to the kennel.  Kennels won't work underwater, so you have to try and have a water level where the kennel will still work yet the creature being trained won't air-drowned.  There was a thread some time back where someone tried to make war carp, and may have managed to figure out how.

[Mister Always]

Well, I tried it out, and the whale didn't seem to start air-drowning as long as the water was at 4/7. There was one 3/7 square in the little box I created (makin' rock walls with water and lava, for the win), and the whale started flashing with the little grey "winded" x whenever the water in her level sunk to 3/7. I'm not sure why the box isn't filling up to an even 4/7, but that doesn't really matter - I now know that my precious whales and other animals won't air drown at 4/7.

War carp, eh? I'll go look for that thread.

[Quietust]

From what I understand, training war fish isn't really feasible - dwarves cancel tasks if submerged in water of depth 4/7 or higher, and fish begin to air-drown if not submerged in water of depth 4/7 or higher. Thus, you'd have to drop the fish into a dry kennel room (with your animal trainer waiting), start training it (make sure no other trainable animals are available), then immediately fill the room up to 4/7 or higher once the training is finished.

[Mister Always]

From what I understand, training war fish isn't really feasible - dwarves cancel tasks if submerged in water of depth 4/7 or higher, and fish begin to air-drown if not submerged in water of depth 4/7 or higher. Thus, you'd have to drop the fish into a dry kennel room (with your animal trainer waiting), start training it (make sure no other trainable animals are available), then immediately fill the room up to 4/7 or higher once the training is finished.

They cancel building tasks only, as far as I know.

Edit: Holy shit. If carp are Armok's avatar in the rivers, then  great white sharks are his avatars in the ocean. Four of them took down a minotaur, no problem. Even an iron man. I figured they'd have at least some trouble with the iron man, but they tore its fucking head clean off. The minotaur died due to bleeding, but they managed to rip one of her hands off, too.

I really hope I'll get my hands on some great whites...and then also manage to not kill them when I tame them.

They have trouble killing a whale (they got it to pass out and have been tearing into its head for 100+ pages), but I suspect it will bleed out soon. Whales, on that note, are impressively lethal even without war training. One killed a goblin easily.

Now if only tamed animals would actually attack hostiles and not just run away...though I suppose a shark might attack anyway. I know dogs do. Dogs don't give a fuck.

[Sphalerite]

The other problem you may run into is that tamed aquatic animals don't seem to move unless forced to.  When I was experimenting with using tamed sea serpents to dispose of prisoners, I found that I had to drop the prisoners right on top of the sea serpents, or the serpents would just ignore them.