In my current game, a random event spawned ten friendly cats on the map that joined my five person colony. With the one I already had, I now have eleven cats. I'm not entirely sure what to do with them. If I let them have free range they eat a lot of my food, if I don't they starve. I'm thinking of either selling them or starting a cat farm and selling some of them as they make kittens. Any advice would be appreciated. As always, thanks for reading.
Well if you are in a forest biome you could create an animal zone that includes everything but your food (and drug) stockpile. This way the cats (at least the adult ones) will hunt their own food. There should be enough rats and rabbits around.
They can also eat raider corpses so you won't have to burn/bury them.
Regarding the cats themselves: their main "use" is to annoy you and eat your stuff ;)
Apart from that they also make great hats, armchairs or pants. Or as you already mentioned you can sell their cute kittens to a passing trader.
Sell them, use them for fur and meat. They are also a handy predator shield with the small body size. The only downside is pawns bonding to them.
Animals in this game are so useless that colonists bonding to them is actually a bad thing. This is sad.
Quote from: KozmoD on April 21, 2018, 01:53:44 PM
Animals in this game are so useless that colonists bonding to them is actually a bad thing. This is sad.
I would highly disagree with that statement. Cats and other small animals are indeed quite useless.
Dogs and boars on the other hand? Highly usefull. You can train them to haul shit around, decreasing the workload for your other colonists.
You can sell off or butcher unwante offspring -> meat or silver source.
And if you train them to release they act as an effective bulletsponge soaking up a lot of damage that would otherwise be directed towards your favorite colonists. If they die you can even butcher them for meat.
They are also a good source of non-vegetarian food meaning you can cook fine or lavish meals more easily without having to rely on hunting.
Especially cows and chickens are usefull in that regard.
Additionally animals (or just dogs?) can nuzzle colonists giving them a mood boost. Being the master of a bonded animal also gives a mood boost.
However if you have a bonded animal you should protect it and maybe don't send it to the frontline anymore because the mood debuff due to a dead bonded animal is indeed quite severe.
Even for useful animals, bonds are often more trouble than they're worth. Animals with any kind of combat utility rarely end up bonded to the person it's actually valuable for them to be assigned to, which creates mood hits and more micro, and the mood penalty on animal death and the berserk chance on pawn death is just too punishing. And on the flip side, there's only a marginal benefit to the animal being bonded in the first place.
I use animals for hauling in almost every colony, for that they are kinda useful. But sometimes the micro gets really annoying. Mood penalty and beserk chance are horrible, chickens are just a nightmare, and the extra work you need to put on for hay/kibble adds to the micro. A single Cold Snap and boom, every animal starves. Ive lost the count of times I used dev mode to explode a random dog that didnt move to the safe zone when raiders came, and was slowing down the game cause of shooting.
I wish they were a little more controlable and things like A Dog Said and Animal Armor were vanilla.
Bonded animals and dogs assigned (since they nuzzle often) can be handy for more unstable pawns that have trouble staying happy. Cats won't work in that situation since they don't have obedience. Well, without a mod.
Cats and yorkies nuzzle more often than larger pets. Some people make "cuddle rooms" for all the small pets live in and send depressed colonists in there to cheer up by being nuzzled by cuties.
Otherwise cats are completely useless. Just like real life!
In the real world you can't really sell cats, they're free. But in this game you can make a bit of silver off them!
Quote from: Toast on April 23, 2018, 06:06:49 PM
Cats and yorkies nuzzle more often than larger pets. Some people make "cuddle rooms" for all the small pets live in and send depressed colonists in there to cheer up by being nuzzled by cuties.
Otherwise cats are completely useless. Just like real life!
I think the barking would make me suicidal in that room. I always feel bad for my pawns when I get dozens of dogs. I imagine that many cats would smell...
Quote from: Dashthechinchilla on April 23, 2018, 10:53:13 PM
I think the barking would make me suicidal in that room. I always feel bad for my pawns when I get dozens of dogs. I imagine that many cats would smell...
The woman I am getting my Maine Coons from (a cat breed) has 48 cats in her house and the smell isn't actually that bad. I guess it depends on how clean you keep your house. (She has an official permit from the veterinary office to keep up to 50 cats in her house and they check up on her regularly, so don't worry about anything bad going on there).
Then again, colonists keeping clean is of course the other thing...
Food
Didn't you ever watch 101 dalmatians? It's good inspiration for what to do with them.
My uses for cats?
1. Sell them, immediately.
2. See #1
They're not trainable, but you can still use them.
Next time a raid comes, restrict you cats to a zone in the path of the enemies. The enemies will be delayed a bit and split up as they engage the cats.
As a person who recently concluded a run that recently died from FPS death due to a catsplosion, I can say that cats are definitely more useful than people think. They eat less than any other animal of their body size, and actually have the second lowest hunger rate out of all animals in vanilla RimWorld; only snakes are lower than cats here.
Cats nuzzle every 24 hours. While yorkshire terriers do indeed nuzzle every 15 hours, they also eat 2.5x as much; you can get 56% more nuzzles from cats for the same amount of food consumed. While nuzzles are only a relatively minor mood boost, they do stack fairly high, so having a lot of cats will probably keep your colonists pretty damn happy. That being said, look out for luciferium addiction if you plan to harness the infamous catsplosion.
As others have mentioned, they also make surprisingly good cannon fodder. Cats have a small body size, which means that raiders will have a harder time hitting them with ranged weapons. This is useful late-game when there is a lot of raiders, which usually means that there will be some degree of friendly firing in amongst enemy lines. Not just that, but cats reproduce fairly quickly, which means that losses can be recouped with relatively little issue.
Quote from: Toast on April 23, 2018, 06:06:49 PM
Otherwise cats are completely useless. Just like real life!
Not really. IRL cats are how we were able to form modern civilization. They were considered sacred in places like Egypt and China because they'd hunt and kill vermin that would consume and contaminate town food supplies and granaries otherwise.
In Europe, when foolish superstitions rose about cats being "bad luck" resulting in them being hunted down and killed, the populations of rodents, like rats, mice, etc, exploded and resulted in the Black Death (aka the Bubonic Plague), which wiped out between 50 and 80% of the population wherever it spread. All because they went through a period where they didn't like cats.
People like the Egyptians, Romans, Ancient Greeks, etc, realized that cats keep rodent and other pest populations down and help prevent famines and diseases from the contamination of food supplies.
I'd call that pretty useful, wouldn't you? We woldn't be talking about Rimworld on computers over the Internet if it weren't for cats. We'd all probably still be hunting and gathering in small nomadic tribes.
Cats only eat about 0.2 nutrition per day. This means you can have something like 4 cats per dog. It's also easy to make them eat 100% kibble, since they won't be hauling any food items. They're pretty efficient mood boosts as long as you make sure they aren't wasting full meals. I think a nice change would be to start with 2 yorkies or cats, of the same sex.
They have about the same uses as real-life cats. Being cute but aloof or as working cats, hunting pests. Unfed cats patrolling open fields are an effective deterrent against rats, squirrels or even hares. They're also an effective shield against hunting predators, as they breed quickly. This is mostly useful in the early game, unless you have huge tracts of land that can't easily be walled off to protect against wandering herbivores. And of course, cats won't hunt larger game so you'll need to supplement with wargs or wolves to guard against larger animals.
Quote from: Seriously Unserious on May 06, 2018, 10:56:52 PM
Quote from: Toast on April 23, 2018, 06:06:49 PM
Otherwise cats are completely useless. Just like real life!
Not really. IRL cats are how we were able to form modern civilization. They were considered sacred in places like Egypt and China because they'd hunt and kill vermin that would consume and contaminate town food supplies and granaries otherwise.
In Europe, when foolish superstitions rose about cats being "bad luck" resulting in them being hunted down and killed, the populations of rodents, like rats, mice, etc, exploded and resulted in the Black Death (aka the Bubonic Plague), which wiped out between 50 and 80% of the population wherever it spread. All because they went through a period where they didn't like cats.
People like the Egyptians, Romans, Ancient Greeks, etc, realized that cats keep rodent and other pest populations down and help prevent famines and diseases from the contamination of food supplies.
I'd call that pretty useful, wouldn't you? We woldn't be talking about Rimworld on computers over the Internet if it weren't for cats. We'd all probably still be hunting and gathering in small nomadic tribes.
Cats are perceived as useless in today's society because we no longer need them for the job they were originally assigned to. Cats were used, as you say, primarly for guarding storehouses against pests. Dogs were bred to be hunting companions and guardians of our homes. That's the function they still serve, mostly. But we evolved past the need for "working cats" and never bothered finding some other use for them, besides as pets.
I'm sure there are people all over the world who live more primitive lives than we do, who still have working cats and depend on them to keep their food safe from rats and other pests.
Quote from: cultist on May 07, 2018, 09:54:39 AM
Cats are perceived as useless in today's society because we no longer need them for the job they were originally assigned to. Cats were used, as you say, primarly for guarding storehouses against pests. Dogs were bred to be hunting companions and guardians of our homes. That's the function they still serve, mostly. But we evolved past the need for "working cats" and never bothered finding some other use for them, besides as pets.
I'm sure there are people all over the world who live more primitive lives than we do, who still have working cats and depend on them to keep their food safe from rats and other pests.
Working cats still exist, even in the first world. Talk to anyone who owns a stables or has a family-run farm.
Animal shelters are starting to realize this need, too. There are some pilot programs for "unadoptable" cats (i.e. the feral ones that hiss and scratch anyone who comes near) to be put in place as working cats in restaurants and warehouses. The business owners they're adopted out to don't have to do anything to support them, and they do a very good job of decimating the local rodent population. They sometimes warm up to the humans who work there, too.
I wish I could remember where I saw the article about it, but I remember one restaurant owner saying that before they adopted their working cat, there was a steady stream of rats going to and from the dumpster in the alley behind their restaurant. After they got the cat, it became a trail of rat pieces, and after a few weeks they stopped seeing rats altogether.
Part of the issue is that
1) It can be pretty simple in-game to secure your food from wild animals especially vermin, exactly the opposite of real life
2) Vermin don't pass on diseases in-game, like they do in real life.
Ergo, you don't have much of a reason to exterminate rats and the like in-game, when in real life you had/have people with careers as vermin-killers. THAT is what cats were used for, to both protect the food source of their human owners and to prevent disease.
Quote from: Boston on May 07, 2018, 04:10:45 PM
Part of the issue is that
1) It can be pretty simple in-game to secure your food from wild animals especially vermin, exactly the opposite of real life
2) Vermin don't pass on diseases in-game, like they do in real life.
Ergo, you don't have much of a reason to exterminate rats and the like in-game, when in real life you had/have people with careers as vermin-killers. THAT is what cats were used for, to both protect the food source of their human owners and to prevent disease.
A job cats are exceedingly good at.
There are huge advantages to using domesticated natural predators to control pest populations over chemical based poisons as well. Poisons poison and kill indiscriminately, including things we DON'T want poisoned and killed, like beneficial plants and fauna, people and in general filthy up the environment. Cats, ferrets, small dogs, etc don't do all that. They eat, and fulfill their natural role, just with human support and protection.
For example, in farming, pesticides may kill off unwanted bugs like locusts, and aphids, that can damage crops, but they also kill off the beneficial bugs like bees, butterflies and the bugs that prey on the crop eaters, such as spiders, wasps and so on.
The bees are needed to pollinate the crops, otherwise they won't grow. Same for butterflies and many other pollinating bugs. Wasps, ladybugs, green lacewings, spiders and many others eat the pests, so when we kill them in our effort to get to the pests, we cripple nature's way of dealing with the pests, so when we stop poisoning, they have no natural predators left and their populations explode. Same goes for when they develop a natural resistance to the poison, which inevitably happens. Life finds a way to live.
Of course, most of that's not simulated in RW, and I wouldn't expect Ludeon to simulate that much in a game that's not really about ecosystems and biodiversity. I would be nice if they'd simulate very small pests like rodents and tiny bugs finding ways through/over/around walls and into crops and food stores though. That would definitely give a good reason to keep small predators around, and maybe add a training option for pest control or something, so animal handlers can train them to get better at it or do it on command as well as on their own when hunger drives them to hunt and eat.
I think if we had to worry about rats and such getting into our food supplies we'd all be singing the praises of those cats and small dogs.
Its RimWorld. For anything that cannot do work, the only answer is:
Hats and meat.