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[IndigoFenix]

Communication by pigeon is at least a thousand years old and could make communication between areas much easier.  It could be a standard creature tag, like [HOMING].

Rather than use the magical messenger birds of fantasy stories, you could order birds that have nests in particular areas, and use them to send messages quickly to those areas. Similarly, by raising your own birds and exporting them, you could get messages of far-off events faster.

Or you could just use magic to send them wherever you want.

[Shonai_Dweller]

Or moles. Dwarves, especially living underground probably have some kind of animals which can make use of a worldwide connected cave network.

[SixOfSpades]

Dwarven Postage System
Pigeon Messaging System
There was at least one more, but I can't find it at the moment.

Personally, I don't think dwarves should have such a system unless elves develop it first.

[IndigoFenix]

I expect elves would be prime candidates for the magical "send animals wherever you want" while dwarves and humans would use a more realistic system.

I don't see mundane moles as being used for long-distance communication, but some fantastic or generated creatures could have the same tag.  Interestingly mole rats do have a magnetic homing sense similar to migratory birds, but in their case it is more for navigating their tunnels in the dark rather than long-distance travel.

[Starver]

Elves would surely make use of arboreal communications (not so fanciful!) with obvious the capability to make 'trunk calls'...

Humans, having provably adopted early iterations of RFC 1149, here on roundworld, should certainly have some form of primeval IPoAC established on dorfworld.

The bearded buggers with their love of levers might have a Semaphore system overground (with enough hilltop sites built up) or just a spooky-action-at-a-distance lever2indicator thing if they're able to initially trek the distance with the components needed.

Goblins? Well, they've probably got communication daemons of some kind.


With an established diplomatic relationship, inter-species communications could be via 'loan' terminii to one kind of communications method (or bothmkinds, according to direction of traffic) or by bi/multilaterally-founded settlements which use a sneakernet interface between the two or more systems provided by the home civ. If things run smooth. (The Dorfish link might easily suffer from Sock Error, etc.)

If all that is too easy, then of course a tree-link could be rooted (up!), crossbow bolts can pierce the sky in huge quantities, vile forces of darkness can obscure lines of sight (while distance itself might make quantum leverage disentangle, or just let loose the gremlins) and temples might be built that disrupt the dispersal of diabolic dispatches.

[PlatinumSun]

I can get behind homing pets in general.

[Miles_Umbrae]

It's more interesting from a lore-perspective than an actual mechanic that the player sets up and handles.

[FantasticDorf]

As long as its vermin birds, there's plenty of bats & cave swallows to hand to dispense and send off in a messenger's stead as long as there's some form of access to the surface.

Large birds alone i feel are as cheaty & vunerable as just using messenger dwarves, you can probably comfortably send a bird-man or a messenger mounted ontop of a large bird/flying creature to do the same job if one is availible, while vermin birds are discreet with a chance they might not arrive due to circumstance, they can also fly through obstacles other large creatures can normally not pass.

[Bumber]

Some suggestions on which animals could be messengers in this old thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=143014.0

[Azerty]

Would we have to feed them, and will they give other products (meat, feathers, eggs)?

[Cathar]

Or...you know...
Messengers.

Homing pigeons are unreliable. They get killed, they lose the message, and sometimes they decide they want to mate more than delivering the message. Also homing pigeons have one bigass drawback ; they can only deliver messages between two places and will never ever be able to learn a third one.

Basically what you do is you teach the pigeon he can find food at two places. When you need to deliver a message, you just stop feeding it, and it will naturally go to the other place.

So to train homing pigeons you need to transport them physically between the two places you need them to go between. Why not just send a guy, especially since the distances between places in DF are just not that big ?

[Starver]

Also homing pigeons have one bigass drawback ; they can only deliver messages between two places and will never ever be able to learn a third one.

Technically, they can deliver messages between anywhere¹ and one place. Though they'll fly that again (maybe faster) if returned to the same departure point, they can also be sent to any other point of departure (or just let loose from any point in the middle of a journey) and let 'home' receive messages from all over the place.

The fact that 'home' is effectively constant (and the need to ship them to 'away' points to then use them) is a logistical issue that has been dealt satisfactorily with, here, since maybe 1000BC, though it is an important consideration.


(The food-trick is slightly different. Feed them at 'away', don't feed them at 'home'. They'll fly to 'away' when released from 'home' hungry enough, then fly 'home' when released from 'away' sated enough. At least until and unless they happen to find food elsewhere, and that's easy enough to happen to create a 'disloyal' pigeon who will then be detrained back to a standard many-to-one pigeon, and maybe not even that if it ever willingly or unwillingly goes AWOL and stops going 'home'. )


¹ FCVO 'anywhere', but here on Earth a distance of 7,200 miles was 'homed' in 24 days, so it's possibly a long (feathered?) tail on the probability of success.

[Cathar]

Yeah, so that's even worse, since you need a guy to come and bring the pidgeon back, defeating the whole purpose in small universes like dwarf fortress, where you don't need to send a lot of messages and every place is within walking distance of a dwarf.

I guess my big question is ; why implementing homing pidgeons ? I guess it gives some flavor to the game, but it wouldn't fill a need in gameplay - not a need that a normal, dwarfy messenger wouldn't

[Miles_Umbrae]

Yeah, so that's even worse, since you need a guy to come and bring the pidgeon back, defeating the whole purpose in small universes like dwarf fortress, where you don't need to send a lot of messages and every place is within walking distance of a dwarf.

I guess my big question is ; why implementing homing pidgeons ? I guess it gives some flavor to the game, but it wouldn't fill a need in gameplay - not a need that a normal, dwarfy messenger wouldn't

Pigeons are relatively safer than humanoid messengers because they are fast-moving rat-sized flying targets making them that much harder to catch/hit.
It's also much easier to spot a disloyal pigeon than a traitorous intelligent humanoid.

[Cathar]

Pidgeons are slow moving targets that are the bottom rank of the food chain for anything that flies. Sure flying may sound great until the local bald freedom decides to have a snack and there goes your important message asking for urgent reinforcements.

Besides, you will need someone to carry the pidgeon back anyway, so there's no safety point even for dwarves. Maybe, maybe you can use them if you are besieged, but wouldn't adding dwarven messengers the first logical step before adding the skyrats?