I've just started playing Dwarf Fortress, and I'm noticing that at least 75% of my population (now 46 dwarfs) are complaining about flies. I don't see them anywhere, although I do at one point remember seeing a 'swarm of flies'.
Google tells me that it's because I'm not putting my food in bins/barrels/containers but look at my stockpiles ALL I see are barrels, I started cranking them out specifically because of this.
I had thought perhaps that they just had a really long memory, but recent births into my population proves otherwise as the babies appear to have an issue with flies too.
What gives?
Entrance:
Kitchen area:
Best Answer
Flies are attracted to dead bodies, piles of food (including unpicked crops on the farm) and pools of water.
Reasons you don't want them:
Note that they don't have the
[VERMIN_EATER]
tag, so they won't actually eat your food, just buzz around it, annoy dwarves, and possibly speed up rotting.Here is some advice on protecting against flies:
I would further suggest that you keep your food stockpile, your farms and your butcher's workshop in secluded areas. This means that if you do get flies, your dwarves are less likely to be bothered by them. Keeping the butcher's workshop in a secluded area (with a door) is a good idea anyway as butchers' workshops tend to generate miasma, which you also want to keep away from your dwarves.
They also tend to flicker in and out of visibility on the map, so if you're looking around the map whilst paused you might not see them. Narrow it down to a few places they might be, then watch those places and see if they pop up.
Can cats kill flies?
There seems to be some argument about this. As quoted above, the wiki page on flies says that cats cannot kill flies but doesn't seem to offer much explanation. However, I've not been able to find it explicitly contradicted either.
I've done some digging around and found that the
[HUNTS_VERMIN]
tag (that cats have) is a bit confusing, mainly because there is no single[VERMIN]
tag that determines whether or not a creature is vermin. Instead there are lots of tags like[VERMIN_ROTTER]
,[VERMIN_EATER]
,[VERMIN_MICRO]
, etc., which are overlapping and not mutually exclusive. So it probably depends on the exact implementation of that[HUNTS_VERMIN]
tag - there might be a list of all the vermin tags somewhere which it uses, or it might exclude some of them (like[VERMIN_MICRO]
) or only include some of them... hard to know.