DF2014 Talk:Animal trainer

FotF reply on animal training

Q: Will the exact mechanics of training levels ever be explicitly explained? I have observed that a creature's pet value is is inversely proportional to how many of them need to be trained in order to advance through the training levels. I have also observed that maintenance training, war or hunting training and training already trained infants into fully tame animals all contribute less to training levels than training a fully wild animal does; this has caused me to hypothesize that the contribution of any given training session to the training levels is directly proportional to the increase in an animal's training level caused by that session. I have also heard from another guy who trains a lot of animals that training levels do have an effect on in-fort training

A: Pet value... like the trading value? I don't see any of that in the code, but I might be missing something. Every tame animal job increases overall fort training points for that animal by 10, and the fort training knowledge levels are attained at 30, 100, 250 and 500 (it zeroes points when it increases level). War and hunting jobs are also worth 10 points, but a maintenance job is only worth 3. Looks like training infants is 10 too, though I could have missed some conditional on any of these. If your fort level is higher than the civ level for a given animal, 10 points of knowledge are transferred with each caravan that gets off the map (so it'd take 88 years worth of caravans to bring the civ all the way up to "expert" I guess, but just 3 years to get every subsequent fort to start at "few facts"). Sounds like the sort of thing that could be sped-up with all the new knowledge/books once we start linking in-game industries to it. There's also the unexplored matter of why your civ level would be lower than your fort level if your fort is the last one, as opposed to part of a large civilization, and why a trainer migrant coming from an old expert fort would lose knowledge.

The fort level of knowledge has a strong effect on in-fort training. If you know nothing about the animal, the animal training roll must be 30 to get past semi-wild and 100 to be masterfully trained (with 40/50/65/80 for the others). "Few facts": 20/30/40/60/70/90. "Familiar": 15/20/30/50/60/80. "Knowledgeable": 10/15/25/40/50/70. "Expert": 5/10/20/30/40/60. The calculations for skill rolls are complicated, but by these numbers, your trainers are almost twice as good at expert-level fort knowledge, if they weren't already great trainers in their own right (in which case they'll probably crack 100 most times without help).

From http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=140544.msg6583653#msg6583653 2A02:8070:7AD:B200:5105:8B71:8AD4:5344 13:54, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

War dogs don't breed?

On my latest fortress, I have trained all my dogs (around 50) to be war dogs and locked them into a fairly large room using a pen zone. This was some in game years ago. Since that time, there haven't been *any* puppies, while most other tame animal species I have breed freely. I remember that female war dogs can give birth to puppies, but these may have conceived before being trained. None of my males are gelded. 1So, to me, it very much appears that dogs upon receiving war training miraculously lose interest in mating and turn into canine battle monks, which to me is kind of a bummer as I have to restart my dog breeding program from scratch by purchasing new dogs of both sex from merchants while my four-legged warriors are good for only two things, fighting and being slaughtered before they happen to die of old age. Electrolisk (talk) 16:36, 31 October 2015 (UTC)

Animals stop breeding after there are 50 of that species. 2A02:8070:7AD:B200:5105:8B71:8AD4:5344 13:54, 21 November 2015 (UTC)

baby animals grow up before being able to be retrained

as is explained in the article, if you train a baby animal they are tame forever, but if the parents were too well trained then the babies inherit the training and they cannot be retrained to be fully tame. has anyone found a way to force retraining? its kind of a big problem since i modded giant cave spiders to have spiderlings but i set the child tag to one.