Animal Management Shortcuts Needed.

[Darkstar82]

Unless Ive missed something (if so pls let me know  ) I can switch through humans using . or .   but there is no keyset to cycle through the animals which makes managing their training a chore, especially if you have a few dozen of different types. I know its not supposed to be animal farm but this function would help.

Other functions would be a "train all to max" button. I cant think of a time when im ever going to want to partially train an animal and this again would speed up animal management no end.

Also Animals seem to be reeeeally heavy on the kibble? I`m having to depopulate the place just to make enough kibble to feed half a dozen pigs and 4 cats. Some adjustment?

Anyway, petfood for thought.  Thanks all. 

[cultist]

Also Animals seem to be reeeeally heavy on the kibble? I`m having to depopulate the place just to make enough kibble to feed half a dozen pigs and 4 cats. Some adjustment?

Kibble is great for smaller animals like cats, terriers and especially chickens. They only need a small amount of food to fill the hunger bar, so feeding them a meal for instance is a waste of nutrition. The other big advantage of kibble is that it never spoils, so you can produce lots of it in advance as long as you have the materials to spare.

For larger animals like muffalo or elephants, you are probably better off feeding them hay directly rather than making food for them. It's a lot like real life actually.

[Chibiabos]

I agree with the OP, and think I mentioned this already.  Its particularly frustrating when you have a lot of animals and want to check on the status of their training, and whether newborn critters are old enough to train to Haul.

For the moment, the easiest workaround I have is at night when they're all asleep, assuming you have their beds all together and close together.  Then, at least, all the animals are in one close geographical area and you can click on them one at a time without having to hunt each one down one at a time all over the map.

But, yes, I think I already made the suggestion animals should have their own cycling shortcuts so when you click on one, you can cycle through them the way [,] and [.] do for colonists (or maybe use the same shortcuts but merely contextual -- if you have a colony animal clicked on and selected, [,] / [.] will cycle through the animals versus if you have a colonist selected, [,] / [.] will cycle through the colonists instead.

[Chibiabos]

Kibble is great for smaller animals like cats, terriers and especially chickens. They only need a small amount of food to fill the hunger bar, so feeding them a meal for instance is a waste of nutrition. The other big advantage of kibble is that it never spoils, so you can produce lots of it in advance as long as you have the materials to spare.

For larger animals like muffalo or elephants, you are probably better off feeding them hay directly rather than making food for them. It's a lot like real life actually.

Kibble is actually great all around, but it depends on your labor resources.  IIRC, kibble gives a 25% bonus (I might be remembering it wrong, but for 8 raw ingredients input, I think you get 10 kibble output) in terms of kibble produced versus raw ingredients put into it.  There is a drawback in that it takes labor to produce -- it doesn't take long to produce labor, but that's time your cooks aren't making meals and generally hauling the ingredients to the butcher table to make kibble counts against time those cooks aren't able to cook meals or do other things; another drawback is some animals like Wargs cannot eat kibble at all; Wargs will always need raw meat or corpses (but fortunately rotten corpses are fine).

Kibble requires vegetable food and meat food to produce, but despite the meat requisite, strict herbivores like elephants can eat it, so in addition to the basic food output for food input bonus, in all cases except those like wargs whom cannot eat kibble, it increases overall flexibility in animal feed -- herbivores that can't eat meat can eat kibble half of which is made from meat.

Kibble does need to be kept in a roofed area so it won't spoil, but yeah unlike hay or especially meat, does not need to be refrigerated; it does not spoil aside from decaying for being left in an unroofed/outdoors area, so using kibble also helps out with power efficiency -- the more food that doesn't need to be kept in a freezer, the less you have to expand the freezer and build and power more freezers.

I tend to like using hay and human meat to make kibble, which is a great win -- yeah you still need a cook to butcher humanlike which causes a big mood debuff for that cook unless they have a trait making them immune to that debuff (or has a joywire installed to compensate, or other traits making them less prone to having a mental breakdown despite having hefty mood debuffs), but it gives a practical, pragmatic use for those dead bodies you tend to pile up from fighting off so many raiders.