Trapping advice

[Jephraim]

Hi, I am in my first year of trapping. I have had some success trapping fowl in small deadfall traps, but I would like to make trapping a major part of my income. I have been laying paw-board traps trying to get foxes. My strategy has been to put four traps around a piece of bait, in some cases I have a small deadfall trap with the bait. I put a set of four traps at each tile along this river. So far its been about a month and nothing caught. Do you have any advice for making this approach better?

[JP_Finn]

Paw board needs to be baited individually. Otherwise you get nothing.

Tip of paw board is like “w”, the center being usually bit taller than the sides. The bait is placed in the center. With the board erected upright: to get the bait, fox has to jump up to nudge the bait off. But while nudging the bait; it’ll get stuck on the notch and stay dangling until trapper comes to harvest.

If there’s no bait on pawboard, there no reason for the fox/vixen to jump to knock it down; and so will never catch a fox.

[Jephraim]

Awesome, Thank you. That clarification helps a lot. I had read somewhere else that someone had the approach that they make a circle of paw-boards around a central bait pile, so I had tried to adapt that approach.

Do you have any advice for how many traps should put in specific locations?

[PALU]

JP_Finn describes how it works in reality. The UrW logic is somewhat different, as pawboards can catch animals that just step on that tile. In your case you left the diagonals open, and I would expect animals to frequently walk around the traps to get to the center, assuming they want to go to the center.

I get animals in empty snares, small deadfalls, and pawboards because I use them to keep animals out of my farm plot area, not actually to trap animals. It's not a lot, but it happens.

When I actually try to catch animals, I make trap lines of something like 5 traps, ideally with trees along the line to make it longer. In that case I also bait each trap with bait I believe the intended prey is interested in. As has been noted in another thread, that kind of trap line doesn't work in real life, because the traps aren't directly beside each other, so it depends on how much you want to game the game in the game (couldn't resist the pun).

[Jephraim]

Thanks for the advice PALU, do you just completely encircle your crops in traps?

I have a trap fence that I'm working on along a treeline, so far no dice, but I will try and incorporate more than just trap pits in that trap fence line

[PALU]

I enclose my farming area in a fence with a few traps (so, technically a trap fence). Inside that I had a complete line of smaller traps, and I'm actually converting those smaller traps into pit traps.

I'm also enclosing the homestead with a complete array of pit or bear traps.

[trowftd]

Thanks for the advice PALU, do you just completely encircle your crops in traps?

I have a trap fence that I'm working on along a treeline, so far no dice, but I will try and incorporate more than just trap pits in that trap fence line

One thing to also keep in mind is that the game's mechanic of how to handle the animal spawns and such is written in news.txt in game folder.

To summarise, if you have a successful trap set, you will no longer have animals spawned automatically in that area just for the sake of the trap you set. Game will check if there are animals in the area that you set the trap in and then check if your trapping is successful and will attract animals to that trap. Now this doesn't mean your traps will always be empty, animals do move quite long distances and if one stumbles upon your trap lines, you should get a chance.

So in order to have some success in trapping, find a place where there are visible wildlife. That way you'll get result a lot quicker and if you find some reindeers you may not even be able to butcher them all

Hope these are useful, I personally don't go all that much into trapping but it is super fun too just planning out where to and how to build traps and you can get lots of furs quite easily.