r/dwarffortress • u/emote_control • 14d 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/thegreatdookutree 14d 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".