v0.34 Talk:Orca

Do other fish wash out to shore? why did orcas do?

Ok, so i drag some water from the ocean the threw it back in. At the place where i threw it it was land, 30 tiles from the ocean. So the group of orcas threw one orca at a time , after dancing for a while, on the wet floor. They drowned one after the other. The last one seems to only go 1 tile to the shore then jump back in. - Tsester 16:12, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

EDIT:

EDIT: I had made the ocean cliffs into slopes

EDIT: a jellyfish came 2 tiles away from the ocean, then went back in

Are you saying that the orcas walk out onto dry land and drown, or do they swim to areas of ground covered by water? Also, aquatic creatures will usually attempt not to drown by getting back into water if they can. --Lethosor (talk) 18:13, 24 February 2013 (UTC)

I believe they jumped out of the water. - Tsester 00:19, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

So they jumped out of the water onto dry land? I haven't seen that happened before, but I don't often embark on oceans. That sounds unintentional, but interesting. --Lethosor (talk) 02:03, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

I'm not sure if the tile where each landed was dry or wet. - Tsester 06:35, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

These creatures have a "[BEACH_FREQUENCY:10]" tag, which is intended to model the poorly-explained real-life behavior of some creatures that strand themselves out of water; see Wikipedia:Beached_whale for more information. --Loci 20:14, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

Interesting. I hadn't noticed that tag in the raws before, probably because it was the 4th tag on its line. Is this restricted to dwarf mode? I tested it in arena mode (using the default arena), with 40 orcas on the ramps of the water pool, and none of them have "beached" yet. Even if I use dfhack to set the permaflow of the water, they don't seem to move. I'm assuming this means beaching only occurs with waves (which makes sense).

Also, this seems like a useful piece of information to have on the creatureinfo template (although I'm not trying to suggest bloating it with every possible tag from the raws). I hadn't known about this, and some information on relevant articles could be useful. --Lethosor (talk) 21:13, 25 February 2013 (UTC)

It's probably restricted to dwarf mode, because arena mode doesn't classify creatures into roaming wildlife groups (and thus doesn't make them move around that way). --Quietust 21:32, 25 February 2013 (UTC)