Bay 12 Games Forum

And of course making their bones into crossbows.  A pamphlet of my thoughts on menageries!  A good meat/animal taming industry can create huge amounts of wealth very quickly, and frankly I just find them to be a lot of fun.  I like letting my dwarves adopt animals and to have a good zoo/colosseum.

GETTING LOTS OF DIFFERENT ANIMALS: I've been worldgenning with parameters to increase the patchworkness of the world.  If you increase the X/Y variance of things like rainfall, and also change the mesh sizes to emphasize the top and the bottom end of ranges, you usually end up with lots of different biomes in small spaces.  Then you pick your 4x4 embark so that it's at the four corners of several different biomes.

AREA ATTRIBUTES: If you want a cool zoo, you should definitely go to the tropics.  That's not to poopoo those of you that want to make an ice palace with a polar bear exhibit, but generally the tropics have a wealth of different animal species.  Savagery must be high.  Animal men suck, flying animal men really suck, they're harder to kill and you gotta wait for them to leave the map, but you really gotta love giant animals though, they can provide a ton of wealth very quickly if you bring one down, roast the whole thing, and sell it to the caravan.  Evil biomes are just out, or you could do it as a challenge but butchering+evil just doesn't go well.  I keep trying to make an ocean farming system, like the one done by the guy with the sea serpents, because... giant whale roasts, baby.  One day I will make a fort out of giant whale soap.

EMBARKING FOR EARLY ANIMAL SLAUGHTER: I guess the best way to hunt is to use a hunter but I personally favor military dwarves.  I usually embark with a guy who likes copper, so I give him proficient weaponsmithing/armorsmithing.  Preferences are insanely important in this game and you can have good armor sets and weapon right off the bat at a cost of some wood and a couple of ore.  Putting aside two dwarves for military duty is a sizable blow to your labor pool but it's worth it.  2 female dogs and 1 male dog gives you some early supplemental hunters and a puppy mill.  I like to take a proficient chef.

EMBARKING FOR A ZOO: Proficient mechanic, proficient glassmaker, and about 150 bags of sand.  I like to find McLikesgreenglass and give him the cagemaking job.  Go ahead, be a dork, spam cage traps.  It's the best way to make a zoo so embrace it.  The best way to capture mass animals is a giant cage trap perimeter.  Build chokepoints for better efficiency or go full dwarf and make 600 traps.  Regardless of whether you're embarking to sand, just take the bagged sand at embark since it's a 1 point bag.  Magma makes things easier or just use coal.  Maybe take an animal trainer.

One thing I'd like to know is, if I want to generate +animal man bone bolts+ and +goblin bone bolts+, should I build a sentients slaughter room and just let the parts decay?  If I build a droptower I won't be able to get the flying animal men to die.

Your thoughts are appreciated.

It's an important component of happiness, they're guaranteed "own fine bed," a bonus from the bedroom, the door, you can get bonuses from preferences when you install a cabinet and a container.

Bottom line if you're doing something where a bunch of dwarves might die, it's handy to have happiness boosters, that's just one of them.

If anyone doesn't get it I'm referring to the fact that randomly generated fort names always seem to have the word cloister or the word ink.  It happens to me so often I thought other people noticed it.  I still have no idea what the word cloister means and while I could look it up that would be too easy so I wasted everyone's time with this thread instead because I

I never build anything imaginative, I just give the dwarves all the material comforts they could need.  The roasts... the roasts.

Keep them away from social situations with your dwarves (basically just keep them out of the meeting area) unless you want bushtit people as elected officials.

I had a tigerman get elected mayor and he promptly mandated 3 bowls of cereal.

Why do cats always pick the same dwarf to attach to?

I have one poor fisherdwarf who has 65 cats attached to his mind. 5 recently died of old age, causing him to tantrum.  Thankfully the fortress is well spread out, and has all sorts of mind healing ameities, so his repeated tantruming has not degenerated into berzerk rage or madness. He seems to be doing better now, at "fine".  He is attending a meeting over assaulting another dwarf.

Why do cats always pick one victim? Its like "oh, that dwarf is super vulnerable to kittycat mind control! Clog the hallways! Pen him in! HIS MIND IS OURS!"

I am contemplating atom smashing their feline asses.

I have no idea.  If only there was A LOOFAH that you could use to scrub the cats away.

If only.

I've done something I usually don't do and embarked in an area devoid of trees.  It's a desert next to a volcano.

I have an abundance of copper, silver, gold, zinc, lead, and sand, but no clay.  There's some iron around as well as some marble but I have no coke/coal/lignite.  I pretty much need the wood for construction when I come by it.  The caverns were headed for and breached immediately and I'm mining out the sand to start farming trees.

I have three dwarves with pig tail fiber fabric in their preferences.  One I made a weaver, one I made a dyer, and the third likes both pig tail fabric and brass.  So here's the questions:

Should I use the brass to make the buckets and bins I'll need?  What would you do with it?  It's sort of a pretty metal and in forts past I might use it for doors but without any wood I think I'll need the bins.  Or should I have the PigtailBrass guy make clothing and bags?  Or split his time 50/50?

Also, I have a guy who likes green glass currently training glassmaking with goblets.  Should I make a bunch more glassmakers?  I have infinite sand and infinite energy, I could have a master glassmaker who constructs lots of serrated disks, intermediate glassmakers for cages, vials, and furniture, and everyone else for raw glass and glass blocks.  Do you kids like GLASS?

O Daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us.  Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stonesupright *kapok training spear*.