Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Niyazov]

There's a Kobold cave near my fortress with GCS and Helmet Snakes as livestock. I can apparently raid them with impunity - my last raid retrieved 10 tame giant cave spiders. Most of the suggestions about managing GCSs assume that only a small number are available; what can I do with large numbers of tame GCS?

[Bumber]

Put them in fortifications, let them web enemies. Probably useful against werebeasts in particular.

[HmH]

Use them to capture forgotten beasts and clowns. Most of those can be caught with a webbed cage trap.

UPD: Oh, and IIRC, dropping webs from a retractable bridge doesn't destroy them, so you can make a machine for capturing friendlies and trapavoids: lock them in a corridor with cage traps, then use a bridge or a series of hatches to drop webs on top of them. It'll be far less bothersome to reset than a cave-in trap.

[Urist9876]

• Silk farm
• Webbing cage traps
• Ranged support
• Retracting bridge that drops webs in a hallway, just to slow whoever goes through, works nice with ballistas
• Animal trainer training (they cannot be fully tamed, so require retraining periodically)
• On display in cage at library to study for scholars, on display in tavern for looks, on display in temple to scare dwarves to the right path
• Rarely: pet for whoever loves giant cave spiders or food for those who love to eat them.

Probably they have more applications.

You do not have enough spiders, I hope they breed ;-)

[PatrikLundell]

I believe creatures captured in raids are fully tame, even when those creatures cannot be (fully) tamed by dorfs.

[Superdorf]

Wait, can tame giant cave spiders still web things? I'd heard somewhere that they won't...

[PatrikLundell]

My silk farms usually have a tamed GCS with an undead as the target. Now, I'm not sure I've set one up in 0.44.X, but I don't think any of the logic has changed. I believe there have been issues with using gobbos as targets, though.

[Bumber]

I believe creatures captured in raids are fully tame, even when those creatures cannot be (fully) tamed by dorfs.

Would the offspring inherit that status?

[CaptainArchmage]

I believe creatures captured in raids are fully tame, even when those creatures cannot be (fully) tamed by dorfs.

Would the offspring inherit that status?

Offspring inherit that status, and the deal with the Giant Cave Spiders is if they give birth to young, those young are born adults. So this literally means permanently tamed Giant Cave Spiders. This should go in the Dwarf !!Science!! thread.

[Ninjabread]

Wait, can tame giant cave spiders still web things? I'd heard somewhere that they won't...

I ran some tests back in 44.05, on the wiki it says (or said, haven't checked in a while) that they don't, but that's not strictly true. I tested a few things out and put the results on that thread, but didn't test everything I should've, cause I really wanted to update to 44.06, and also it didn't even occur to me to test on a megabeast because I was very very new.

[TheEqualsE]

Wait, can tame giant cave spiders still web things? I'd heard somewhere that they won't...

I have a bunch of experience with this.  I've seen hostile things attack a fort and chained spiders do nothing.  Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.  On more than one time a forgotten beast walked right by one of my guard spiders and the spider did nothing.  If goblins attack them the spider waits to be attacked and then maybe fights back.  But, if you stick a bunch of tamed spiders in a cage and unleash them on invaders they will fight and they will spray web.