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40d Talk:Fish

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Carp Drag dwarves to their doom?[edit]

I have had Carp drag dwarves to their doom on several occasions, but I was not focusing on it when it happened. Can someone tell me how this happens? The dwarves in question were interrupted during stockpile jobs, which probably means they were carting trash to my refuse pile, which is 5 tiles from the nearest river tile, and yet I find them at the bottom of the river after I get a message that they have bled to death! Are the Carp somehow chasing dwarves down and dragging them into the river? Is there a new tentacle-carp?

Old bug which should be fixed in 33c. Carps were getting insanely powerfull by raising their swimming skill. If you start a new game with 33c, it won't happen again. If you are using 33c already, it's probaby a remnant of an old save you've ported from version to version. --Eagle of Fire 18:52, 28 November 2007 (EST)

attacking occurs in the 8 directions to the side, plus 8 up or down diagonaly and straight up/down(you can see this attacking down stairs in adventure mode) thus, a dwarf on the shore of a river can be attacked by a carp in the river, and with wrestling this can result in the dwarf ending up on top of the carp in the river Chariot 18:59, 28 November 2007 (EST)

Pearl[edit]

It says you can get pearls from mussels and oysters. My dwarves have eaten them (processed and raw) and I've had plenty rot away, but I never got any pearls. Anyone have any info on this? Bouchart 21:33, 28 November 2007 (EST)

Prepared but not eaten[edit]

My darling inhabitants are for some reason, fishing and preparing the fish at their fishery - but although I have huge stockpiles of raw fish, it never gets prepared at the kitchen nor eaten.

What am I missing here? GarrieIrons 06:15, 31 January 2008 (EST)

I assume you've checked that the cook option is enabled on the fish in the food menu. So unless you've got a HUGE supply of other foods, I'm not sure why they're not being cooked. Though, to be honest, I've never specifically seen fish cooked as I never make fishing a significant food source for my forts. --Edward 17:59, 31 January 2008 (EST)
Well, when such a huge portion of my migrants are fishing-inclined the raw fish just accumulates without any effort on my behalf... it's more like I can't make it not happen rather than I made it happen! my dwarves are hunting vermin when they have barrel after barrel of raw fish and a chef saying there is no food to cook when I ask him to prepare meals of any quality. And the fishery with its stockpiles are right next to the kitchen, which is right nearby my fields. :( GarrieIrons 04:17, 1 February 2008
Are you absolutely sure it's being prepared at the fishery by the "fish cleaning" job? I ask because you mention "raw fish" is available, which cannot be eaten. Raw fish isn't automatically converted to a usable state. You will have to continually keep setting the fish cleaning job to keep processing the raw fish. Even if you set the fish cleaning job to repeat it will eventually be canceled when there are no more raw fish, and need to be set again at some point. --Janus 00:16, 1 February 2008 (EST)
Thanks Janus. For some reason, even though I had a stockpile containing several barrels of raw turtle, and the job "prepare raw fish" was set to repeat.... nobody was doing it. I cancelled the job and reset it - lo and behold my fish cleaners got to work.
Now I know that raw fish does not equal uncooked fish.
Still not clear on the distinction between:
but I'm continuing to look at it.GarrieIrons 07:09, 5 February 2008 (EST)
Fish cleaners prepare fish for use as food. Fish dissectors extract other things from fish, ruining them for use as food. -FunnyMan 08:49, 5 February 2008 (EST)

Flopping lungfish[edit]

I was recently digging out a new stone storage room from a soft dirt area. I checked back to add the stone storage zone and spotted a lungfish flopping around on the floor. There was no wet stone, no bodies of water nearby, and no misplaced messages. I caught it in a movie, so I may find a place to share it someday.


I have hoards of lungfish flopping around. They don't seem to be edible, or hostle. I think they're just vermin, like flies and whatnot. I don't think they're even fish. They have LUNGS after all. --Shadow archmagi 21:34, 29 February 2008 (EST)
they are fish [FISHITEM], and are vermin. to be fishable it has to be a vermin. you see turtles doing the same thing. there are quite a few fish irl that have lungs also, doesnt stop em from being fish. -Chariot 02:40, 1 March 2008 (EST)
So can I designate an area in the middle of my mine - which is between the brook on the west and a volcano vent on the east - as a fishing zone? it keeps having lungfish turn up. All the outside area is covered in troglodytes so I don't want any fisherdwarves just wandering around.GarrieIrons 00:04, 9 June 2008 (EDT)

Limited Fish?[edit]

I recently got the message "There is nothing to catch in the river." I went to the zone and the fishing was at (0). Will my brook replenish, or is it time to start massing farms (fish were about half of my food supply) - Wizjany

They replenish every season just like the hunting. -Fuzzy 14:21, 11 October 2008 (EDT)

Any word as to whether or not the volume of water helps with supply of fish? I think it does, but I'm not sure. I keep digging artificial lakes, though, just to be sure I have fish supply, but if I didn't have to, it'd be nice. --Erathoniel 21:56, 9 November 2008 (EST)

From my experience, it doesn't. I dug a wide canal attached to my cave river, and I see cave fish swimming in it, but my dwarves report that there are no fish to catch in it when I designate it as a fishing zone. I can only zone the original river tiles when I want them to actually catch something.--Maximus 23:07, 9 November 2008 (EST)
I built a moat in my last game that connected two pools and a brook together which were conveniently located around my entrance. The 1-tile-wide channel was designated as a fishing zone and often fished from successfully at a point roughly midway between one of the pools and the brook. It seems to me that this question might be paired with another one for potential insight: Pools refill when it rains. Single tile channels do not. Can you channel out a dwarf-made space that will refill when it rains? I suspect the answers are linked.
@Wizjany: are you saying that the zone listed the zone as dark grey and no longer usable as a fishing zone? If so, weird. --RomeoFalling 23:17, 9 November 2008 (EST)
I would be surprised if volume helped... I have a 100x100 moat, 5 thick, and I have much LESS fish available after I paved over existing lakes for my castle. However, I can't verify if turtles refill x units per season, but the water supply can hold up to x*y turtles, where y is a function of how much water is available, and x is the constant replenished per season. Basically, maybe they refill 1 per season, and the max on the map is 1*number of water squares, or something like that.--Gotthard 23:24, 9 November 2008 (EST)

Fish respawn?[edit]

I started a great map, only to discover carp and gar in my river. I decided not to restart, but to do something about it, so I drained the river at it's source, built grates, and opened the floodgates to let the river flow again.

After about a year in game, I looked, and noticed carp and salmon in my grated river! Does fish spawn at random in the river at times? I had assumed that they would have come in from off screen. Guess I'm wrong? I wanted to confirm before I added anything to any articles, so wanted to ask about this here.

Fish corpses need to be butchered[edit]

I dammed my river and collected the resulting fish flopping around in the mud. They were "fish corpses" rather than "raw fish". To my surprise they were butchered rather than prepared at the fishery. This seems correct in the sense that it's a "corpse" but not correct in that a fish which dies from drowning should be no different then a fish which dies from being caught (and presumably drowns unless the fisherdwarf is individually strangling each one).unsigned comment by Schwern

Well, at least that explains where the merchants get their longnose gar meat from.--Maximus 21:54, 12 December 2008 (EST)

Aquifers[edit]

I have a channel where I used to have a stair going down and found the aquifer. My fisherdwarf is sitting there trying to catch something. I wonder if he will?

Is there is a way to make it more likely he will be successful? GarrieIrons 10:27, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Cats vs Fish[edit]

"but unlike true vermin they...are not hunted by cats"

Not entirely true. I have multiple channels draining my murky pools into the ocean, which tend to flood the beach from shallow to moderate depths. To my surprise I discovered a large number of salmon on the shore, with a cat nearby. I watched as the cat pounced on one, the fish turned into a vermin corpse, and the cat carried it off. As it left, another cat came to the beach. Checking all of my cats, each one was covered with blood, ichor, and mud.

Cats can hunt fish, but only if they're in shallow water.

~ Eidako 08:06, 28 June 2009 (UTC)


Fish Being Pumped?[edit]

The title says it all, really - Can fish be pumped? Do they have to be below a certain size for it to work?

I made two rooms of identical size directly above one another - the top one was attached to the river via floodgates and the floor was just a retractable bridge. I filled the top room by opening the floodgates, closed the floodgates again, and opened the retractable bridge - effectively dumping the fish (and all the water) in the second chamber. I figured this would be a good way of 'mass fishing', since it can be repeated pretty quickly - anyways, I saw plenty of fish in the water before I drained the lower room, but when I pumped it all away ... no fish - did they just disappear because I left it too long, or can fish actually travel up a pump stack? Perhaps they disappear when the water is no longer connected to a river or 'spawning point'.. I also want to know if fish can travel through a grate or a fortification - if they can't, putting one in front of my pumps might be a solution to my problem :P --unsigned comment by 90.219.78.218

The kind of fish your fisherdwarves catch are vermin, and vermin teleport. --Quietust 17:45, 2 January 2010 (UTC)

Salmon runs and migratory vermin[edit]

Added a note on shad performing biannual salmon runs as discovered here. Other verminous fish may also undertake this behaviour - we're not sure why yet. Someone might want to touch it up a little bit; not sure if the info added needs to be moved around on the page. I was also considering noting which fish vermin are known to move in migratory packs, but found mentioning the [CLUSTER_NUMBER] token sufficient. --Retro 22:15, 30 March 2010 (UTC)

The matter's been scienced out. This specific post has the findings. According to this, only steelhead trout, shad, and salmon would be capable of undergoing such migrations based on their creature tokens, and as all three have been observed doing so (and no other vermin fish have), it's proven. --Retro 04:48, 1 April 2010 (UTC)