How do I set up a scenario to REALLY push animal herding ?

[b0rsuk]

Animal husbandry has been added in A12 I think. It's currently A16 and I still so no major reason to keep animals.

They're pretty mediocre in combat unless you specifically design a maze to fight in. Even then, have fun against mechanoids. EMP grenades would be nice if only releasing animals wasn't so clumsy.

Wool is nice, and fetches good prices. But I'm currently in a year-round arid shrubland and planting devilstrand is much less fuss, and I have more silver than I know what to do with (two then skill 12 crafters got me started). Wool is nice to have in very cold biomes, as you can make jackets (later - dusters) from it that don't have penalties like parkas.  But in a very cold biome you'll have trouble feeding alpacas, or even "cold adapted" mufallos who can't take grass from under the snow.

Eggs are good, worth 5 meat and you can fit the equivalent of 375 on a stockpile square. But if you can raise chickens, you have conditions to be a successful grower anyway. And if you can sow in the ground, you have animals to hunt generally. So even chickens are a bit redundant.

Hauling animals - they take a while to get. May be worth it. Animals trained to haul are not automatically valid for caravan beasts of burden.

One genuine advantage of animals is they don't need to be carried in a caravan.
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So I thought I'd set up a scenario that promotes animal herding, and living off meat/animal products rather than the usual plant. The obvious rule is: No sowing (can't sow plants in the ground)

1. In a biome with winter, I don' t think I'll gather enough plants to feed my animals in winter. No haygrass and I can't just gather plain grass. I can't grow haygrass in hydroponics, and I'd need it for healroot.
2. In a biome without winter, I'll be swimming in WILD animals. Maybe except in a desert. But where will my animals graze on a desert ? So the advantage of my own herd is... I can order them around and they won't leave the map / all die to a toxic fallout ?
3. The usual approach with hydroponic rice would feed me, but then I no longer need the animals.

The way the game is designed... things I can set up in scenario editor... feels somehow incomplete. There's no situation that makes me REALLY happy to have animals, or say to myself "Gee, I really wish I had animals.". No niche, really. I can't even craft a scenario which only leaves me eating animals I raised.

And by the way, setting up an opposite challenge with no hunting / no meat in meals is similarly impossible. You can have a rule "no hunting", but it only disables the interface sugar that is marking an animal for automatic hunting. I can still kill animals in all other ways, especially shoot when drafted. And I absolutely can butcher animals. It would be much more interesting to have a "no butchering" scenario rule instead of "no hunting".

[Limdood]

You can set up a scenario to push animals.

#1: base design.  Open base, thick walls, no perimeter, separated buildings, offset hallways.  This will encourage enemies to chase your pawns down your short, 2 or 3-wide hallways.  Bears and cougars/panthers are great combatants for this, wolves are so-so.  Snakes are nice because they reproduce more easily.  Boomalopes are an option, but risky.

#2: focus on melee pawns.  Get a pawn with good melee and animal skill.  Get another pawn, possibly noncombat, with good doctoring...you'll need him.  Psychopaths or cannibals are a plus for making kibble (not sure if psychopaths can animal bond...i'd assume so, but if not, that would be a plus)

#3: set zones appropriately.  You don't want hauling animals getting shot up, as they represent a significant time investment and are more likely to be bonded.  You also want a minimum of animals digging in your freezers

Animals aren't really meant to be a primary food source.  They do make a good supplementary food source.  Chickens, but more importantly cows can make a nice supplement to your food on low-animal maps, to supply eggs and milk to fulfill the "meat" requirement of fine meals.

Even with current rules, Every map I play that CAN support animals, I usually have several different varieties being tamed.  Labs, Huskies, Pigs, or Boars for hauling.  Muffalos for caravan trading (and the wool and milk are a nice plus...I prefer muffalos over dromedaries for that reason).  I might have 2-3 alpacas in hotter climates so i can throw everyone in alpaca dusters and cowboy hats and be good up to 200F.  I might have a couple boomalopes for a nasty tribal raid.  A couple wolves or cougars set to follow my hunters is a HUGE HUGE help if i get a "revenge" incident.  Lastly, there are the moneymaking animals or experiments...Back in earlier alphas snakes and turtles sold for tons, a dozen turtles set to a home area right in your entrance can slow down attackers big. 

plenty of uses for animals.

[Shurp]

Pigs turn human corpses into food.  A minor perk, but one worth considering.

But overall, animals are more of a nuisance than an asset.  If pets would automatically *not* follow drafted colonists that would be a huge improvement; pets would then be very helpful for improving mood.

[Goo Poni]

Mods can help with that. But I do tend towards agreeing with the OP, I love keeping tame wolves around but they're fragile in combat and breed like rabbits. Like come on, boys, she just had a litter of cubs a couple days ago, do you really all need to go three on one with her? Only war beasts worth training seem to be bears as they're still somewhat common, do decent damage and don't die to a stern look.

I think the only way to make animals useful would be to force yourself to live and breathe muffalo or some similar creature. Clothes all fashioned from their leather and wool, food all from their meat and milk, skulls hung over everyone's beds, so on, so forth.

[b0rsuk]

Pigs turn human corpses into food.  A minor perk, but one worth considering.

Interesting. But they won't survive on human meat alone in cold climates, and have poor cold tolerance anyway. In warm climates, they have plants to eat. But I imagine pigs will munch on bug meat just as well - just be sure to build the barn under open sky, where bugs won't ambush them.

If pets would automatically *not* follow drafted colonists that would be a huge improvement; pets would then be very helpful for improving mood.

This is already configurable in the A16 Animals tab.

In my experience Mufallos have the flaws of a hybrid. They produce milk, but slowly. They produce wool, but slowly. Alpacas and cows are better at their specific roles.

Another thought experiment. Your 3 starting colonists each have 0 Growing skill and 10 Animals skill. How do you capitalize on that ?

[Trylobyte]

Another thought experiment. Your 3 starting colonists each have 0 Growing skill and 10 Animals skill. How do you capitalize on that ?

You can't tame animals without having food to offer them, so you'd have to go kill something to get meat to offer it to a carnivore, then use the carnivore to go hunt other things.  Twould be a cycle of violence.

[b0rsuk]

Another thought experiment. Your 3 starting colonists each have 0 Growing skill and 10 Animals skill. How do you capitalize on that ?

You can't tame animals without having food to offer them, so you'd have to go kill something to get meat to offer it to a carnivore, then use the carnivore to go hunt other things.  Twould be a cycle of violence.

You can harvest agave and berries. But for the sake of the argument, let's say you also start with 4 cows. Now what ?

[Sinosauropteryx]

But for the sake of the argument, let's say you also start with 4 cows. Now what ?

Each cow can be milked once a day, for 8 units of food. That's 32 milk per day for 4 cows.

Each colonist requires ~20 units of food (2 meals) a day. So with 4 cows to 3 colonists, you've got about half your calories covered. Hunting, foraging, and/or growing will be required.

Double it to 8 cows (64 milk/day), and you can fully sustain 3 colonists. Then the question becomes, how many grazing cows can your biome support before you have to start growing hay, etc? Perhaps the only way to make a large herd sustainable is to live like a cowboy and travel to different pastures.

Another issue is bulls. I don't know if it's possible to start with cows without the chance of some of them being bulls.

[Trylobyte]

Another issue with this is that not having any growers completely cuts off your access to medicine (Healroot is Growing 8) and forces you to hunt for clothes (Cotton is Growing 4) at which point your hunting is probably bringing in more meat than your cows are making.  You'll also have a conflict in that the animals you want to tame for defense (wolves, bears, etc) will also attack your cows/calfs or even your colonists if they get hungry.  There's a reason agriculture and permanent settlements appeared around the same time.

You could do it, but you'd need to do a whole lot of trading to get up a decent herd of cows or flock of chickens before it becomes viable for the long term.  And you're going to have to do that, because without agriculture you have no reliable way to scale your food supply - You'll have to rely on breeding, which takes a long time (unless you luck out and get chickens).

[Tammabanana]

Another issue with this is that not having any growers completely cuts off your access to medicine (Healroot is Growing and forces you to hunt for clothes (Cotton is Growing 4) at which point your hunting is probably bringing in more meat than your cows are making.  You'll also have a conflict in that the animals you want to tame for defense (wolves, bears, etc) will also attack your cows/calfs or even your colonists if they get hungry.  There's a reason agriculture and permanent settlements appeared around the same time.

You could do it, but you'd need to do a whole lot of trading to get up a decent herd of cows or flock of chickens before it becomes viable for the long term.  And you're going to have to do that, because without agriculture you have no reliable way to scale your food supply - You'll have to rely on breeding, which takes a long time (unless you luck out and get chickens).

• The in-game Scenario Editor allows you to start with the animals of your choice. You don't have to rely on luck. You can just start the game with chickens and muffalos.
• I'm curious; have you ever actually seen your animals attack each other? I've had starving warg pets wandering around a colony full of tame chickens, and the chickens remain uneaten.

Permanent toxic fallout would largely remove the possibility of wild animals, but still allow your colonists to (carefully, taking turns) go out and sow haygrass to feed your indoor herds, until you can set up safer fields. You can build greenhouses over soil, with sunlamps and roof, and grow haygrass there.

[GarettZriwin]

Chickens are worth keeping if you want to mass produce fine meals, their price is poor compared to meat so if you sell meat you have a lot more space in your freezer and stable source of ingredients.

Yorks eat very little and if set properly they can keep your colonists with top mood giving them bonus productivity and preventing any mental breaks.

[Catastrophy]

Feeding animals is kinda hard for me. I never get kibble right. Using grass uses huge space and is moot in winter and NPD is awkward to use. How do you guys do it? Do you have large meadows to graze?

[b0rsuk]

So I started a new game, Crashlanded + banned sowing in the ground. I randomly got a labrador. Temperate forest.

It's 6th of Summer, I have 5 people, ibex ram and doe (no wool, no milk), an alpaca, a mufallo (3 people at 10 skill keep trying to tame the herd!!). I also try to tame turkeys.

I'm "using" a Nutrient Paste Dispenser with meat of animals I hunt. I try to keep berries for taming and training, but my people keep eating into it.

I'm a looong way from a sustainable animal farm. But i have a plan. I'm very close to an allied colony. I'll try sending a caravan and buying stuff.

I wonder if I can escape winter by migrating ? But where to ?

[Tammabanana]

Feeding animals is kinda hard for me. I never get kibble right. Using grass uses huge space and is moot in winter and NPD is awkward to use. How do you guys do it? Do you have large meadows to graze?

I'm still struggling with this for large herds, but here are some things that have been improvements for me:

I set up multiple zones - big/tough animals can mostly stay outside the walls and graze/hunt out there, and I don't have to worry about feeding them at all in the warmer months. Inside the walls, I grow a big patch of haygrass, and I zone more vulnerable livestock so they have access to that. In between those two zones, I put a barn they can both retreat to in emergencies or at night.

If I want them to eat the hay/kibble/corn I've gathered, I put it in the barn. But if I don't want them to eat it up because I'm trying to stock up for winter, I store it someplace not in their zones.

I let pets like dogs and cats have free run of the pantry, excluding stuff I really don't want them to eat, like fine meals. But simple meals are a really good way to feed some of those pickier animals, like cats.

I avoid taming anything that's so picky about its diet that I can't reliably feed it, like wargs.

In the fall, I check how much food I've stored for the winter vs. how many animals I have to feed. If it's not looking good, I slaughter excess animals and turn them into kibble for the survivors. I keep breeding stock, milk/egg/wool producers, and bonded animals.

At the end of the growing season, I've been prioritizing sending colonists out to harvest whatever they can harvest off the map, before it's all killed by the cold. I'm having a lot of trouble getting them to haul the stuff back in an efficient manner, though.

I've been sending my hunters out to rid the map of predators, so more of my animals can safely go outside the walls to graze.

[Serenity]

Wool actually protects against cold and heat.