v0.31 Talk:Animal trainer

Trainable Animals in 2010

I´m playing a bit with the newest version at the moment and just got the happy announcement, that my animal trainer trained a "war leopard" (much to my surprise). So I was curious and searched all the creature files for trainable animals and it seems like the amount of potential war/hunting animals has increased greatly in 2010. The animals I found are:

- Dog (duh...)
- Leopard
- Lion
- Tiger
- Jaguar
- Cheetah
- Mandrill
- Gorilla
- Grizzly bear
- Polar bear
- Giant eagle (!)
- Elephant (!!)
- Giant bat (hunting only)
- Giant cave swallow (hunting only)
- Dragon (!!!)

I guess this is already common knowledge but I just wanted to list them here for general convenience. Maybe we shall also include this in the article. ~ Felcis 08:26, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

How to train?

I have a cage with dogs in the same area as my kennels. Requesting that an animal be trained as a war dog, however, gave me the message "Urist McTrainer cancels Train War Animal: No creature". I believe Urist had been looking for the (appropriate) animal for some time, and at the point she gave up she was a country mile away from the kennels.

So: how does the trainer decide which animal will be trained? And where does she then look for the animal? Is it possible to specify which animal should be trained (and if so, how)? I'm guessing that cage where all the barking is coming from is one place she doesn't look ... Hv 20:24, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

It selects the animal to be trained from the list of unrestrained, uncaged trainable animals. The only way to specify which animal is to be trained is to tie up, cage, or otherwise prevent all other untrainable animals from getting to the kennels. In order to get rid of that message, you have to take all the dogs you want to train out of their cages. --Eurytus 21:34, 25 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. I've added a note to that effect in the article. Hv 00:03, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure that the animal chosen for training is random (as it states in the article). At a new fortress, I had three dogs, two male and one female (who had several puppies following her). I wanted to train one of the male dogs as a war dog, and tried several times (3 or 4 at least, and by creating a Train War Animal order then cancelling it if I got the female) to get one of the male dogs to the kennels with my Animal Trainer, to no luck – the female came every time, trailed by a string of puppies. She was, not incidentally I suspect, the first dog (and animal) listed in the "Status/Animals" screen, and I tried both to make her available for adoption and slaughter in the hope that it would remove her from availability for training (no luck). Finally I did have luck when I looked at this page and saw that caged/chained animals would not be trained – I put her in a spare cage I had and successfully trained one of the male dogs.

Of course, this doesn't completely discredit that the animal chosen is random, but if my probability calculation is right, there is less than a 4% chance that of three possible animals, the same one would be chosen three times in a row. But my thinking right now is that the first animal in the Status/Animals list that is valid for a type of training will be the one picked.--Scrotch 19:10, 30 October 2010 (UTC)