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

[FreyaMaluk]

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".

I was really excited about animal herding when I started playing this game, but soon I discover they are just a pain and make the game reaaaaally laggy... You can always create your own scenario a la Noah style, but the maintenance of animals both in software and in-game resources is way to hard to even bother.... They eat to much and kibble takes too much meat base for it. Chickens are the worst for the extra high reproduction rate. The only animals I consider useful are alpacas, muffalos and dromedary (clothing manufacturing economy base). Chickens drive me insane after a while. I know I can restrict the hens and the roster in different areas and control matting that way, but it's such an annoyance, cuz it means an unending click concert.

Some  animals attack units are interesting (packs of wolves, turtles as tanks, and chickens as distractions (granadiers attacking chickens into suicide for the lols), but the demands for the engine and for the colony are just huge. The game just gets incredibly laggy after a while.

Besides, the animal tab as it is needs reworking... Something along the lines of the brillant mods "Animal Tab" by Fluffy and "Better Pawn Control" by VouLT. The first introduces a clearer overview and filters for animal taming or slaughtering. The later introduces policies for all paws to be sent away to restricted/protected zones with only one click . No more clicking train!

[b0rsuk]

My efforts are hampered by RNG. Colonist recruitment has been changed, it's now based on gradually built rapport. But my 3 colonists with 10-11 Animals skill get glorious 12% or 13% animal taming chance. This means that as summer is coming to an end I still have only 1 Mufallo, and I'm trying to tame the entire pack. A single alpaca (wildness 0, skill required 0) commonly resists taming for several days. And 10 days in this game is a season.

[Shurp]

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.

Why don't you make a stove and cook simple meals with the meat?

[b0rsuk]

Why don't you make a stove and cook simple meals with the meat?

My colonists are even worse at Cooking than I am! See, I prioritized Animals, Construction, Research, Shooting. At least NPD guarantees no food poisoning.

[PotatoeTater]

One of things I've noticed is if you have a growing zone for trees, grass will grow along side the trees, I have an orchard like setup and let my animals during the summer graze from the grass there. They leave the hay alone and it allows me to stockpile it for the winter when they are kept inside.

[b0rsuk]

Okay, I'm going to interrupt the experiment because there's no way I will survive my first winter without either building hydroponic tables or excessive hunting. And the point was building a sustainable colony based on animal herding.

Mufallos, even cows are hopeless as a source of food (milk).

Wool grows too slowly on both alpacas and mufallos to make a profit on selling apparel in the first year. Even if you do profit, food is quite expensive to trade and many traders and even colonies you visit don't have any to sell.

Maybe some other animals (pigs?) breed fast enough that you can butcher them for meat and prepare for winter.

Chickens and perhaps turkeys sound promising. I mean the egg farming, because eggs are efficient and have extremely good stockpile density (75 on a square, equivalent of 375 meat). In the next playthrough I will try chickens and turkeys. But clearly I will have to modify a scenario to start with a couple. Only chickens/turkeys remain a possible alternative to year 1 agriculture. But HOW am I going to feed my chickens and turkeys in winter without the ability to plant haygrass ? ??

[GarettZriwin]

Human flesh?

[Tammabanana]

Chickens and perhaps turkeys sound promising. I mean the egg farming, because eggs are efficient and have extremely good stockpile density (75 on a square, equivalent of 375 meat). In the next playthrough I will try chickens and turkeys. But clearly I will have to modify a scenario to start with a couple. Only chickens/turkeys remain a possible alternative to year 1 agriculture. But HOW am I going to feed my chickens and turkeys in winter without the ability to plant haygrass ? ??

Not turkeys! Chickens will lay unfertilized eggs you can eat; turkeys will just sit at 50% progress until it's fertilized before they'll lay.

I wouldn't bother with forcing the exclusion of growing as an option. Plant the haygrass, and use your willpower to not plant other stuff.

Alternatively, if you really seriously have your heart set on no growing, I'm in progress on a mod that makes haygrass grow wild and dandelions harvestable. Click the link in my sig; it's down in the Works In Progress section, "Initial Conditions: Subsistence". It's playable but not really finished.

Its butchering spot might behave funny if you're also using Set-up Camp/Camping Stuff - one of those has a butchering spot in it, too. Either one will overwrite the other, or you'll see two butchering spots and two recipes. That's a thing I haven't investigated yet.

[PotatoeTater]

Chickens and perhaps turkeys sound promising. I mean the egg farming, because eggs are efficient and have extremely good stockpile density (75 on a square, equivalent of 375 meat). In the next playthrough I will try chickens and turkeys. But clearly I will have to modify a scenario to start with a couple. Only chickens/turkeys remain a possible alternative to year 1 agriculture. But HOW am I going to feed my chickens and turkeys in winter without the ability to plant haygrass ? ??

Not turkeys! Chickens will lay unfertilized eggs you can eat; turkeys will just sit at 50% progress until it's fertilized before they'll lay.

I wouldn't bother with forcing the exclusion of growing as an option. Plant the haygrass, and use your willpower to not plant other stuff.

Alternatively, if you really seriously have your heart set on no growing, I'm in progress on a mod that makes haygrass grow wild and dandelions harvestable. Click the link in my sig; it's down in the Works In Progress section, "Initial Conditions: Subsistence". It's playable but not really finished.

Its butchering spot might behave funny if you're also using Set-up Camp/Camping Stuff - one of those has a butchering spot in it, too. Either one will overwrite the other, or you'll see two butchering spots and two recipes. That's a thing I haven't investigated yet.

I can confirm, I tried to do a turkey farm back in alpha 15, they are not an effective source of meat and they do not produce eggs the same as chickens. They do have a low food consumption, but that is about it.

[b0rsuk]

Not turkeys! Chickens will lay unfertilized eggs you can eat; turkeys will just sit at 50% progress until it's fertilized before they'll lay.

I wouldn't bother with forcing the exclusion of growing as an option. Plant the haygrass, and use your willpower to not plant other stuff.

I'm the stubborn guy who built a ship with self-enforced "no mining" rule back in A12. I'm determined to also try "no sowing" and see what are the implications.

Alternatively, if you really seriously have your heart set on no growing, I'm in progress on a mod that makes haygrass grow wild and dandelions harvestable. Click the link in my sig; it's down in the Works In Progress section, "Initial Conditions: Subsistence". It's playable but not really finished.

Why not just modify the "cut plants" order to make it produce small piles of hay ? This would be useful AND realistic. When you cut grass, it's not magically disappearing somewhere. You need to rake it aside.

[Tammabanana]

Why not just modify the "cut plants" order to make it produce small piles of hay ? This would be useful AND realistic. When you cut grass, it's not magically disappearing somewhere. You need to rake it aside.

To make what produce small piles of hay? I assume you mean grass, not the "cut plants" tool at large, because "cut plants" hits all plants, and raspberry bushes and trees don't make hay.

The realistic answer for that is: Short grass doesn't make good hay, it's too hard to bundle up and transport.

The game mechanics answer is: the code considers grass and haygrass to be two separate plants. It would be nice if grass itself could be allowed to grow tall and be cut for hay, yeah, but that would be complicated to implement and wouldn't be compatible with any other mod that changes grass. It's far easier, and more mod-compatible, to add a new plant that's basically a copy of the existing haygrass mechanic, except wild.

[b0rsuk]

The realistic answer for that is: Short grass doesn't make good hay, it's too hard to bundle up and transport.

That's why it would produce only a small fraction compared to haygrass.

The game mechanics answer is: the code considers grass and haygrass to be two separate plants.

The code considers raspberries and strawberries to be two separate plants, but they both yield berries when harvested. Poplar, pine, teak and cecropia are all trees, but they all provide wood.

It's far easier, and more mod-compatible, to add a new plant that's basically a copy of the existing haygrass mechanic, except wild.

And I think it's far more elegant to just make plain grass yield a small amount of hay, so haygrass doesn't have a monopoly on it. Occam's Razor.

[LordMunchkin]

Animals feel like a luxury when they should really be mandatory for any farming community. They're OK if you have a decent biome where you can let them graze and have enough time to grow some winter feed. Otherwise, you're better off hunting or buying your meat.

Alpacas, chickens, and huskies are probably the most efficient animals to breed. Alpacas because they offer the most wool/time. Chickens because eggs are the best feed/time source of meat that can be farmed. Huskies because they're easily trained, breed quickly, and have fairly decent stats as haulers/war animals.

On a sidenote, there's a mod that makes wargs immune to food poisoning from eating corpses. Really fun if you want to play a Bolton style faction! 

[Tammabanana]

And I think it's far more elegant to just make plain grass yield a small amount of hay, so haygrass doesn't have a monopoly on it. Occam's Razor.

You're welcome to mod that yourself, if you like.

[Limdood]

honestly I find it inconvenient or unpleasant to start a game without decent use of animals anymore.

I have a post earlier in this thread detailing all of the minor uses i have for animals...none of which are any sort of overwhelming colony direction....just little quality of life improvements.

If nothing else, I buy up dogs as early as i can afford them to get them breeding and hauling ASAP.  I don't mind at all putting out the extra food for dogs (even if they wander in and eat real meals) to get an extra hauler AND protection for my hunters.

This is mostly meant to be a counterpoint to the people saying that HAVING animals is an inconvenience.  I believe the opposite.  NOT having animals is inconvenient to me, and whenever possible, I will push for any of my various animal systems that I have the supply (map available or traders) and animal skill (no skill 6 bear tamers...risk vs reward says they'll be bear food) to maintain.