Most tamed animals are garbage

[8roads]

Glad to be of help！

Talking of thrumbos, maybe we can try some other "Dendrovores", like alphabeavers.
Their gestation period is mere 14 days and they've got high heat/cold tolerance.

Their hunger rate is so HIGH though, I have no idea how you'd manage to keep fed.

Grazing.
I was going to keep a dozen and eat their babies.
In certain biomes trees are simply too many to be put to good use. why not feed them to beavers? they don't even mind the harsh winter.

[kasnavada]

I managed to keep a thrumbo for long by placing it on a field of cotton which my dedicated grower continuously replanted.

I'm pretty sure it falls on exploit territory though.

[SpaceDorf]

I managed to keep a thrumbo for long by placing it on a field of cotton which my dedicated grower continuously replanted.

I'm pretty sure it falls on exploit territory though.

No it isn't, thats how I reduce feeding for most of my grazers in the growing period. A huge field of dandlions in my main outside area ( grow fast, high feeding, add beauty ) and they have access to the hay field and corpse pile.
So every Animal has free choice of food, stays outside of my kitchen ( except some hauldogs ) and my main farming area.


Oh. A Huge con for Bears. They make a lot of dirt. Thats why I started to keep them outside and use the dogs for Homezone Hauling. Also as Rescue Squad both are invaluable.

[Dave-In-Texas]

I don't have to micro manage mine as strictly as the OP says they do
I mark the meal storage, etc as part of animal area 1 and then invert it.
If that gets hairy (don't want bears eating my babies) i'll actually manually make an area that matches my home zone, inside defenses.  They cross the forbidden areas but don't stop to eat.  i've had a pet start starving that way...

I like to tame alpaca and muffalo,  love that wool. Anything that can haul is fair game to me.. so wolves, foxes, wild pigs, etc.    When food is plentiful i'll tame some small animals as nuzzling is happening more frequently again (at least for me, all my time in A14 i only saw it happen 3 times).  Once food gets scarce... more meat

I find myself wishing that if one of your pets is under attack your other pets would react and help it unless you're drafted.. lol

[kasnavada]

I managed to keep a thrumbo for long by placing it on a field of cotton which my dedicated grower continuously replanted.

I'm pretty sure it falls on exploit territory though.

No it isn't, thats how I reduce feeding for most of my grazers in the growing period. A huge field of dandlions in my main outside area ( grow fast, high feeding, add beauty ) and they have access to the hay field and corpse pile.
So every Animal has free choice of food, stays outside of my kitchen ( except some hauldogs ) and my main farming area.


Oh. A Huge con for Bears. They make a lot of dirt. Thats why I started to keep them outside and use the dogs for Homezone Hauling. Also as Rescue Squad both are invaluable.

I still think it's an exploit. Even if I agree it's handy. A seed just planted in the ground provides 0.2 nutrition, and that's the same as a full grown plant. Seeds are infinite and free. Nutrition should be like 0 for the first half of the plant life (then I'd be ok with it).

[8roads]

I managed to keep a thrumbo for long by placing it on a field of cotton which my dedicated grower continuously replanted.

I'm pretty sure it falls on exploit territory though.

No it isn't, thats how I reduce feeding for most of my grazers in the growing period. A huge field of dandlions in my main outside area ( grow fast, high feeding, add beauty ) and they have access to the hay field and corpse pile.
So every Animal has free choice of food, stays outside of my kitchen ( except some hauldogs ) and my main farming area.


Oh. A Huge con for Bears. They make a lot of dirt. Thats why I started to keep them outside and use the dogs for Homezone Hauling. Also as Rescue Squad both are invaluable.

I still think it's an exploit. Even if I agree it's handy. A seed just planted in the ground provides 0.2 nutrition, and that's the same as a full grown plant. Seeds are infinite and free. Nutrition should be like 0 for the first half of the plant life (then I'd be ok with it).

well, the labor isn't free.
anyway don't report this to Tynan please 

[SpaceDorf]

well, the seed in rimworld looks allready more like a small plant,
so if the growing plants have more nutrition than the seedlings its not exploity in my book.

[genericoverusedname]

Where do the colonists even get the seedlings from? They just magic them up from nowhere!

Not that I mind, seed management gets annoying in DF and I don't miss it.

[Yodarkore]

Back on topic, Im really curious how you guys can have 10+ animals trained for hauling, even with a very skilled pet handler, it takes forever to train (low success rate) i never managed to get a fully trained pet for hauling before it dies screening some raiders. So now, i just dont bother trying taming any animals, I just slaughter them for more food, especially when they self tame. I did have a game where i had 2 wolves and a bear, it was pretty and cute: the bear self tamed, and i had a wolf from start (as far as i recall), I succesfully tried to find him a female, and then got a puppy a year later, but next to useless since they didnt fight really well (the pet handler was a sniper), and when i managed to get the "release animal" option, they almost died several time, and lost limbs. Do you all play on chillax phoebe basebuilder easiest setting or what??

The bear have a bunch of HP so it helps survive friendly fire: 2 out 3 injuries on them are friendly fire. Imho, best is to slaughter the smaller one, and sell the self tamed one before they get bonded to anyone, and parking them in a "safe" zone near the base waiting for the next trader...

And how are we supposed to deal with bonded animals to a very unskilled pet handler? They get a debuff "i should be with my pet" and no way to get rid of it since that pawn (lets say my medic/researcher as an example, as it happened to me once) have lots of things to do way more useful for the colony rather than failing all day long trying to tame squirrels while the pet handler pawn try to learn the said pet the occult arcane of hauling since he wont have sufficient level until (in game) decades (yes decades, maybe even a century, not years nor seasons not even days) to have sufficient level to be the master of his pet that got obedience to the pet handler. How is this feasible without modding it???

[Serenity]

I had a small family of tamed timber wolfs once. They were pretty awesome. They bred new ones now and then and I got them trained pretty quickly.

If you don't want them to get hurt just don't use them in combat. This mods helps with that:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=24422.0

I just had a polar bear self tame We'll see how that goes. If I could only get it to snack on all the frozen corpses...


I don't think the pet master needs to do the teaching. The master is the one the pet follows. You can have another pawn teach it stuff.

[Yodarkore]

And how are we supposed to deal with bonded animals to a very unskilled pet handler? They get a debuff "i should be with my pet" [...] How is this feasible without modding it???

If you don't want them to get hurt just don't use them in combat. This mods helps with that:
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=24422.0

So it is modding the game then, no way in vanilla as i suspect, and i do also use this mod since a couple of game to avoid unecessary season long mood debuff "my pet died"... Needless to say, i was pretty careful not letting the pet handler dying, i dont want a bunch of mad animals poping in the middle of a raid just because their handler died, it also happened to me once in a game, luckly i wasnt in perma death mode, so i save scummed (that time, the pets were a warg and a cat that went mad at the very moment the handler died)..

I just had a polar bear self tame We'll see how that goes. If I could only get it to snack on all the frozen corpses...


I don't think the pet master needs to do the teaching. The master is the one the pet follows. You can have another pawn teach it stuff.

To be the master of his own pet, the so called master is supposed to have 4 to 6 points in "animal handling". Until that, the pet is only "bond" (for starter animals, and i like to play tribals yet, so its 3 free pet from start, all bonded randomly to different pawns). So when you reach obedience 1/1 *bim* debuff. My poor scientist had only 2 points in it and no passion in animal handling at all. He had a -5 debuff all game long since he was never able to reach sufficient skill and i couldnt divert him from research/medical/cleaning stuff. My "skilled" pet handler went to 16 points in animal handling, and still never managed to train a pet to haul (it was like 5/8, before i had to reroll game to the A15c patch). And as the pet trainer, he gets all new tamed pet bonding sooner or later, wich is both good and bad..

[Serenity]

Yeah, right. Forgot about the difference between bonding and master. Sorry :s

The training also depends highly on the animal. Some are just more trainable than others. I just a group of huskeys join and they are far easier to train than the bear. Which is certainly realistic. The bear needed a high animal skill and with 9 still has only like a 10% chance. With the huskeys I just saw a 55% haul chance on the first attempt.

[SpaceDorf]

Its a numbers game.
The more trained animals you have, the higher the chance some of them get trained for what they should do.

Also I keep untrained animals near my base in a special zone, so my trainers have less walking to do.
On top of that, multiple mid-class trainers produce more training chances than a single high-level one.
They should be high enough to be the master of a bonded animal, this way you have lots of buffed pawns and spread the debuff if one of the animals gets killed.

[Serenity]

Well it took a while, but I now have a hauling polar bear and my animal trainer is up to skill 13. From 7 or 8.
Bears have a wildness of 85%. That makes them harder to train. Dogs are easy.

By the way, is there a way to prevent boding? Lets say I wanted to raise animals for selling. So I have an area where I put them and just feed them until they are grown. Is it enough to just not train them in anything?

[SpaceDorf]

By the way, is there a way to prevent boding? Lets say I wanted to raise animals for selling. So I have an area where I put them and just feed them until they are grown. Is it enough to just not train them in anything?

The special area is the best way I can think of. Not training is a given for me in that case, since it would be a waste of food anyway. As far as I know bonding happens through Training, Treating or Nuzzling.