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[Shazial]

I've recently come to a realization my test fortress is headed towards an inevitable FPS death as my efforts to become self sustained for cheese, cloth, and leather have led to a situation where my butchering backlog is at least 500 animals deep (with a total of over 1800 animals and pets in the fortress) - there's no way I can catch up to that with their breeding speed without some dire steps taken (the few males I've kept for breeding purposes seem to be extremely.. virile cases..).

With the limitations to butchering (No butchering of animals that weren't slaughtered by a butcher), I've come to ponder on if there are ways to get around it somehow and regain population control. Of course I could just put them into an atom smasher and clear the queue through that, but it'd be a waste of a ton of leather, bones, skulls and other vital by-products.

Is building a huge animal grave yard with 10+ butcher shops the only way to solve it, or does anyone's brilliant mind have some good suggestions for this particular issue?

[Rowanas]

I've recently come to a realization my test fortress is headed towards an inevitable FPS death as my efforts to become self sustained for cheese, cloth, and leather have led to a situation where my butchering backlog is at least 500 animals deep (with a total of over 1800 animals and pets in the fortress) - there's no way I can catch up to that with their breeding speed without some dire steps taken (the few males I've kept for breeding purposes seem to be extremely.. virile cases..).

With the limitations to butchering (No butchering of animals that weren't slaughtered by a butcher), I've come to ponder on if there are ways to get around it somehow and regain population control. Of course I could just put them into an atom smasher and clear the queue through that, but it'd be a waste of a ton of leather, bones, skulls and other vital by-products.

Is building a huge animal grave yard with 10+ butcher shops the only way to solve it, or does anyone's brilliant mind have some good suggestions for this particular issue?

You forget the all-solution.  Pit them, magma them.  Works on any animal, butchered or not.

[PatrikLundell]

Being self sufficient with leather is rather tricky currently, as you get a single piece of leather from each animal, regardless of size (unless they're too small). This means that if you have any significant consumption of leather (such as for clothing), you're probably in for a serious over production of meat, bones, etc.
One way to increase the leather yield is to use splattering, i.e. drop the animal from a sufficient height that it splits into parts, as each part provides one piece of leather, but that requires that the animal is wild or that you're in a reanimating biome, in which case you can have killed animal reanimate to be splattered (or just "hope" the raw hides reanimate, in which case you can kill them, which typically results in multiple hides).

To bring the number of animals under control, I'd recommend butchering of all adult males to stop any new pregnancies from occurring, moving the young males to a separate area to block future ones, and start to butcher the adult females off. You'd need to move any newborn males to the separate area before they grow up, of course. If you're butcherers aren't up to the task, it may take many years to slaughter off the excess stock, at which time you can move a few females to the male pen to produce a limited number of new offspring, and then send those to slaughter after a sufficient number of offspring to ensure a new generation has been produced.

[anewaname]

This is the method I use when I plan a mass culling with intent to keep all the leather and meat, and I have used it several times for massive turkey cleansing... (it also works well for beak dog cleanup)

Near the animals, put 3 or 4 butchers shops.
Next to each butcher, put a tanners shop.
Next to each butcher, put a one-tile meat stockpile (1 barrel, meat only)
Set up one 80+ tile stockpile (max barrels, meat only, take from links only, take from each of the 1-tile stockpiles)

Ensure at least 10 dwarfs have butcher and tanner skills enabled (tanning is only added to dwarfs that already have a high moodable skill)
Queue an order for 20+ pots/barrels and make sure there is an auto order for barrels or pots.
Queue 20 or 40 animals to be butchered.
Once about 10 animals have been butchered, go to each tanner and add an order to "tan hide/Repeat"
While things are happening, open Dwarf Therapist and queue the remaining 500+ animals to be butchered.

This will result in constant butchering and tanning. The raw hides will be processed fast enough to avoid spoiling, and the stockpile linking will result in more instances of dwarfs carrying multiple stacks of meat to a barrel and fewer instances of dwarfs carrying one meat stack to an empty stockpile tile (it will help if other meat stockpiles in the fort are not accepting meat at the time, as you only want 'put item in barrel', not 'put item in stockpile'). If you have enough barrels and large enough stockpiles, you will not need to micro-manage it.

[Fleeting Frames]

There is also gelding your males, if you can't bear to lose or haul their produce.

[mikekchar]

The other possibility is to cage your animals.  IIRC, they can't breed in cages (but can, on restraints).  The downside is that your fortress will be *busy* feeding any grazers ;-).  I haven't gotten around to doing it, but was planning to do what you are doing.  My strategy was to cage most of the herds and let out controlled amounts for breeding.

[sketchesofpayne]

Pigs and birds can be caged with no problems (no starving).  Keep the breeding stock on restraints near each other and cage all offspring. 

That's the solution I had to implement to keep my FPS up.  I had a fort of 200 dwarves and a bunch of livestock.  Any time something spooked the livestock my FPS would drop by twenty.  Overall my low FPS was due to animal pathfinding.  once I used restraints and cages that issue went away.

[PatrikLundell]

I've seen it claimed caged males are capable of impregnating uncaged females that get close to the cage, but I haven't tried to confirm that claim.

[Saiko Kila]

I've recently come to a realization my test fortress is headed towards an inevitable FPS death as my efforts to become self sustained for cheese, cloth, and leather have led to a situation where my butchering backlog is at least 500 animals deep (with a total of over 1800 animals and pets in the fortress) - there's no way I can catch up to that with their breeding speed without some dire steps taken (the few males I've kept for breeding purposes seem to be extremely.. virile cases..).

With the limitations to butchering (No butchering of animals that weren't slaughtered by a butcher), I've come to ponder on if there are ways to get around it somehow and regain population control. Of course I could just put them into an atom smasher and clear the queue through that, but it'd be a waste of a ton of leather, bones, skulls and other vital by-products.

Is building a huge animal grave yard with 10+ butcher shops the only way to solve it, or does anyone's brilliant mind have some good suggestions for this particular issue?

I was in this position not once, nor twice, but no longer, thanks to some simple designs. I still have an army of hundreds of animals.
My tips:

1. You don't need more than one or two butcheries (even for hundreds of animals). You do need more butchers though. How many depends on their other roles and stats, but I'd say that at least twice as many as butcheries. Butchering your own animals takes no time.

2. You do need a huge amount of space in storage (quantum stockpile recommended), for meats, for bones (if you care about it), and of course refuse for things like cartilage.

3. You do need a huge number of haulers, at least 10 for a butchery. Hauling efficiency is most crucial for the whole butchering industry.

4. You do not need storage for skins, because you want to process them as quickly as possible. So you need tanneries, more than butcheries, I would recommend at least three, but it could be not enough in the beginning. You also need a surplus of tanners, twice as many as tanneries, but more preferable. Use Auto-Tan setting (unless you want parchment). You also don't need storage for tanned hides actually, and save haulers' time. You may build your Leather Workshop (or two) near the tanneries, though. Also, disable hauling of food on Tanners.

5. Build a cage, and cage all non-grazers (so cats, dogs, pigs, birds etc). you want to eventually slaughter or breed. This is for saving FPS. You may leave a pair, or a couple of females and one good male, uncaged for further breeding, but when you want to thin the flock just cage every non-grazer.

6. Geld all (or almost all) grazer males, assuming they are mammals. Geld all male pets, no matter grazer or not, because they cannot be caged anyway.

7. In the beginning, order only as many animals to slaughter as you have butcheries (i.e. one or two). Take note how much time is needed to empty the butcheries of meat and stuff, and how much storage space is used after this ( especially if you don't use quantum stockpiles). This will allow you to modify number of haulers, and storage space and access. Also take note how long it takes to tan hides, to optionally up the number of tanneries or tanners. Later you could order twice as many animals as butcheries in the same time, but don't order more - you haulers, storage, and especially tanners will be overwhelmed, and the meat and skins will rot.

8. (optionally) in the meantime you could order roasts to be made (mostly meat will be used), but remember than Render Fat also uses kitchen and cook's time. Fortunately fat rendering is quite high priority nowadays, and tallow doesn't rot faster than meat (i.e. not at all when in storage).

[FantasticDorf]

Two refuse piles are a must with a animal products industry, one input for fresh corpses A* (with 3 wheelbarrows) and another closed one for refuse coming from the fortress workshops & stockpiles where materials would not be being processed. B* seperated by a double door airlock that just keeps it out of sight of dwarves walking the hallways.

 A    B

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• This system pushes away nervous tissue and cartilage handled under (body parts) into the closed workshop recieving pile, i can never have enough leather and usually i put the boneworks onto mass orders to make collectibles since my nobles are more interested in metal objects (my queen is particularly obsessed with crossbows) so i dont think item FPS is a major issue with my 200 dwarf fort

• This waste afterwards (in clear view of what's good refuse and whats not) goes into a bridge atomic crusher across the hall operating underneath a dumping pit with a (a design i've worked upon for a very long time) where the corpse pile eventually processes every rotten or dead human corpse in as big a load as i push within it when i have the dump-pile active or is left to rot with impunity.

Dogs for example, i keep them within usually 7x8 pens dug into the rock and let them explode themselves, being careful to try and pick geldable males for war-training, and leaving them in a meeting-zone pasture on the upper levels where my military are stationed. Ill usually butcher the oldest ones but i have a cage installed to get a grip on it if i need to, its effective for egg layers too like jabberers or just chickens.

7x8 particularly or maybe a bit deeper because by attaching metal bars or grates onto the front, you can make a collapsable 'wall' which in a emergency will either attract sieger attention & allow you to animal bomb them with lots and lots of dogs, besides the war trained ones upstairs in the shared meeting area/pet dropoff to run the gauntlet of making running through my fortress difficult.

[OmahaMH]

3. You do need a huge number of haulers, at least 10 for a butchery. Hauling efficiency is most crucial for the whole butchering industry.

Last night a few of my pigs reached maturity at the same time and since they were males that I didn't need, I queued them up for slaughter immediately.  (Happy birthday)  I got a small, slightly dark bit of amusement of watching the butcher drag the pig to the block, kill it, and then suddenly a mob of other dwarves storm down the nearby stairs, rush into the butcher shop and grab every still-pulsing pig part, and distribute them to various stockpiles back upstairs.  Then the butcher goes back out side, gets the next one, puts it down, and the hauling train comes running through the shop WHOO WHOO again.

I imagine I should start slaughtering a few females soon too, because I probably don't need a dozen breeding pigs...

[Shazial]

Oh wow, those are all valid suggestions. I'll have to definitely look into which would work the best in my situation. The idea of slow generational control of population really charms me, but sadly I made the mistake of making my breeding animals adopted as pets.. so that tosses that out of the window, since getting rid of pets is one of the hardest thing in game from my understanding.

[Xyon]

I dunno, set up a drawbridge with a pit underneath and drop hundreds of animals to their death all at once after penning them in the zone ontop of the bridge?

[FantasticDorf]

I dunno, set up a drawbridge with a pit underneath and drop hundreds of animals to their death all at once after penning them in the zone ontop of the bridge?

Mixed pasture & meeting zone will make them stay there, so a valid suggestion, especially over lava but geese etc that can fly will fly away and will probably need something alternative like having debris falling upon them or be willingly set upon by wild (/released) beasts.

[Xyon]

I dunno, set up a drawbridge with a pit underneath and drop hundreds of animals to their death all at once after penning them in the zone ontop of the bridge?

Mixed pasture & meeting zone will make them stay there, so a valid suggestion, especially over lava but geese etc that can fly will fly away and will probably need something alternative like having debris falling upon them or be willingly set upon by wild (/released) beasts.

I once had to drop a pet bunny over 30 times from my kill-tower because it would kind of glide to the wall and maybe break its fall somehow? or just be too light to get damaged much from impact? I forget if it worked with flying pets/livestock because I had a separate turkey pen for farming and was mainly using the kill tower for unwanted pets that migrants bring.