Has anyone had success pasturing & tending animals?

[METATERREN]

My recent colony happened to start with two good sized herds of Muffalo. I build a big scrap metal wall to create a big pasture zone around them and I split it down the middle so I can alternate pastures when the grass is eaten up. Everything seems fine. Then my herd of 12+ muffalo just disappear when winter came around. There were no holes in the fence (infact I had saved and reloaded after noticing they disappeared due to a random fire that took down a section of wall). I double and triple checked -- no way for these things to leave except perhaps via Deep Water.

So what gives, why did my Muffalo herd disappear? No corpses etc.

I couldn't tame any of them because my dude with 5 animal skill wasn't good enough. So I was keeping the herd around until I recruited an animal tamer or if throughout winter I needed to butcher them. But again, they just disappeared.

[Panzer]

When the temperature outside drops below 0 degrees celsius, plants start to die, grass included. My guess is your muffalos had nothing to eat, and when they start starving they leave the map, in search of something edible

[christhekiller]

You should grow hay during the growing months and keep it near the muffalo herd. They'll eat that when all the grass in under 5 feet of snow and won't leave

[NuclearStudent]

They probably swam off through the deep water.

[milon]

Scrap metal (slag) isn't actually a wall. It did you mean that you made a steel wall around them?

It's possible they just despawned off the map. I've never heard of that, but that doesn't mean it can't happen.

[Simon_The_Space_Engineer]

What you can do is set zones that the animals are allowed to go into and not leave. I used this to help keep my animals where I want them (and in the colony I was doing this I ended up playing with the developer tools as well so now I have to many) and it got annoying caring for them as they can require a lot of attention which makes it pointless to keep playing that colony as rimworld is about the colonist and their story, not a ranch full of animals

[skullywag]

Umm tamed animals dont wander off the map. Tame them. Problem solved.

[milon]

Also, wild animals don't breed. At all.

O_o

[Cpt Kennedy]

The way I solve this problem is by creating a climate controlled "barn" with a single tile high priority stockpile for hay. By setting up your animal areas correctly animals can have the option of grazing outside or staying inside. Even if an animal gets exposure during the winter, sleeping in the heated barn will prevent them from dying. Hiding in the barn will also save them from raiders (most of the time, had a tribal set the barn on fire once, RIP muffalo)

[asanbr]

I have tried a few times but it seems uneconomical to me since the food they consume is worth more in terms of food and money than anything I've gotten produced from animals.
Dogs and pigs might make sense because they can haul. Other animals I just tame and sell for cash asap, I find it is a good source of income, in particular camels, muffalo and llamas which are easy to tame and sell for 100-200.

I sometimes keep a boomalope which can be fun to send into a group of raiders or siegers.

I don't see the profit in breeding any type of animal compared to the work amount and food amount it requires. Maybe if they can roam free all year around, I haven't got enough experience of that since I seem to always end up on maps with max 4 months growing period.

[Avis]

Umm tamed animals dont wander off the map. Tame them. Problem solved.

I had 3 tamed muffalos that just decided they were done with the colony and left.

[METATERREN]

Ok so I played my first game on some easier settings and fyi made it through until launch where 9 of my 10 colonists set off back into space (the last one didn't want to leave her Masterwork Grand Plasteel Sculpture behind).

That game was on Cassandra Challenge on a year around grow map. My base was hybridized between mountain and the outdoors. The map was pretty good and I close off two big areas for the animals to move between year around.

So I moved the animals between pastures every once in a while and also had to send them out into the world to graze. Raiders will kill the heck out of your animals if they come across them btw. Anyway, I ended up needing lots of hay to help feed my 20+ size herd of labradors and wild boars. The babies are cute to have running around.

Overall it really took a lot of work to keep those dang pets. My colony lasted about 320 days before launching on their home made spaceship. During that time there was really only one point where having the bustling herd was really useful. That was around days 200 or 275 where things became pretty rough on my colonists mood. The use of the herd was that since there was practically nothing to hunt on the map at that time, and that I hardly had a colonist to spare for full-time hunting of monkeys and snakes, I slaughtered probably one dozen boars. This provided the meat for me to continue feeding my colonists Fine Meals and maintaining the +5 mood boost.

In general it seems that it would take a lot of work to keep a herd on a non-year around growing biome although a 4 months growing season for for a TON of hay might work. The primary benefit seems to be the ability to train a lot of haulers and a potentially berserk-preventing benefit is ensuring that Fine Food or even Lavish Meals can be made when times get tough.

I mean a massive field of hay will have to be made in order to support any decent sized self-sustaining (after occasional slaughters) herd. Even on year-around growing. Just a heads up on that.

Oh, a big problem with hauling animals is that they consume all of your perodyne/pain medicine and beers unless you very carefully control that with animals spaces. And they track loads of dirt. And they don't haul very often in exchange for all of the dirt they track around.. I ended up using my 6-8 haulers in bursts by bringing them in from the pastures for a month at a time.

Overall I will make sure to get a big field of hay going along with some potatoes if I do another game with herding. I enjoyed how clutch it was when I ran out of time to hunt and meat for fine meals, slaughtering helping keep my colony from berserking after raids.

I have tried a few times but it seems uneconomical to me since the food they consume is worth more in terms of food and money than anything I've gotten produced from animals.
Dogs and pigs might make sense because they can haul. Other animals I just tame and sell for cash asap, I find it is a good source of income, in particular camels, muffalo and llamas which are easy to tame and sell for 100-200.

I sometimes keep a boomalope which can be fun to send into a group of raiders or siegers.

I don't see the profit in breeding any type of animal compared to the work amount and food amount it requires. Maybe if they can roam free all year around, I haven't got enough experience of that since I seem to always end up on maps with max 4 months growing period.

[zandadoum]

@METATERREN
most (or all?) animals can eat cooked meals. if you have problems with your crops, but you have other ways to get what you need to cook, you can feed that to them.

other than that, i'll just say you shouldn't over breed if you can't feed all those animals.

also: it might be good to just breed animals that actually do something apart from eating all your food and sometimes end up on your cooking table. ex: i breed wild boars: easy to tame, can haul, easy to breed, good food if necesary. alltho i'd rather starve for a week than kill one of my haulers.

chickens are ok too (tho IMO they eat way too much!) because the eggs (+veggies) can be used to make lavish meals if you don't have a source of meat. and they breed very nicely too. just keep the roosters separated from hens at one point if you don't want to have a 200eggsplosion kill your PC xDD

[RickyMartini]

I had 3 tamed muffalos that just decided they were done with the colony and left.

If that's true and they didn't accidentally die and then we're slaughtered. If not, this would be a serious game breaking bug.

[Avis]

I had 3 tamed muffalos that just decided they were done with the colony and left.

If that's true and they didn't accidentally die and then we're slaughtered. If not, this would be a serious game breaking bug.

I just sell off my muffalos early winter now usually.
I don't actually know where they go?
Maybe it has something to do with whether they're allowed outside/ on the edge of the map.
I'm too tired to investigate it right now.