Underwhelmed by pig farming

[Celestial]

Train them to haul. Pigs and wild boars are in my mind the best haulers, since they'll eat relatively anything, don't eat too much, don't breed too fast or two slow, and are great at carrying stuff.

[OFWG]

Train them to haul. Pigs and wild boars are in my mind the best haulers, since they'll eat relatively anything, don't eat too much, don't breed too fast or two slow, and are great at carrying stuff.

This. So far I play in goldilocks biomes and pretty much the only hassle with pigs is having to let them shelter indoors during deep winter cold snaps. I pen them in and grow hay for them after a couple years once I'm lavishly established, but they can generally manage for themselves as long as you don't get too emotionally attached to the ones that won't make it through snowy / fiery / grizzly bear-y periods.

[Shurp]

In reallife, i know that on an ideal case scenario, pigs only give 1/4th the weight of the food they eat. while chickens have it at 1/1.5.

Rimworld chickens have a hunger rate of 0.25 against 0.4 for pigs. 

Chickens produce an egg a day for 0.25 nutrition (0.45 cooked), which leads me to think chickens produce twice as much food as they consume (if they could consume eggs).  Chickens rock.

A pig yields 72 meat for 3.6 nutrition (6.5 cooked).  But that's after feeding them for 30 days.  Hmmm, that would be 12 units of food -- pretty close to 1:4.  Sounds like Rimworld might have it about right.

So it's really a question of just how badly your colonists want bacon in their tortillas

[bierdeckelkanne]

Wow I didn't know Chicken were this awesome. So if you would grow Haygrass, make Kibble from Haygrass and eggs you would make a profit? On it's own it would be not very useful but you could use this cheap kibble to feed other animals too.

[Hans Lemurson]

Wow I didn't know Chicken were this awesome. So if you would grow Haygrass, make Kibble from Haygrass and eggs you would make a profit? On it's own it would be not very useful but you could use this cheap kibble to feed other animals too.

I believe you could make a profit in the sense that for the same amount of Haygrass, your food output will be higher if you convert it all into egg-kibble to support ~2x as many chickens.  I don't think you can feed chickens in a closed system without any agriculture, though.

[b0rsuk]

I've tried getting chickens on ice sheet, but it's bloody hard. You need luck getting the right trader, and caravans are often impossible.

[Shurp]

We clearly need a bioengineering mod that allows you to download the chicken program from the net and grow chickens in vats on ice sheets instead of waiting for a trader to show up with them.

Or wargs.

[Hans Lemurson]

The wild carnivores all have surprisingly low hunger rates.  I don't think any of them would actually allow for a self-feeding fur farm, but they look like surprisingly good candidates for good feed conversion.  Foxes have a hunger rate of 0.12.  Wolves hunger at 0.2.  Less than a chicken, and certainly better than a Husky!

Of course, the wiki may be inaccurate on some details, so this ought to be verified.

[b0rsuk]

The wild carnivores all have surprisingly low hunger rates.  I don't think any of them would actually allow for a self-feeding fur farm, but they look like surprisingly good candidates for good feed conversion.  Foxes have a hunger rate of 0.12.  Wolves hunger at 0.2.  Less than a chicken, and certainly better than a Husky!

In my last ice sheet colony I bought 3 grizzly bears and tamed one polar bear - or maybe it self-tamed ? Anyway this gave me good bear police for cases like infestation. I still had bugmeat to spare.

Pigs have thin, sensitive skin, they're vulnerable to temperature. You must heat the room well, and have wood for solar flare. Grizzly bears are just 10*C less tolerant than polar bears, so they're perfectly viable even if it's  -75*C outside. Double walls + a few heaters (I put hydroponic room between hospital, barn and living quarters).

[Limdood]

animal meat farming only works with grazing....pretty much that way in real life.  The only rimworld exception would be if you regularly get insanely large raids (or any size raids...consistency is the big factor) and store the bodies, but even then, you run a really awkward balance - too little corpses or a raid dry spell and your livestock starves to death, too many and you have a bunch of micromanagement to deal with the overflow of raider corpses.

Pigs DO have a really nice niche in the game though.  They are easier to train than boars and eat a much MUCH wider range of food than dogs, making them ideal haulers in biomes where they can graze, or where you grow up lots of haygrass for other reasons.

[b0rsuk]

I think ice sheet *would* work with chickens.

My problem with grazing is that you must stockpile hay or kibble for winter, and it's only available if you... grow anyway. Once you start growing haygrass, you may as well grow corn or whatever.

[Shurp]

Pigs aren't *that* cold sensitive. I have a heater in my pig closet set to -7'C. The corpses freeze and the pigs don't.  Unlike chickens I don't have to worry about newborns freezing. The piglets are happy too.

And my core pig population can survive on hay while I wait for more bodies.

[Boston]

A good rule of thumb in "real life" is that it takes 10x the amount of land to make one pound of meat than it does to make one pound of plant matter.

Animal husbandry is not a very effective use of land, it is just that ...... well, a lot of the land on the planet isn't very good for agriculture. SO you might as well use it for SOMETHING.

[b0rsuk]

A good rule of thumb in "real life" is that it takes 10x the amount of land to make one pound of meat than it does to make one pound of plant matter.

Animal husbandry is not a very effective use of land, it is just that ...... well, a lot of the land on the planet isn't very good for agriculture. SO you might as well use it for SOMETHING.

So the right way to fix grazing animal is adding new common soil type - mega-gravel or something like that. If you had soil with about 40% fertility, not even potatoes would do well in it.

[janat08]

My logic goes as that if i want fine meals I'd rather rely on growing more rather than explicitly chasing after meat, it hypothetically working out if the pigs do the hauling. It's definitely not a problem if you get 140% fertile zone that gives you 3k of corn (grows faster too {I suppose it gives extra too}).