How to feed a crow?

[gearform]

I just caught a crow but don’t know how to feed it. Ok, It’s trapped in a house then I use a Fire Extinguisher to blind it, and I caught it by a Chicken cages. but I don’t know how to feed it. When I give birdfeed to it, it shows that “a crow don’t like that kind of food”. How about rotten meat?

[Rose]

How about rotten meat?

How about some lead?

Or… what do you need a crow for?

[Kadian]

Same reason someone would want to catch any random bird. They lay eggs. And their feces can be used to make liquid fertilizer.

The bird food is for ‘small’ birds, at least that’s what the description says. It’s possible that crows aren’t considered small enough, so it doesn’t let you feed them. Maybe try with a pigeon or so?

[Belcanzor]

There is some lines in the JSON file for each animal. One is for is food. Maybe you need to add “bird food” on the crow.
Not sure, never try myself. Las time I about to do that was with a bear and quit trying.
Request a “tame animals” mod?

[gearform]

Yeah,raise a crow seems to be an unexpected things,LOL…

[Orange01]

I am raising some brown chicks, which ate bird food. I think they might grow up to be crows.

[TheZoneWizard]

Could a crow be trained for the purpose of perhaps holding a small camera device to scout land etc?

Not sure what other large birds would exist that could hold a tiny camera. Would be an interesting idea for map surveying?

[Kadian]

Could a crow be trained for the purpose of perhaps holding a small camera device to scout land etc?

Crows are pretty smart animals, and they can be easily trained. Even nowadays, people can train them to follow certain people for example, basically ‘spying’ on them, they can be trained to ‘talk’, and with enough patience you can train them to press buttons or do a small sequence of things.
So yes, in theory it’s possible to train them to fly around with a small camera.

Looking at the other birds we have, all of them should be able to carry a small spycam ; after all, those only need to be as big as a button or so to work. However, the training might be the problem here, out of all birds we currently have ingame, none seem…smart enough. We have geese, ducks, chicken, and so on, none of them would be smart enough to come back to you, at least in my opinion. And some, like the chicken, wouldn’t be able to fly very long at all.

We do have a Cockatrice and it’s chicks though ; since it’s a mythical animal, we wouldn’t really >know< how smart they are or how long they could fly, so…that one is an option i guess.

[mlangsdorf]

You can’t tame crows by feeding them once.

Implementing a smarter system for training animals, where some animals would become domesticated by feeding them daily over several weeks wouldn’t be really hard, but no one has done it.

[Kadian]

You can’t tame crows by feeding them once.

You can’t tame feral dogs, cats, cows and other animals by feeding them once either, but it is still a game mechanic nonetheless. And unless they start eating normal stuff too (like raw meat for cats/dogs) it shouldn’t change either because it makes no sense to use several dozen slabs of meat to get a cat or dog to follow you.

Let’s take one of the worst examples from the animal-food: The Cat Food. It uses 2 chunks of meat and 1 portion of water. Sure, it is easy to get if you’re a more experienced survivor, but if you need to give them food more than once, well, it stacks up very quickly. Even if you just have to feed the cat once per day for a week, this would be 14 chunks of meat and 7 portions of water, also some batteries.
This just isn’t worth the hassle at the moment, since a cat doesn’t give you anything in return, unless you’re roleplaying. Having a friendly animal around should give the survivor a morale boost at least. Also, cats and dogs should be able to bring ‘presents’ every once in a while. I for example have a cat which regularly brings back mice, birds, rats, and we even found some remains of a rabbit once which he killed as well, so small game is definitely a viable ‘present’.

By the way, the recipe for catfood doesn’t make sense at all, so that needs to be revised too. Not sure about the other recipes though. The dogfood one seems reasonable enough at least.

[mlangsdorf]

The logic on retaming feral animals is that they were used to being fed by humans, so when you feed them once, that puts them back in a familiar place. I’m not really defending it, just telling you what the logic was and why Kevin told me I couldn’t make crows tameable with birdfeed.

[TheZoneWizard]

For game purposes. Seems legit. I try and ponder the realism and then slide to the idea of “well…should seem ok in the game…close nuff”.

So I am not requesting it as such. I am curious as you mention it shouldn’t be too difficult to code in. Would that be something of interest in adding to the game? The spy crow thing.

I imagine something like…a crow is wild. Catch said crow. If player doesn’t want to tame said crow; add camera to crow and z-level flies away and you get the overhead map of the flight path.

If catch and tame = crow returns to player and can get random flight paths shown.

Trying to think in code terms and express the idea at the same time

[Viik]

Have to defend usefulness of cats - in one play though shocker brut was chasing a random farm cat for almost 3 days, he wasn’t able to kill it. Had to put down poor thing (brut not cat) as it kept waking me up.
Now as we have mechanics with insects spreading because of the trash, maybe cats could help with handling it. In Dwarf Fortress they are extremely useful for dealing with rodents.