Bay 12 Games Forum

Where is a good place to store them to be eaten? Will they get eaten if they're caged or do I have to store them in a clutter of animal traps in the stockpile, and just have lots of traps?

I have some (lots of) other questions too, mostly to do with animals.

1) Vermin. I'm still looking for an efficient way to deal with them that doesn't involve letting cats roam around my fortress, but requires little direct handling from me. It'd be great if you could assign whole creature types to things as well as individual animals. like put all live rats here, etc.

How far can a rat fall and survive? I made a 1z deep pit to put them in, but rather embaressingly they all escaped when I started dumping them in there. Would filling it with water help? My current solution is to catch them in animal traps and then assign them to a cage I have set up beside my animal store. I even took the cage down after a while and dragged it to the kennel. So now I have a cage swarming with tame rats that I don't know what to do with. I might flog it off to someone when I can eventually figure out how trading works.

2) Taming wild/large animals, how is this done? Also, do you positivley -need- a dungeon master to train some of the more potent beasts, and if so, how the heck do you obtain one? I apparently have to catch them first, but how. Does this involve going out and taming them on site or do I have to catch them somehow? The only way I can see to do this is to wait for the stupid things to blunder into a cage trap. My hunter tends to get a bit knuckle happy and invariably brings back a corpse. But then, that's what he's supposed to do really.

3) Pets, benifit or bane? I've only been playing with the game since this weekend but I've already seen a few stories of entire fortresses going mad due to pet cats and dogs that get caught up during altercations with goblins. I've kept a tight reign on my animals so far, and not let any of my dwarves get attached to them.

4) This leads me to my next question, keeping dwarves fed and happy. I'm fine until immigrants start arriving. I'm not sure how to keep such masses fed. Also my dwarves are constantly complaining of bad water. That and they're thirsty. I did designate a drinking zone, and they -are- using it. But apparently not enough. Being thirsty is slowly making them angrier and angrier. This is my only real problem other than forcing them all into a barracks. Most of their bad thoughts were about miasma until I moved the refuse outside, my skulls were apparently quite stinky, even after the other bits rotted away. But the state of the water is getting quite bad. They're drinking from a brook too, not a pond.

1)
Somewhere along the line, my woodcutter dropped his axe. I think this is from when he ran into a miasma but I'm just not sure. Examining his inventory shows dwarf blood on his back. I've tried building a weapon store under the fallen axe but nobody has moved it around like they seem to like doing.

Nor can I persuade him to pick it up again. I've assigned him axe in the military menu, but still he's not going to pick it up. It doesn't help that he's my only woodcutter and I need wood for a furnace, i'm up to my ears in copper ore.

2) How do I turn immigration off? I was doing fine until eight dwarves showed up with their kids! I'm still getting used to handling a small number of dwarves and they're eating all my darn food without being too useful. Alternatively, how can I turn excess dwarves into useful food?  

3) is there any way of fencing in cows without chaining them all up with ropes? I tried stuffing them in a room with a door but they all escaped the minute someone opened it, and I don't really want to keep them cooped up in cages, or running loose over the countryside.

[ March 30, 2008: Message edited by: Loctavus ]

He'd become a legendary tailor as a result though.