Are pack animals worthwhile?

[Shurp]

So I decided to try out this caravanning thing, and I'm disappointed by the results.  Oh, it works great when I send a few colonists out with backpacks stuffed full of t-shirts and pemmican to go buy components.  But I thought I would try sending a bigger party out to buy some steel.  So I took a pile of pemmican and several alpacas and headed out...

Well, those are hungry critters.  I looked at how much pemmican I was chewing through on the way, compared it to the amount of steel I was going to buy... and decided it made more sense to stay home and just mine.  Trading 100 pemmican for 70 steel just doesn't seem like a good buy.

Has anyone else found a way to make caravanning for raw materials work out?  Or does it really only make sense for lightweight goods?

[Toast]

Are you in a cold area? I've only tried caravanning in year-round growing areas and the pack animals just graze along the way and leave my food alone.

[Shurp]

Oh, hadn't thought of that.  But no, I'm in tundra, there won't be any grazing out here.

And yes, I waited until summer before heading out.  Trying to caravan in the snow doesn't work at all

[Toast]

Interesting. That makes me like caravanning as a money maker even less than I already do. Every time I set out with enough goods to make a worthwhile profit, it ends up attracting bandits who are ludicrously overmatched for my caravan guards and usually with flame launchers to set our precious goods on fire. This is on the way to a settlement that is literally a one-day trip away, mind you. I don't know how people manage to make this new trading paradigm work for them. 

[Dashthechinchilla]

I brought hay on my caravan, but I was in a year round growth area so I couldn't tell if the pack animals were eating it.

[ITypedThis]

Interesting. That makes me like caravanning as a money maker even less than I already do. Every time I set out with enough goods to make a worthwhile profit, it ends up attracting bandits who are ludicrously overmatched for my caravan guards and usually with flame launchers to set our precious goods on fire. This is on the way to a settlement that is literally a one-day trip away, mind you. I don't know how people manage to make this new trading paradigm work for them. 

I feel your pain, but I must say I've never had any problem with the raids. The most I've ever gotten was two half-naked pirates with clubs charging two of my partly bionic soldiers with their custom-made excellent assault rifles. And I send them out for up to two weeks at a time!

[Chibiabos]

Definitely.  I modified my .XML to allow elephants to serve as pack animals (no idea why the heck that's not allowed by default) ... it creates magenta squares over the elephants because I guess the elephants don't have pack caravan graphics,  but they haul a lot.

I'm really struggling with getting caravans launched at all, though ... colonists forming the caravans stop sleeping in their beds and won't take in joy activities and quickly go into hard breaks and if one goes on a psychotic rampage and gets knocked down, the caravan is aborted :/

[DariusWolfe]

A thing I'm going to start doing, at least until Tynan or some modder fixes this, is create a "Staging Area", which will include an outdoor roofed area, the caravan spot and a Critical priority stockpile set to include nothing. When I want to send a caravan, I'll decide what I want sold, then set the stockpile to include those things; then, everyone who can haul can fill that stockpile. In the morning, I'll start the caravan, and it should dramatically speed up caravan loadng.

[RazorHed]

Great idea DariusWolfe

[Chibiabos]

Yes, going to do that too, including setting up a freezer (I often wind up resorting to raw Corn for food for the trip along with hay for pack animals, and sometimes find myself with a surplus of cold perishables).  I'll keep it unpowered until its time to "pre-Caravan."  That should probably help a lot.  Unfortunately I often like selling weapons in shelves which could be a pain to micromanage de-prioritizing shelf storage, maybe I'll just give up on shelf storage.

Greatly shortening caravan formation time I think would help a lot with the days-to-form with significant debuffs from no joy, not sleeping in own bed, disturbed sleep, etc.

[RayvenQ]

It's somewhat annoying that if you create a caravan without any pack animals in the caravan just collect all the items and head off, with pack animals, they load the items individually, I'm personally a bit mystified as to why they do that rather than collect everything they need all at once (like they do without pack animals) and THEN load it onto the animals, instead of grabbing one type of item at a time to load it.

[Chibiabos]

Or let colony haulers, including haul-trained colony animals (even if not in the caravan) help with the caravan-loading process.

[Blastoderm]

So far from my experience caravans are not worth it. Transport thousands of corn to get...a coupe thousands of silver? Not possible to preserve packaged survival meals from consuming on daily basis. Animals eating tons of foods.
I'd say make a separate colonies near settlements and make transport pods there and then just launch them to and from your main base. At least that way you can have an easi way of transporting resources. and fast trading

[BetaSpectre]

From a profit perspective Pack Animals aren't worth it for long term trade, but they do provide a means of transporting heavy items reliably without using up componentsome, steel, and Chem fuel.

There should be a tick IMO to feed the animals from the caravan menu with the caravan food.

Personally I find them useful for the muffalo wool, or camel hair. Though cloth, and devil strand are more useful, I just like the the theme

[Shurp]

Alpaca wool makes great jackets for tundra bases.  I was hoping to use the alpacas for caravanning too.  But it looks like I've sabotaged myself with the tundra play -- I didn't realize that spring and fall were nearly impassable too.  I really do have to pay more attention to the seasons.  It looks like the base which is 5 days away in "Septober" is likely only half a day away in summer.