v0.34 Talk:Animal trainer

Page out of date

This page needs to be rewritten, as training was completely revamped in today's release (34.06)

Tharwen 00:58, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Moved the info from Kennel over. I corrected what I noticed was out of date; I think I got it all. Apologies if I missed anything. --Zombiejustice 18:59, 5 April 2012 (UTC)

Added content about the domestication of wild animals. If anybody knows the effects training quality has, please feel free to add it in. The effects of civilization knowledge of animal training would be nice too. I'd also like confirmation on training young animals becoming "domesticated" and forever tame: I read that somewhere but can't seem to find it anymore, nor have I actually tested that out. Does it work on fully wild young animals? Only young animals born from trained animals? If the latter, does the parent have to have a particular quality of training? --Reilwin 03:28, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

Added what I've learned so far. Training quality absolutely affects the time it takes to revert. I've gotten into the second generation of Wild boar training, and, so far, it seems that the training quality of the mother gets passed on to the offspring. By assigning a trainer, you are then adding to that initial training quality, thus allowing for domestication. So, something like this: Urist McTrainer tames a breeding pair of wild boar. Boar gets +Trained+ while sow gets *Trained*. For the Sow, that means that it went from wild (say, training level 0, to level 4) Urist McTrainer reinforces the training, and eventually a Piglette *Trained* is born, with no trainer assigned. By assigning Urist McTrainer to the Piglette, which starts at level 4, you then have the option to adding to the training level up to Urist's training ability. Thus, Piglette can go from level 4 to level 7, domesticated, since Urist can add up to 4 levels, and domesticated is the highest we can go. I think. --MisterB777 18:37, 10 April 2012 (UTC)

I can confirm that children of masterfully trained wild animals will be born masterfully trained, and that if you assign your trainer to them they will become tame. Something else I ran into that people might want to take note of. I had a bunch of gray langurs that my trainer trained masterfully. I decided to get rid of them, so I butchered them. You know how you have trouble with crafters if one of their masterful items is destroyed? Yeah, same thing here. One absolutely miserable trainer.

Training hunting/war animals

Does anybody know how to train a tame animal into hunting/war with the new Animal training zone? When the taining still worked at the kennel, you could choose the wanted animal directly, but from the zone, I have no idea how to start the actual training process. I do have some animal trainers and a lot of dogs that are "waiting to be trained" but I can't assign the dogs to the trainers like a work animal and the only thing I can do with the dog directly is marking it ready for butchering. I've also tried putting them into a restraint inside the training zone and making the training zone the meeting hall, so the dogs would wander around in it.

You handle all training assignments from the "z" screen. Go to the Animals menu and set training duties from there. --MoogleDan 17:35, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps this should be added to the main page? I'm going to add it if there is no objection.

Add it please.I was lost for hours on this. However after doing that I havn't been able to train a war dog still.

I added some info on how to train animals, HTH. --Nagidal 08:32, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

War training pastured animals

The statement "Pastured animals can only be trained if the zone is located within their pasture." is false. I observed pastured giraffes being war trained in their pastures while I had the animal training zone in some other part of the fort. Please confirm and correct the article if true.

Overall Training

The levels of Overall Training that I've seen on the Animals subscreen are A Few Facts, Knowledgeable, General Familiarity and Domesticated. Are there others? --Bouchart 23:00, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Not that I know of, but I put those in. Also, Knowledgeable is higher then general familiarity for some reason. --Lethosor 20:02, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Well, it turns out "expert" is above "knowledgeable". Guess I spoke too soon :) --Lethosor (talk) 20:34, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Does anyone know if the civilization gaining knowledge works differently when you're the capital? Does it still wait until the caravan leaves? --Zzedar 16:18, 5 April 2013 (UTC)

AFAIK, your wealth/population/animal knowledge/other status info are updated to the outside world whenever a caravan leaves your map, whether you're a mountainhome or not. -91.156.198.36 17:56, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Taming time/difficulty

Does anyone know what controls the difficulty of taming? Could it be directly derived from PETVALUE? That would coincide with my limited taming experience:

animal	[PETVALUE]	number trained	comments
bugbat	20	countless	all of these are trivial to tame compared to others on the list
raven	25
crundle	50
elk bird	400	10	taming/animal knowledge progress is very similar to rutherer. animal knowledge progess might be a bit faster
rutherer	600	29	taming/animal knowledge progress is quite fast (from nothing to exceptionally trained in a couple of years, children born from trained mothers are trivial to domesticate)
jabberer	1500	1	taming progress is very slow, animal knowledge progress is noticeably faster than for hydras/cave dragons
hydra	10000	1	taming progress is very slow, animal knowledge progress takes years. hydra is only at +Trained+ / General familiarity after 2 decades of training! (≡Trained≡ is the highest I've gotten him to, after reverting to wild state and complete retaming)
cavedragon

In any case, it might be worth mentioning that certain animals are much easier to tame.

But is it even possible to completely domesticate a race of wild animals? Highest I've gotten to is Expert. -91.156.198.36 17:39, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Well, it usually takes many different animals to level up a trainer, as opposed to repeatedly training the same creature (sadly, this is a challenge in the case of dragons, which don't breed in the current version). As for the ease of training elk birds, most civilizations start out with General Familiarity with many cave creatures, including elk birds. I haven't domesticated any species either – the highest I've gotten is to "expert" with ravens (and only because they arrive in groups of 8-10 at a time). It could take multiple fortresses to accumulate enough knowledge for domestication (although I can't say I've tested it). --Lethosor (talk) 17:55, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Indeed, having many different animals makes it considerably faster to gain overall knowledge on the animal race, but one specimen should be enough. You can always train other animals to get experience for your animal trainers. Also, my civ barely has any animal knowledge other than the default domestic animals and some cave critters, I started at year 5 to ensure I would encounter tamable megabeasts before they are killed in worldgen. At first, I was worried that I would domesticate the lone hydra before gaining enough knowledge on its race (I used to never release it from its cage, only retaming it when it reverted to wild. This did not seem to slow overall knowledge gains, compared to the cave dragon whom I've constantly trained), but turns out completely domesticating it isn't going to happen by accident. -91.156.198.36 19:03, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Well I caught a breeding pair of Giant Wren and am setting up a breeding program to see how long it takes to domesticate them and if its even possible to completely domesticate wild animals. Based on the question mark on the page no one knows. Skyte100 (talk) 05:00, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

It's possible to tame individual animals, especially when they are young, but I'm not sure if it's possible to gain enough knowledge to domesticate an entire species (for example, domesticating giant ravens as easily as ducks). --Lethosor (talk) 21:34, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

Contradiction: Can animals that revert in their cages be retrained?

"Animals left in a cage cannot be retrained from beyond a wild state (ae. will only be trained from and revert to a wild state), so moving the no longer wild animal out of its cage is necessary for further training. Alternatively, with a difficult to train animal or a poor trainer, you may want to leave the animal in its cage; the Animal will eventually revert back to its wild state, at which point your trainer will train it again"

The first sentence seems to say the animal will revert to wild state and be untrainable. The second sentence says you should let your animal revert, so your animal trainer can get XP from retraining it. Can reverted animals be retrained or not? If they cannot, and since once-trapped animals are trapavoid, it seems that once a wild animal reverts, it can never be retrained.– unsigned comment by 50.137.253.56

Yeah, that paragraph was unclear. Any animal that reverts to wild status can be initially trained again (assuming you can get it into a cage), but, after the initial training, further training cannot take place in a cage. I reworded the article to clarify. --Loci (talk) 20:05, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Fortress-born animal children

Page states "there is no such thing as wild fortress-born animal children." This is not correct. I had a herd of wild, uncaged capybaras get stuck on my map (due to a bug unrelated to breeding) long enough that all the females had babies, and I've had captured female critters drop babies many times (most often herd animals, i.e. males and females enter the map at the same time). It's true that baby animals don't enter the map, females don't seem to enter pregnant, and uncaptured females won't generally stick around long enough to get pregnant and carry to term, but it's not true that there's "no such thing". Urist McDorf (talk) 10:07, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Confirmed. (I've had wild caged rhinoceroses give birth in cages, even to triplets once.) I'm thinking it may have meant that trained (or tamed) animals can't give birth to wild children. --Lethosor (talk) 18:27, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

Agreed. This line may have been attempting to convey that animal children born in your civilization cannot become completely wild until they reach adulthood, but it's confusing and that detail is covered elsewhere in the article. I have removed the unclear statement.--Loci (talk) 20:27, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Increasing Knowledge without Caravan's Departure

I accidentally captured a jaguar that wandered into a cage trap during a goblin siege, and have set my animal trainer to repeatedly training her every time she reverts to a wild state because why the hell not.

In Limestone I got a message saying the dwarves of The Portal of Climates now know a few facts about jaguar training, and was somewhat confused because this page says nothing about your group gaining knowledge about animal training. My civilization is named The Feral Earth, as mentioned in the [c]ivilizations screen and in the thoughts and preferences screen of one of my founding 7's miners.

Here's a save with the announcement. It's on the 4th page at the top if you're in the default-sized windowed mode. The jaguar is (Trained) in that save, I think. Top of the fourth page of animals in default-sized windowed mode. And it's the only thing about which my dwarves know a few facts in Overall Training.

Cheers!

--Lielac (talk) 19:32, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

I've also been training war grizzlies in this fort, and once again it's the group name featured when they become expert grizzly bear trainers. The dwarven caravan actually survived this time and is going to leave soon, though, so I'll see if that changes anything. --Lielac (talk) 22:06, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

... I forgot to update this because I didn't get any messages about The Feral Earth gaining knowledge. --Lielac (talk) 08:31, 30 January 2014 (UTC)

Transfer of training information

Regarding this statement near the bottom of this section:

When training animals that your civilization has never domesticated before, successful training will result in some knowledge being transferred to your civilization every time the dwarven caravan returns to the mountainhomes. This has no effect on gameplay within your fortress, but is conjectured to reduce training barriers for future fortresses established by your civilization.

When I tested this by abandoning a multi-year fort where seven species had been trained to "general familiarity", none of them were even listed in the z screen when I started a new fortress. Forcing a caravan also does not appear to give the new fort any training knowledge, on arrival or departure. It may be true that some information was transferred to the home civilization, but it doesn't appear to have any effect in fortress mode. —Lethosor (talk) 13:50, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

A followup comment on Reddit seems to imply that the transfer of knowledge is quite slow—a 5-year-old fort with "general familiarity" in training one animal only contributed "a few facts" to a new fort with the same civ. —Lethosor (talk) 14:51, 3 April 2014 (UTC)