Are oceans broken?

[Ottfried]

So I started a Fort with the goal of having a big fishtank in the middle with lots of funny merpeople. Bedrooms and taverns could look through the glass and see these fine creatures.
My problem is: there is nothing spawning in the damn water. It is a serene ocean, I'm on vanilla and I only get fish to spawn and a fairy here and there.
Not even big see creatures. Just the critters :/
Wildlife from the mainland is coming in no problem.

Anyone having experience with oceans?
This is my second fort with no ocean spawns

[Eggnog98]

There seems to be issues with steam version and animal spawns. If you have dfhack, you can try and exterminate any surface creatures to see if that helps with respawns

[True Guesser, Wand Bearer, etc.]

There are a couple issues here. One, ocean spawns were super low back in Classic as well. Two, there appears to be a bug in which flying creatures will derp out; they stop moving or otherwise interacting with anything. Thus they never leave your map and block other creatures from spawning. If you see any flying creatures not moving, you must kill them or use DFHack to remove them. You can also use DFHack to increase the population of a given species within your region, which will theoretically increase their spawn chance.

[Ottfried]

Birds not despawning is really not the issue here. I have like 10 wild animals roaming around at the same time and they are 100% leaving every now and then. guess the spawn chance is just bad.

are joyous wilds more likey to spawn more creatures? is that perhaps a thing?

[Eggnog98]

The Ocean is a separate biome so its not affected by the Joyous wilds. Only thing I can think of is if there are animals in the ocean biome in one of the cavern layers blocking the spawn, maybe?

[True Guesser, Wand Bearer, etc.]

Originally posted by Ottfried:

Birds not despawning is really not the issue here. I have like 10 wild animals roaming around at the same time and they are 100% leaving every now and then. guess the spawn chance is just bad.

are joyous wilds more likey to spawn more creatures? is that perhaps a thing?

Savagery does affect the frequency of creatures, but land spawns still take priority. My current embark is a Terrifying (max. savagery evil) Ocean, and in 10 years I've seen a single pod of Orcas. The ratio of land tiles vs. ocean tiles within your site might be a factor, but I'm not certain. Besides regularly exterminating the surface critters, all I can recommend is using DFHack to increase ocean populations.

[Ottfried]

I really want to avoid using dfhack.
I just started a new fort in a joyous wilds ocean region.
Even tho I haven't seen merpeople yet, there are some ocean creatures spawning. So that is an improvement.
I guess I could have a few hunters to let new creatures spawn

[TPark]

Only one (or maybe a couple) group of non-vermin animals will be on the map at the same time. The game does not take into account where the creatures can roam. So, if you have a lot of land animals on the map, that is why you aren't getting ocean animals. At some point, as you kill or capture a group of animals, it no longer blocks spawning the next group. I'm not sure if it takes killing / capturing all of them or only some of them.

[Ottfried]

I think there can be 2 groups of land animals and 2 per cavern.
I noticed a groundhog was chilling in my fort and blocked spawns. after my millitary killed it, new groups of animals spawned. after that I started to use hunters and all of the sudden a lot of different spawns appeared.
even caught a marlin. not a merperson, but it's a start!

guess you could use this knowledge to stop agitatet creatures from spawn, if you trap them without a cagetrap

[Ottfried]

For those interested:
Killing everything until merpeople spawn works. I successfully caught 4!
Sadly things didn't work the way I hoped afterwards.
You can not breed intelligent creatures. Wild animals will breed on your map but not animal people, prisoners and other stuff. Hab a male and female cyclops chill in a room together for years without any success.

Also something that is broken: after retireing and unretireing, underground structures too close to the ocean biom will be flooded. I don't know why and even tough I have drains there leading outside the map, it will not get drained. They act as a new water source for the ocean.

The merpeople will also disappear, if they are not in a cage, since they are handled like regular wild animals