Dragon hunting tips?

[Charles]

So I really want to do a fort where I capture dragons and breed tons of them. The problem is I have no clue how to find them. The world I am in right now has 3 dragons listed in legends. The main things I am confused on are as follows.

1. If I make my fort really rich will dragons come on their own?

2. Are there more dragons than the ones listed in legends?

3. If I breed a bunch of baby dragons and then retire the fort will they be set loose in the world? I want to increase their population.

4. I noticed that legends says where they live, but how do I even find that location on the map if I wanted to start a fort on it?

5. Can they be spawned in with DF hack if all else fails?

[Fel]

1/ Dragons are megabeasts, they can show up relatively early in your fort but it is entirely based on luck (well, not really, but you would need to first figure out where dragons even live in your world and set your fort near one of those places to greatly increase your chances).

2/ They should all be listed in the legends.

3/ Bred creatures don't really leave where they are even after retiring your fort

4/ That's the whole issue.
Before the steam version, you could export more data, including a world map that allowed external tools to show you exactly where things happened throughout history.
As far as I know, we don't have access to such things, adventure mode would allow you to get to know your world a bit better but the world map doesn't show you sites other than major ones (sites from civilisations, necromancer towers and such).

5/ It should be possible to use dfhack to spawn dragons on your map, yes, but not sure if they can then roam the world.

[Charles]

Thanks, maybe advanced world generation would be something I could look into.

[Kituneki]

you dont have to do anything too strenuous actually, there is a way to cheese it to..well i would say "increase the chances" to spawn or more like forcibly invite them, but honestly it would almost surmount to basically "cheating" but in dwarf fortress, is it actually cheating if its the desired result you want, since the whole point of the "game" is to telling the story how you want it to be told, so if you want a civilisation that was able to tame the terrifying majesty of dragons, who is to judge, but yeah, you dont have to do silly things like feeling like you need to build on a dragons lair embark