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None of these graze, so you can keep them in stone rooms. Personally, I like to bring a couple of geese, ducks (only make eggs usefully), and turkeys, and some pigs. You must slaughter live animals before they die in order to collect food and leather. Grazers must graze, so you can't cage them, but you can geld the males.Īnimals have a finite life span, and animals that die of old age are not butcherable. Male animals can be caged and will still breed with females who are free. Pregnant animals in a cage will give birth in the cage (and the young inherit the cage assignment) but females will not become pregnant in a cage. If you don't want to breed your animals, and they aren't grazers, you can pack them in cages. Pastured newborn animals will inherit the mother's pasture assignment, except for egg-laying animals, which do not. DFHack has a default plugin that will give you a fertility indicator. There is no way in vanilla game to tell if eggs are fertile. Once eggs hatch, the female will immediately lay another clutch of eggs, so if you want a turkeysplosion you need to be on top of forbidding eggs, or else lock the turkeys in a room with a forbidden door so that dwarves don't get there before you do. The female and male must be in contact prior to egg-laying if you want fertile eggs. If you want to breed egg-layers, you must forbid the eggs in the nest boxes before a dwarf comes to collect them for eating. This isn't an issue with most birds, but elk birds are grazers AND egg-layers so they must be micromanaged if you want to breed them. You can remove a female bird immediately after the eggs are laid without impacting hatchability. The wiki says that the female must spend 100% of the brooding time on the eggs or else they won't hatch. They also must be in contact with males to lay fertile eggs.
#Dwarf fortress nest box how to#
You don't have to do 1x1 tiles, that's just an example on how to minimize the amount of space an animal takes up when it's not a grazer.Įgg-layers need nest boxes to lay eggs. The piglet must be moved fairly quickly (not immediately, but soon) lest the pig and piglet start to fight. In the pig example, the male and female pig do not share tiles, because their 1x1 pastures are next to one another, but when the female gives birth the piglet will be sharing a pasture, and therefore a tile, with her. "Overcrowded" means that they spend more time than not sharing tiles.
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Grazers must be pastured on grass to graze, but non-grazers can be pastured on rock and do not need a minimum pasture size, so you can put one female pig in a 1x1 pasture directly next to a male pig on his own 1x1 pasture, and they will breed.Īnimals pastured together will start to fight if they are overcrowded. The best way to do this is to pasture them together, or on adjacent tiles. If you intend to breed animals, you must put males and females into contact with one another. You can send 5 of them into anything, and they will hold until reinforcements arrive. My preference is to have hammers respond first. If you can't limit the flow, or the battle is badly pitched, or you need to stem an overwhelming force that needs to stop it's forward progression, then a few hammers are the only squad likely to hold its ground. Also the only reasonably efficient weapon for fighting the undead as they can crush the armour and what's within. If you can't make steel or candy spears, then silver hammers are the best. Grip loss on swords is common.Īxes are great for anything without armor. Swords are very versatile and can kill many easy enemies in a messy battle. You should do everything you can to get steel spears immediately. So if you limit the enemy flow, with steel spears, it's unbeatable. Because they aren't tired easily, and quite unlikely to get hurt, as long as the rate of enemies is okay, they'll keep chewing enemies down for a very long time. As a squad they can handle massive sized forces in a steady flow, if they aren't overwhelmed. A single well trained spear is able to kill an insanely strong enemy due to hitting vitals so easily. Steel spears are amazing at moderate skills and ridiculous at high skill levels due to high piercing. Personally I use a squad of each type (no mace tho, which are supposedly best). This is a question better as a discussion thread.
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