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

[FreyaMaluk]

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 ? ??

The only viable scenario for your run would be a year round growing biome... protect as much green areas inside your base as you can and just leave you animals feed from grass. There is no real winter there, so you can just rotate the zones they can eat from. Keep chickens only for the eggs (no rosters: these birds reproduce incredibly fast and require a lot of micromanagement and they'll cause tons of lag). Have cows for the milk. 2 cows and 2 chickens are more than enough to get you going. Alpacas for a successful economy (clothing manufacture) or cobras (they can eat corpses too).
I won't recommend turkeys. Their maturity rate is 2 years... not worth it...
maybe rats.... they eat very little and they can eat everything really, corpses too.. I haven't tried that farm myself, but it's just a thought... well more like a ton of thoughts really... xD

well I hope these can help you somehow

[RazorHed]

I've been raising large herds of boars lately to haul stuff. Sometimes I have to manipulate zones a lot to get them to haul where I want them to . (leapfrogging stockpiles from outer ares to inside the base )  They breed pretty fast , but you'd need a ton to raise them for food , plus wait for them to grow a little .   Then I try to get a muffalo herd going for transport from colony to colony .   If I get too many ill make a second colony on flat terrain and just send the non haulers there, then I bring them back when they are trainable to haul.   I don't use dogs , only grass eaters. Then I buy some chickens which raises medicine skill from Euthanasia or with a dog said giving peeps 2 peg legs     I might start keeping a flock of chickens just to put a zone in my kill box or in front of sappers.  Other than that animals are pretty useless.

[Listen1]

As pretty much all systems in the game, this one also needs a re-doing.

My biggest issue is the amount of food an animal take. Chickens eats 1 whole meals. Bears can eat alot of meat (I believe it is 35 meat/day) And kibble. Kibble takes a fine meal worth of food, and never spoil. Kibble is the only way to feed animals in a sustainable fashion, and the cheapest way is hay + human meat (has just one downside). The animals you want to herd, are mostly herbivore. Alpacas, Muffalos, Chickens, Turkeys, Pigs, Megasloths, etc. And what do they mostly eat? Grass.

As now, there's now way to plant or interact with grass. No way to create a pasture, or a zone for the animals to pasture and the colonists to "auto clean" (cut trees, clean rocks). And this is what it is missingt. 

The the animals would inhabitate a pasture eat only grass. In real life, a head of cattle consumes aprox. 1 acre of pasture per year, since we are in a game we can adjust it to "a cattle needs x square of grass per day, and grass growns x% a day." And with that you can start managing "Oh ok, I have a 16 x 16 area of grass, made for pasture, in this area I can create 32 muffalo, or 48 alpacas or 250 chickes. or a mish mash of all of them. Ah, but I should limit the area for 16 x 12 to make hay and store it for the winter period"

I believe that making this adjustment, creating "slaughtering bills" (So that you kill extra animals and/or female offsprings in some automatic fashion) and operating on animals, would be enough to make it worth herding animals.

Also, combat elephants with turrents on their back. Yeah.

[b0rsuk]

I want the ability to install bionics or personal shields on war beasts. A bear with painstopper. Or maybe administer go-go juice to a pack of elephants.

[RazorHed]

What I want to know is , why aren't elephants counted as caravan animals . Dogs too.

[FreyaMaluk]

As pretty much all systems in the game, this one also needs a re-doing.

My biggest issue is the amount of food an animal take. Chickens eats 1 whole meals. Bears can eat alot of meat (I believe it is 35 meat/day) And kibble. Kibble takes a fine meal worth of food, and never spoil. Kibble is the only way to feed animals in a sustainable fashion, and the cheapest way is hay + human meat (has just one downside). The animals you want to herd, are mostly herbivore. Alpacas, Muffalos, Chickens, Turkeys, Pigs, Megasloths, etc. And what do they mostly eat? Grass.

As now, there's now way to plant or interact with grass. No way to create a pasture, or a zone for the animals to pasture and the colonists to "auto clean" (cut trees, clean rocks). And this is what it is missingt. 

The the animals would inhabitate a pasture eat only grass. In real life, a head of cattle consumes aprox. 1 acre of pasture per year, since we are in a game we can adjust it to "a cattle needs x square of grass per day, and grass growns x% a day." And with that you can start managing "Oh ok, I have a 16 x 16 area of grass, made for pasture, in this area I can create 32 muffalo, or 48 alpacas or 250 chickes. or a mish mash of all of them. Ah, but I should limit the area for 16 x 12 to make hay and store it for the winter period"

I believe that making this adjustment, creating "slaughtering bills" (So that you kill extra animals and/or female offsprings in some automatic fashion) and operating on animals, would be enough to make it worth herding animals.

Also, combat elephants with turrents on their back. Yeah.

about the kibble question... there is a pretty clever mod that makes kibble more productive without making it overpowered. It just changes the food value from 0,05 to 0,01. So when an animal needs only 0,3 nutrition, the rest 0,02 won't get eaten if not required. The amount of kibble made was changed accordingly as well. Instead of 50, you'll get 250, which changes nothing with respect to amount of recipe ingredients.
Efficient Animal Feed by Zerg620 http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=821337641&searchtext=kibble

[FreyaMaluk]

I want the ability to install bionics or personal shields on war beasts. A bear with painstopper. Or maybe administer go-go juice to a pack of elephants.

+1
For now, "A Dog Said" mod is what you need, really...

I hope Tynan can integrate bionics for animals in the future

[taha]

So far, from my experience and from what I've read on forums, is hard to imagine a normal scenario where tamed animals are a must.

1. If they are not chickens, they usually eat more than they produce. If they are chickens, game becomes a click fest when you try to micromanage them. Not to mention the load on CPU.
2. If you try to use them in combat, you soon find out they are too fragile, and the investments (time, food, space, training) does not worth the effort.
3. If you want them for the mood boost, means your colony is doing bad (that's why you want the mood boost, right?), and if your colony is doing bad, means you cant afford pets.

Usually people who are pro pets, are people playing in n00biomes, where animals are already plentiful. I can't image why they need pets there, but they do, and they are vocal about. Eh...


PS Tip. The only way to feed a herd via "cultivated grass" is to plant dandelions. Low nutrition value, but they are always full-grown, so herbivores can eat them. Still does not worth the effort.

[b0rsuk]

Kibble is not efficient at feeding, it's somewhat useful for feeding fractions of hunger but pemmican also does that. The only serious advantage of kibble is ability to use insect meat and human meat. Using hay with kibble is only a small bonus. Hay isn't that much more efficient, if at all.

And the kicker is... Animals skill doesn't factor into your success with animals ! It's only used for taming and training. Alpacas don't need to be trained to grow wool. Chickens and pigs don't need to be trained to breed. You can't fail milking a cow. Shearing an animal seems to alway succeed. No training for nuzzling (and I no longer see my animals nuzzle anyway, it happens once per several in-game days at best). Pack animals - mufallos and dromedaries - can be used in caravans right away, as opposed to a 7/7 hauling trained elephant which can't. All of the above functions can be obtained by simply purchasing animals.

Soo.... the only time you want Animals skill is when raising a battle force of bears, wolves, elephants etc.

[Catastrophy]

So I've tried battlefants now. Not levée en masse style, mind you. I used one with two brawlers and a line of gunmen luring out bugs from a massive hive. It kinda sucked - my rifles were at least skill 13, assault rifle users and they still hit the elephant wandering in front of them. Quite often. They rarely hit their brawler buddies, though. And the battlefant didn't stand really long against some 6 or so spelunkers and bug queens.
Now weighing all the hassle that comes with their food provisions and zone fiddling I can say they don't do for me. Food requirements quite ruin animals for me, I feel even the small fowl just eat too much.

I got muffaloes, too, and I'm back making kibble again because using the NPD is a pita. I tried meals but all the cooking micro is getting on my nerves. Next playthrough it gonna be NPD again - for everyone.

[GarettZriwin]

Usually people who are pro pets, are people playing in n00biomes, where animals are already plentiful. I can't image why they need pets there, but they do, and they are vocal about. Eh...

I guess equivalent of hard worker trait on colonists is not good enough for you even in case of mass producing legendary weapons. armors or cothes/goods for sale...

[b0rsuk]

Usually people who are pro pets, are people playing in n00biomes, where animals are already plentiful. I can't image why they need pets there, but they do, and they are vocal about. Eh...

I guess equivalent of hard worker trait on colonists is not good enough for you even in case of mass producing legendary weapons. armors or cothes/goods for sale...

I guess you don't like strawberry icecream...

[taha]

Usually people who are pro pets, are people playing in n00biomes, where animals are already plentiful. I can't image why they need pets there, but they do, and they are vocal about. Eh...

I guess equivalent of hard worker trait on colonists is not good enough for you even in case of mass producing legendary weapons. armors or cothes/goods for sale...

Dude, by the time you get your 1st legendary thrumbo fur parka, from a hardworking 2x passion lvl15+ crafter, you've already got 20-50 times (as in 50k+ silver)  it's value from a field planted with smokeleaf and an useless bad-back-bad-eye-cancerous-one-handed-lazy colonist who made joints. Really. Should I also put into account tailoring table, a ton of thrumbo food and electricity vs. a sun lamp?

[Shurp]

You know, this makes me think the problem is that joints are OP.  Maybe I should force my colonists to make more difficult drugs for the drug economy.

[Seeker89]

To me a few problems are better with mods. There is a growable grass mod. I found the mod that adds rabbits was good for meat and leather. And using the manger mod allowed from the management that I don't care to do. The hardest part was I couldn't grow grass fast enough... But that was solved with another mod.