40d Talk:Meat industry

Contact for breeding

Removed the verify for livestock breeding without being in contact; I've personally witnessed a female camel and a female horse locked deep inside my fortress get telepathically impregnated by outside animals. – unsigned comment by Drawfirons

Telepathically impregnated by wild outside animals? It's not part of the original question, but it sounds like that's what you're saying. --RomeoFalling 20:18, 8 November 2008 (EST)

I had only a female horse, and it had a baby. It is still early, but it may have been from the wild outside horses, or she may have started pregnant.--Zchris13 14:06, 3 March 2009 (EST)

I too had this happen but with a Muskox. For a second I was worried I had a case of Muskox jesus on my hands.--Toloran 05:12, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

From what I recall, the RNG takes a roll for each pair of tame animals are each year, and from there extrapolates the chance of impregnation. I don't believe it takes into factor if the animals are caged or not. Furthermore, any new animal additions will alternate between male and female. For instance if you have an even number of males and females, and you give birth to 3 young, it will alternate, boy/girl/boy. I can also verify that animals do breed while caged. Updating the wiki accordingly. Media:Puppies.png Schm0 01:21, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Non-renewable resource

I feel it should be mentioned somewhere that both hunting and livestock are non-renewable without some luck as to what animals are brought as pets with immigrants. Tame animals (those that are not pets) seem to be considered 'wild' in that they obey the limits set forth in the raw file for the number that will be 'spawned' (or born, if you will) before hitting a max. Basically, unnamed animals will eventually stop breeding, and only those pets with names will continue to breed. Hence why catsplosion is so bad, and why it doesn't happen with any other animals. Barring the ability to assign other animals to dwarves (and hence, give them names) I don't think meat is a very viable industry in the long term. --Gotthard 18:44, 9 November 2008 (EST)

I've seen one player claim that wild animals can be hunted to extinction. I haven't seen that myself. Barring that, hunting is renewable, albeit limited.--Maximus 21:06, 9 November 2008 (EST)

Are you saying there's a cap on live+deceased animals? If livestock doesn't need to cross paths in order to impregnate, then the meat industry is perfectly viable, although there may be some framerate issues if you choose to do more than one type of livestock -- just list one bull and eight cows as available for adoption. As for the extinction thing, are you sure he wasn't talking about the Cancel Hunt messages that say something like "There are no animals in the swamps" or somesuch? --RomeoFalling 23:09, 9 November 2008 (EST)

I have no idea what the "extinct animals" poster had experienced. I have my doubts about the claim, but can't rule out that it happened, at least to him.

There is a population cap on animals (per-species). It used to be 80, I believe, but it seems more like 50 these days. I haven't formally tested it, but my suspicion is that once you hit that population cap, breeding for that species ceases permanently, even if their count falls below the cap again. If that's true, then animal breeding is a finite resource, unless you cull their numbers carefully to keep them under the limit at all times.

I'm presently setting up a mega-corral, so I'll be testing it soon.--Maximus 23:57, 9 November 2008 (EST)

When I say renewable, I mean will never run out. Trees are renewable, given space to grow. Hunted animals are not. It isn't a *claim* that animals can be hunted to extinction, the numbers are in the raws for each particular animal. After that many of animals exist (living or dead I presume), no more are generated, whether through off-map activity, or being born as offspring. The same is true for livestock brought with you, or traded. The only animals that do NOT obey this limitation are pets (and perhaps named animals in general). I have had the same base for 15 years, and I haven't had any offspring from horses, dogs, or cows in about 9ish years. However, there are still animals being born, and I've traced the number per year back to the number of female pets I have. I'm not sure if named pets only mate with named pets, but a single female pet doesn't seem to yield any offspring (but this should be verified). I had about 20ish puppies per year at max, and it abruptly stopped. It has recently started up again, as puppies brought as pets have matured. Same thing for horses and cows, but it is slow. Frankly, with immigration stopping, and no way to assign pets (iirc?) my animal "home grown" animal supply will soon dry out. The same is not true of turtles, they seem to respawn, but I think fish fall into this category, my river hasn't had anything but turtles for 10ish years. --Gotthard 23:20, 9 November 2008 (EST)

Well, if you're referring to [POPULATION_NUMBER], Creature_tokens#P says that that is the minimum/maximum number that can show up on a map in the space of a year. I've killed something like 150 bonobos on my map, but they're still coming.

Tame animals, on the other hand, clearly have hard population limits (otherwise they'd breed into the thousands and turn every fortress into a "tribbles" episode). As I posted above, it appears that once that population limit is reached, breeding stops permanently (I'll have to test it further at some point). As far as I can tell, however, that limit does not apply to wildlife. It probably doesn't apply to wildlife even after you've hit the limit on tame animals of the same species. (It's been a while, but I once had a fort with a bunch of domesticated musk oxen. I think wild ones still showed up long after the tame ones stopped breeding.)--Maximus 02:23, 10 November 2008 (EST)

Do you know if this was changed recently? Best I can recall, EVERY fortress I've started has eventually killed off all non-aggressive wildlife. I'm not sure, but bonobos may be somehow classified as 'invaders' (aren't they the ones that steal everything?) so perhaps there are no limits on them. It takes me ~3 years to kill off all the wildlife on my map, and after that nothing else shows up. I took the numbers in the raw to be a global maximum in existence... I can verify tame animals stop breeding after a max is hit, and they do NOT start breeding again after the number goes below this. However, I'm fairly certain there is a max limit present for tame animals, as I went through cows pretty regularly, culling the population to keep it manageable. My money is on a global max ever, not alive at any one point, but I could be wrong. (Also, I think wild and tame ones are calculated separately... does your tone indicate they eventually stopped as well?)--Gotthard 22:08, 14 November 2008 (EST)

Bonobos are "wild animals" in my unit list, and they aren't one of the thieving species. I'm not sure whether all wildlife can be killed off; we need more people to chime in about their experiences. My bonobo death count is about 200 now, and shows no sign of stopping. (I've been using nerve-injured soldiers, not hunters, to do the killing.) However, I also finally have a breeding stock of tame bonobos, and I'll let them breed up to the max to see if affects their migrating onto the map. My bet is that the species cap is just for breeding, not migration.--Maximus 23:13, 14 November 2008 (EST)

I'm not doubting your experience, but I've had 4-5 maps where I consistently run out of deer. The species cap there seems to function fine, I *never* had any deer offspring, just hunted them for a while until they stopped (year 3-4ish). I can't verify wolves, however. So bonobos aren't predatory at all? I was thinking maybe more 'aggressive' animals (even if they're not thieves) may reproduce ad infitum. Or perhaps I scared them all off with my deer genocide? I mean anytime a deer showed up, I had 3 guys run down and punch it to death. Are you nicer to your bonobos? And have you seen that with any other animals? I've run out of hoary marmonts, mountain goats, and deer (on separate maps). Sorry to be insistent, but this seems like one area we don't have a lot of info. --Gotthard 22:42, 18 November 2008 (EST)

No, I understand -- I'd like to figure it out too. Actually, on my current map, something totally unexpected happened. I've been keeping all my strays (of any species) in cages, and I haven't had any cow births since the beginning of the game. I've also been buying every animal brought by traders, so was well above the limit. I decided to slaughter all my cows to see what would happen. I killed all of them, or nearly so, and suddenly all the pet cows are giving birth. (There are 4 pet cows and two pet bulls in the fortress.)

As for the wild bonobos, they're still coming. And elephants. And mountain goats. And hoary marmots. None of them are predators. (I do get zombie mountain goats and hoary marmots as well.) But I've been posting soldiers to kill them for years now, and have killed many hundreds of animals. Some animals tend to escape, since the soldiers stay near their station point instead of tracking down every last animal, like hunters will. Maybe that's what makes the difference.

I did have a single crocodile and some ogres show up in the first year, and never again. For any given fortress, there may just be some animals that are finite and some that are unlimited. We should post to the forums soliciting other players' experiences to see what kind of generalizations can be made.--Maximus 00:32, 19 November 2008 (EST)

I had pet horses start to breed when I butchered most of the stray horses. So that part, at least, seems to be reproduceable.

I had three waves or so of macaques spawn, running them down with soldiers each time, and now they've stopped coming (they came about once a year for three years, and then I haven't seen them in the eight years since).

The map keeps spawning one- and two-humped camels. I trap and tame them, but nobody's interested in adopting them. It'll be interesting to see if eventually I run out. --Sev 12:41, 20 November 2008 (EST)

Are they still in cages? Dwarves won't adopt them unless they're roaming (or maybe on a chain... I haven't tested that yet).--Maximus 16:30, 20 November 2008 (EST)

Huh, is that for all livestock? No wonder I have such issues getting those tamed vermin adopted... I stuck them all in a cage for convenience. -Fuzzy 18:11, 20 November 2008 (EST)

Breeding turtles

While it doesn't really fall under the category of the "leather industry" that the top of the page claims, is it possible to do animal husbandry with turtles? It would be nice to be able to have a ready supply of them. I lack unfrozen water on my current map, so I can't rely on spawning turtles, but I do have three tame turtles from the caravans. My suspicion is that vermin aren't treated as animals, so there's to be no turtle breeding, but I know they are special cases in other ways, so I figured it might be worth a try. -Fuzzy 18:16, 20 November 2008 (EST)

I don't think it's possible to release tame vermin from containment. They're always either in a cage, or in a small animal trap. That would keep them from breeding even if they were otherwise normal animals.--Bilkinson 18:23, 20 November 2008 (EST)

Vermin may be released from their cage if they are adopted by a dwarf, AFAIK. --GreyMaria 18:50, 20 November 2008 (EST)

Oh, the "leather industry" is a hold-over from before I moved the original page to "Meat industry". I keep meaning to give this a spruce up ... --Juckto 20:38, 20 November 2008 (EST)

What if I were to build an enclosed pool inside my fortress and mark it as a pit. Would I be able to dump caught turtles into it, or does the pit/pond classification only account for animals and not vermin? I've never checked before. --FJH 19:52, 2 March 2009 (EST)

*checks* Looks like you can assign tame vermin to a pit. I don't think you can breed turtles though. --LegacyCWAL 14:54, 30 March 2009 (UTC)

Interesting....Since you're only trying to breed turtles, I guess you can just channel a few squares and mark it as a pit. It's faster since the dwarves do take a heck of a long time to fill pools. – unsigned comment by Stinhad Limarezum

A death by any other means

I made a note that if an animal is killed by something other than a hunter or butcher it cannot be butchered, based on my experience of 2 dogs being killed by a werewolf and being unbutcherable. GreyMario changed it to "certain animals need to be alive when taken to the butchery". Dorten removed the note entirely.
I'll admit my experience was several versions ago - can you butcher any dead unrotten creature now? --Juckto 02:49, 21 November 2008 (EST)

I can confirm that there are cases where killed animals are rendered unbutcherable. In my case, I brought a boatload of cats for short-term butchering, only to find that I quickly dug into an underground river, and have a dozen snakemen, etc, come out and kill half the cats. Even though they were marked for butchering before they died (I hadn't yet built a butcher shop,) only those that escaped slithering death were ever butchered, the rest sat in my refuse stockpile rotting along with the river-raiders. Oh, yes.. I even went and tried unforbidding them just incase; They weren't. --Edward 03:35, 22 November 2008 (EST)

This only applies to tame animals. I have several experiences where caravan guards killed wild naked mole dogs and elks that came in the way. I butchered them all.