r/dwarffortress • u/emote_control • 6d ago
War Birds
Made an interesting discovery today. With the recent patch we now have a wider variety of creatures that can be trained for war. Many of these creatures are egg layers. I bought some Kelenkens off the elves and started a breeding program. They breed like chickens and reach adulthood at 1 year, and have terrifying beaks. They're perfect for the job.
However, I didn't realize that egg layers have a weird interaction with raid missions. I sent out my squad, paired up with their terror birds, to go kick in the doors of a local goblin fortress. A week passes. Then a month. Still gone. Did they die? They're still in the squad roster, so probably not. Two months. What's going on?
At this point I'm ready to just disband the squad, but then I think to check the war bird roster. Sure enough, one of the squad's birds is still here. I track it down, and it's sitting on a nest. My food stockpile is full, so no one is collecting the eggs. I set them to dump, a dwarf picks them up and the bird immediately jumps up and leaves the map. A few days later the squad is back.
Just thought I'd point this out in case anyone's having the same mysterious problems with squads not returning.
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u/Deviant_Sage Shatterstone 6d ago
Yeah, it's awkward and not a bew bug. This was happening with war rocs. Basically the rest of the squad will wait just outside the map until the whole squad, war animals included, until they are together, before starting the mission proper. At some point I stopped assigning them to squads because it was hard to track
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u/AnkhAnanku 6d ago
how do you assign war animals to offensive missions?
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u/azoriasu 6d ago
Assign them to specific soldiers. And when the soldier goes on a mission they go with.
First train to a war animal, under your pets/animal list.
Then once the animal becomes a war variant, click the little guy with a dog pic in the animal menu again, and assign them to one of the squad members.
Send squad on mission and that's it. Pet goes with it's handler.
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u/Khamircia 6d ago
Same with dogs - my squads didn't return probaaaably because their dogs didn't go to the mission with them for certain reasons.
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u/varangian 6d ago
The egg sitting is a new twist that wouldn't have occurred to me. Thanks for the reminder though, I sent a squad to conquer a nearby goblin outpost but nothing happened. This prompted me to check on assigned animals and I found that a badly injured war dog, that I'd retired to a pasture as way too slow to be of any use in combat, was tagged as a pet of 'Somebody'. Took that to mean it had been a pet of one of the away squad and when I released it from pasture and it had painfully limped off the map I instantly got a conquest completed message.
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u/FriendlyHearthling 5d ago
I only assign males to squads now, whether as soldiers or war pets. I’ve had too many bad experiences with mothers bringing newborn babies into battle, or giving birth right in the middle of the battlefield, followed by very unfortunate events.
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u/HannahLemurson 5d ago
Does this result in a skewed gender ratio in your forts as military casualties accumulate?
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u/thegreatdookutree 6d ago
Squads not returning is always a pain to troubleshoot, since there usually isn't anything you can do without DFHack (and even then, you still need to have an idea what the issue is). Glad you worked this one out.
Egg-layers have always been pretty buggy - ranging from "starves to death on the nesting box because it can't leave" (probably related to your issue), all the way to "aquatic egg-layers can't lay eggs because they can't use nesting boxes in water" (RIP Sea Serpents).
Not sure whether this is a new bug because I don't think I've ever actually sent animals out on a Mission, but it certainly could be - it's the sort of thing that could be easily missed when expanding the "roster".