Suggestion: Animal Cages / Traps

[Hole]

I know TheMetalMan has suggested something similar back in February:

But I would like to simplify his ideas. Trapping should be a second tier research on the food tech tree which unlocks a 1x2 cage, a 1x1 morb trap, a puft capture net equipment for your dupes and maybe some fishing equipment for the future fish update. After a creature is captured you can order the cages be opened where ever you want and the dupes will pick up the trap, place it where you ordered and then release the animal. The cage is destroyed in the process. Creatures should have gender and as long as their needs are met they will naturally breed. Meat can be cooked to double its Calories. Animals would have traits as well and breeding could be used to improve yields of either meat or byproducts.

At the bare minimum, traps / cages would be a great way to take advantage of the local wildlife. 

Bonus Mock up:

 

[AlexRou]

I think this would make abusing the creatures too much easier. Making collecting and moving pufts and hatch that easy would mean everyone will have a room filled with them and have a ton of coal and oxygen/slime.

Having to catch them by carefully placing blocks and trying not to kill them makes it so much more interesting and makes them less exploitable. 

Note: I didn't mentioned morbs cause you can already abuse it by having a kill room and just kill people off to spawn as many as you want.

[Hole]

Maybe It could be balanced by having resource generation rates depend on the animals happiness and health. Add space requirements and disease so they can die if improperly cared for. 

My main reason for wanting cages in the first place is animal management is doable now but the process is tedious and not very fun. I can task my dupes to make airlock hallways all over the place and carefully close the doors one by one to move animals where I want them but that is boring.

[AlexRou]

If its balanced out so its bad to just have a bunch of them in a small room then yeah traps makes sense.

I'm wondering what/how to make them happy.

Disease might be a little overkill? lol

Space requirements seems like the simplest and easiest things to do.

There could also be a crowded status that either make it unhappy or it becomes a space requirement but what would not having enough space do? Make it unhappy? Or maybe slowly kill it? hmmmm

[Hole]

Not enough space should just make them not function so morbs won't fart, hatches will eat but wont make coal and pufts will not make slime. This could all be regulated by the existing pathing AI to calculate how many tiles they could move to at any time. If they  cant move more than 10 tiles then they don't have enough space. Additionally they could also check to see how many entities are occupying the same space and do a calculation to increase the amount of space needed for more animals in one room. Say you need 5 tiles for a hatch to be happy and they need to be natural tiles so it can burrow. each additional hatch would multiply the amount of space needed by x1.2 so now you need 6 tiles. Hs = 5 + (n - 1) * (5 * .2)  where Hs is the space needed for your hatches and n is the number of hatches in that space. So 10 hatches would need  14 tiles to be happy. Or maybe that multiplier is too generous. Lets say x1.6 instead so now you need 32 tiles for 10 hatches.