Animal Husbandry

Started by Pheanox, October 06, 2013, 03:34:24 PM

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Rutebegah

I think the sanity aspect mentioned (thinking of the game don't starve) would be great. Video games greatly overlook the psychological aspect & it makes for a interesting variable to the story line.

SpaceEatingTrex

I sincerely hope this is a planned element of RimWorld, because given the setting there's a lot of potential here! There are many different possibilities for alien creatures and how they interact with the colonists, both in gameplay and story. If the colonists aren't able to train/tame at least some of them, we're missing a lot of those possibilities.

One thing to be cautious of when implementing a system like this is the cost vs. return of animals. In Dwarf Fortress, animals like cats or birds (chickens, turkeys, etc.) consume no resources but provide a number of them. This means you can do things like keep an entire fortress fed with a small number of turkeys at next to no cost. The grazing mechanic for livestock animals improves on this by making livestock consume grass, and also the reproductive rate of livestock is much lower so you don't get such an exponential growth of resources. Thus, if/when animal husbandry is introduced in RimWorld the animals should consume some resource or be controlled so that they aren't easily exploited.

salt1219

i remember reading somewhere about how much food it costs to raise a cow before slaughtering it.
it was a lot compared to what you get, diminishing returns come to mind.

there are other uses too, as mentioned above.  eggs, milk, maybe fur/leather
i would imagine larger animals being rather costly to keep.

GC13

Well the point of cows is that they eat grass, which you don't have to put any effort into cultivating. Sure, it's not efficient if you're already working all available land, but if you're labor-constrained then they're a relatively "cheap" food source.

Hypolite

Or you can feed Muffalos meat and bone (from boomrats) flour, and they would get ESB and start attacking everything around... wait.

Pheanox

Or the fact they are Muffalo refers to the fact they are genetically modified buffalo that have been gene-tailored to not require as much food and to survive on alien planets and moons.  Meaning they don't follow current day rules of animal eating habits anyway.

Besides, you make TONS of food in hydroponics.

British

Quote from: Pheanox on October 12, 2013, 08:46:00 PM
Or the fact they are Muffalo refers to the fact they are genetically modified buffalo
Or maybe the first colonist that saw one of them found them very clumsy, and thus they are muff a lot... and it sticked ;D