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[Number7]

Hello everyone!

I'd like to make a !!fun!! fort based around having quite a few dragons. For this purpose the dragons would have to mature relatively quickly (rather than 1000 years) and i have to guarantee that i have a dragon at some point fairly early on in my fortress, within the first year or two preferably.

What edits do i make to the raws to make the dragons mature faster, and how do i guarantee to get a breeding pair, any kind of cheating is completely fine with me to make this happen, within the first two years of my fort.

Many of my forts are simply too conservative and boring, so i want to spice things up with some giant firebreathing lizards as war beasts, hunting animals and just generally causing a lot of collateral damage for fun and profit. Its quite neccesary to have a few of them to multiply the carnage and also because they are glass cannons to my understanding, gotta lose a few in the process.

Thanks in advance, i've never done anything like this before so any advice you can give to help this fun fort happen would be absolutely appreciated, you all rock

[Will_Tuna]

Embark on a dragon cave?

make them embarkable? have unlimited embark points....

[Number7]

how do i locate dragon caves, and how do i make them embarkable?

[Zuglarkun]

If you want to increase your chances without hacks; generate a new world, copy over or select a new region/island, then look for these parameters - Max Megabeast Caves, Titan number. You'll want to increase the former and decrease the latter. To make caves visible, look for make caves visible near the bottom and set it to yes.

Reasoning being that increasing the megabeast fauna in worldgen will increase odds of dragons surviving worldgen and visiting your fort, while reducing the likelihood of semi megabeast fauna eg. cyclops, titans, etc.. visiting your fort. Do note that if you're using version 40.13 and not version 34.11, greatly increasing megabeast numbers will greatly increase the chance of civilization extinctions within the first few decades. You might need to gen a few worlds and check legends to make sure you have quite a few pairs of breeding dragons still in the world, as well to make sure your own civilization and other civilizations (goblin, elf, human) still exists.

All this is assuming you want to muck around in world gen to optimize chances without hacks.

Alternatively you can use DFHack's "embark anywhere" to embark on a dragon cave as Will_Tuna suggests, to get guaranteed dragons and !!FUN!! from the first year.

And of course... you can COMBINE both options to greatly enhance your likelihood of !!FUN!!

[Loci]

Edit the Dragon definition (in raw/objects/creature_standard.txt), replacing [FANCIFUL] with [COMMON_DOMESTIC] and [PET_EXOTIC] with [PET]. You'll probably also want to remove a couple zeros from PETVALUE so you can actually afford dragons at embark.

You can speed up their aging as well, but it isn't necessary. Dragons are mature (able to be trained and bred) from age 0; they merely grow to ridiculously large size over 1000 years. Young dragons are still quite deadly, despite their slightly-less-than-ridiculous size.

Create a new world and embark carefully with several male and female dragons (they'll be at the bottom of the list).

[Number7]

How would i speed up their ageing though? I quite like the idea of larger dragons as its more epic than having a dragon that is "by 23 years, its the size of a giant cheetah" kind of thing. Especially since i don't run forts that go for 23 years even usually

i believe it has to do with the BODY_SIZE part but i dont know how to interpret it

[Number7]

Okay an update, i managed to speed up their ageing to suit my purposes (I set it to 50 years to max size, seeing as i expect to play the fort for maybe 20-25 years it would create some big dragons but not ABSURDLY huge ones)

however i encountered another problem. Upon embark my dragons immediately murdered everyone. "the stray dragon claws the metalsmith in the head and the severed part sails off in an arc!"

How do i avoid this unfortunate event, do i have to bring a proficient animal trainer? one of them went beserk immediately. Do i bring War dragons instead, who would be better trained? I don't mind the threat of having dragons go rogue and slaughter large parts of my fortress, however i need to actually have a chance rather than death of my original 7 the moment i unpause

EDIT: okay, crisis averted for now, i find if i pasture them IMMEDIATELY to a wide open space away from the wagon, one of them wont go apeshit the moment a dwarf walks near them (in the first place they didnt massacre everyone, only people who got too close it seems)

What causes this behaviour out of interest?

[Findulidas]

Im just speculation here... Probably not high enough level in the trained animal. This can happen if you have exotic dangerous animals like crocodiles and grizzly bears and no one to train them.

Could also be that embarking with [buildingdestroyer:2] animals is bugged, making them all hostile at embark but not later.

[Number7]

They have an interesting behaviour where their first attack is to "lightly tap" with their claw whenever they kill a dwarf that comes near them. the combat log also shows the metalsmith at this point trying to punch the dragon at this point.

My dwarves may be so badass they try to spar with Dragons when not even drafted to the military.

Although this doesnt explain the immediate hostile embark situation, i find if i pasture them away from the wagon before the first unpause no dwarves will die (at that point in time) only later when they wander far out of the way to get cooked and/or decapitated.

[Pirate Santa]

Upon embark my dragons immediately murdered everyone.

Your dwarves were all going to die eventually, consider it a mercy killing.