Best Trap Fence Setup?

[OblongNoodle]

  I have just finished building a 4 Large Map tile long trap fence. I currently have trap pits about once every 20-30 fence lengths. On either end it butts up against water. At one end I have the fence running perpendicular to the rest of the fence along the waters edge for about 10 fence lengths. I'm by no means finished with this, but I wanted to know what setups I should consider. Should I make funnels? cover the waters edge for some distance on either side?

  Any pictures or great descriptions of what works well would be appreciated. I've gotten an elk and a reindeer in my current setup after about a month. Now that I'm finished with the biggest part of it, adding more traps more often wouldn't be as daunting of a task if needed.

I'm currently going in to October and it will start to get cold soon. I'm working on my cabin as my main priority now that the basic trap fence is up.

[PALU]

I'd say it's way too large, i.e. you run the risk of getting much more game than you need. Real life fences were quite large, but the DF ones don't need to be as large.
Personally I've just surrounded my farm plots with a fence and 3 bear traps per side. However, I complement this with hunting when "needed" (i.e. being out of fresh [as opposed to preserved] meat for a while). Also, I've got bird traps which eventually are going to be moved to the farm plot area, inside the fence, and even later be replaced by fox paw boards (as the current UrW incarnation punishes small game hunting unfairly).

[Dungeon Smash]

Well, I'd say the right size just depends on how much game you feel like managing.  2 major kills in the frame of one month is a high ratio, and it sounds like your set up is good if that's how much meat and hide you feel like processing.  hard to say how long it will stay at those yields, i'm not really sure how the migration patterns in the game are modeled, but it seems like it's definitely working

i know one strategy ive had good luck with is, encircling a small lake.  animals come to drink and get caught in the traps.  you could consider expanding your fences part-way around the water if you want more game, but it sounds like maybe you already have enough.  Careful not to kill more than the forest can handle!  or the spirits may not look favorably upon you...

[Bedlam]

You have the right idea there, it's kinda hard to say what is the optimum because fences work on a few interacting factors (as far as I know):

• Are there animals nearby on the zoomed out worldmap? They seem to be individually tracked out there and will wander about, preferring the types of terrain that's appropriate to the animal to hang out.
• For each trap on the map, is the trapping skill good enough to attract one of those? How about the bait, is it right for the animal?How about how long the trap has been live (needs a certain base amount of time, a day or two)? There seems to be a max of 2-3 animals that can be attracted no matter how many traps you placed in a location, so multiplying traps is not effective. About 3-5 big traps per map is plenty. I had good luck with long chains of hare traps and loopsnares, so maybe the cap does not apply to smaller animals or they have a different cap.
• If those conditions check out, then the animal is placed on the map at a random spot and is given some "head start"
• It starts bumbling around and doing its thing, if hungry it makes a beeline for any food, including food in the traps you laid
• During this bumbling it is influenced by the fences, it actually bumps into them and tries to walk around, it sees trapped holes in the fence as walkable holes. This means that a single baited trap surrounded by trapfence encirclements with trapped routes to reach the baited spot might be an effective idea to try out - catch everybody and optionally save on bait if you're short
• Rituals and higher trapping skills seem to attract animals to traps more as they bumble

I've also tried building vast multi-map trap fences that close the gap between major bodies of water, thinking that will help me funnel lots of reindeer into my trapline. It was effective but not as effective as I thought it would be - pretty sure the vast multi-map funnel between bodies of water didn't make a difference, it just treated each map with a trap fence as a singular thing.

So in conclusion my thinking about this is, the most effective trap fence is having multiple trap fences quite a long way apart in every cardinal direction and based in varied types of terrain, with your main camp or base being in the middle between all the traps spread out radially. Maybe half a day of walking or more (more non-overlapping zoomed out area to "gather" animals for each one trap-map), and using basic fence builds like you're already doing, plus the right bait. Elk and reindeer are attracted to berries. Hares like turnips, reindeer too but probably not as much as berries. Wolf traps are good because they catch smaller/medium animals such as wild pigs, pinemartens,lynxes. Pit traps with both berry/meat baits on each one seem effective too. Birds also go for the berries. No animal seems to care about leaves, seeds, or beans (might be Sami's oversight?).

If you're having bad luck and not catching anything for weeks, kick the trap down and re-set it, might improve your odds.

Another effective measure is having a secondary camp (with secondary trap spots etc) where you go to live for a few weeks, once in a while. Living far away from home for a time lets the main area refresh and repopulate with animals if you've been catching them all and it's running low.

[PALU]

I've had my grain getting "picked" in the few hours between getting ripe and my character checking on them. Now, you can't manually pick grain (I tried, just to make sure), so it must have been the work of animals, presumably birds (no visible track, and I think birds were inside by snare trap line when I arrived).