Uses for cats

[fritzgryphon]

They're not trainable, but you can still use them. 

Next time a raid comes, restrict you cats to a zone in the path of the enemies.  The enemies will be delayed a bit and split up as they engage the cats.

[XeoNovaDan]

As a person who recently concluded a run that recently died from FPS death due to a catsplosion, I can say that cats are definitely more useful than people think. They eat less than any other animal of their body size, and actually have the second lowest hunger rate out of all animals in vanilla RimWorld; only snakes are lower than cats here.

Cats nuzzle every 24 hours. While yorkshire terriers do indeed nuzzle every 15 hours, they also eat 2.5x as much; you can get 56% more nuzzles from cats for the same amount of food consumed. While nuzzles are only a relatively minor mood boost, they do stack fairly high, so having a lot of cats will probably keep your colonists pretty damn happy. That being said, look out for luciferium addiction if you plan to harness the infamous catsplosion.

As others have mentioned, they also make surprisingly good cannon fodder. Cats have a small body size, which means that raiders will have a harder time hitting them with ranged weapons. This is useful late-game when there is a lot of raiders, which usually means that there will be some degree of friendly firing in amongst enemy lines. Not just that, but cats reproduce fairly quickly, which means that losses can be recouped with relatively little issue.

[Seriously Unserious]

Otherwise cats are completely useless. Just like real life!

Not really. IRL cats are how we were able to form modern civilization. They were considered sacred in places like Egypt and China because they'd hunt and kill vermin that would consume and contaminate town food supplies and granaries otherwise.

In Europe, when foolish superstitions rose about cats being "bad luck" resulting in them being hunted down and killed, the populations of rodents, like rats, mice, etc, exploded and resulted in the Black Death (aka the Bubonic Plague), which wiped out between 50 and 80% of the population wherever it spread. All because they went through a period where they didn't like cats.

People like the Egyptians, Romans, Ancient Greeks, etc, realized that cats keep rodent and other pest populations down and help prevent famines and diseases from the contamination of food supplies.

I'd call that pretty useful, wouldn't you? We woldn't be talking about Rimworld on computers over the Internet if it weren't for cats. We'd all probably still be hunting and gathering in small nomadic tribes.

[zizard]

Cats only eat about 0.2 nutrition per day. This means you can have something like 4 cats per dog. It's also easy to make them eat 100% kibble, since they won't be hauling any food items. They're pretty efficient mood boosts as long as you make sure they aren't wasting full meals. I think a nice change would be to start with 2 yorkies or cats, of the same sex.

[cultist]

They have about the same uses as real-life cats. Being cute but aloof or as working cats, hunting pests. Unfed cats patrolling open fields are an effective deterrent against rats, squirrels or even hares. They're also an effective shield against hunting predators, as they breed quickly. This is mostly useful in the early game, unless you have huge tracts of land that can't easily be walled off to protect against wandering herbivores. And of course, cats won't hunt larger game so you'll need to supplement with wargs or wolves to guard against larger animals.

[cultist]

Otherwise cats are completely useless. Just like real life!

Not really. IRL cats are how we were able to form modern civilization. They were considered sacred in places like Egypt and China because they'd hunt and kill vermin that would consume and contaminate town food supplies and granaries otherwise.

In Europe, when foolish superstitions rose about cats being "bad luck" resulting in them being hunted down and killed, the populations of rodents, like rats, mice, etc, exploded and resulted in the Black Death (aka the Bubonic Plague), which wiped out between 50 and 80% of the population wherever it spread. All because they went through a period where they didn't like cats.

People like the Egyptians, Romans, Ancient Greeks, etc, realized that cats keep rodent and other pest populations down and help prevent famines and diseases from the contamination of food supplies.

I'd call that pretty useful, wouldn't you? We woldn't be talking about Rimworld on computers over the Internet if it weren't for cats. We'd all probably still be hunting and gathering in small nomadic tribes.

Cats are perceived as useless in today's society because we no longer need them for the job they were originally assigned to. Cats were used, as you say, primarly for guarding storehouses against pests. Dogs were bred to be hunting companions and guardians of our homes. That's the function they still serve, mostly. But we evolved past the need for "working cats" and never bothered finding some other use for them, besides as pets.
I'm sure there are people all over the world who live more primitive lives than we do, who still have working cats and depend on them to keep their food safe from rats and other pests.

[Aerial]

Cats are perceived as useless in today's society because we no longer need them for the job they were originally assigned to. Cats were used, as you say, primarly for guarding storehouses against pests. Dogs were bred to be hunting companions and guardians of our homes. That's the function they still serve, mostly. But we evolved past the need for "working cats" and never bothered finding some other use for them, besides as pets.
I'm sure there are people all over the world who live more primitive lives than we do, who still have working cats and depend on them to keep their food safe from rats and other pests.

Working cats still exist, even in the first world.  Talk to anyone who owns a stables or has a family-run farm. 

Animal shelters are starting to realize this need, too.  There are some pilot programs for "unadoptable" cats (i.e. the feral ones that hiss and scratch anyone who comes near) to be put in place as working cats in restaurants and warehouses.  The business owners they're adopted out to  don't have to do anything to support them, and they do a very good job of decimating the local rodent population.  They sometimes warm up to the  humans who work there, too.

I wish I could remember where I saw the article about it, but I remember one restaurant owner saying that before they adopted their working cat, there was a steady stream of rats going to and from the dumpster in the alley behind their restaurant.  After they got the cat, it became a trail of rat pieces, and after a few weeks they stopped seeing rats altogether.

[Boston]

Part of the issue is that

1) It can be pretty simple in-game to secure your food from wild animals especially vermin, exactly the opposite of real life

2) Vermin don't pass on diseases in-game, like they do in real life.

Ergo, you don't have much of a reason to exterminate rats and the like in-game, when in real life you had/have people with careers as vermin-killers. THAT is what cats were used for, to both protect the food source of their human owners and to prevent disease.

[Seriously Unserious]

Part of the issue is that

1) It can be pretty simple in-game to secure your food from wild animals especially vermin, exactly the opposite of real life

2) Vermin don't pass on diseases in-game, like they do in real life.

Ergo, you don't have much of a reason to exterminate rats and the like in-game, when in real life you had/have people with careers as vermin-killers. THAT is what cats were used for, to both protect the food source of their human owners and to prevent disease.

A job cats are exceedingly good at.

There are huge advantages to using domesticated natural predators to control pest populations over chemical based poisons as well. Poisons poison and kill indiscriminately, including things we DON'T want poisoned and killed, like beneficial plants and fauna, people and in general filthy up the environment. Cats, ferrets, small dogs, etc don't do all that. They eat, and fulfill their natural role, just with human support and protection.

For example, in farming, pesticides may kill off unwanted bugs like locusts, and aphids, that can damage crops, but they also kill off the beneficial bugs like bees, butterflies and the bugs that prey on the crop eaters, such as spiders, wasps and so on.

The bees are needed to pollinate the crops, otherwise they won't grow. Same for butterflies and many other pollinating bugs. Wasps, ladybugs, green lacewings, spiders and many others eat the pests, so when we kill them in our effort to get to the pests, we cripple nature's way of dealing with the pests, so when we stop poisoning, they have no natural predators left and their populations explode. Same goes for when they develop a natural resistance to the poison, which inevitably happens. Life finds a way to live.

Of course, most of that's not simulated in RW, and I wouldn't expect Ludeon to simulate that much in a game that's not really about ecosystems and biodiversity. I would be nice if they'd simulate very small pests like rodents and tiny bugs finding ways through/over/around walls and into crops and food stores though. That would definitely give a good reason to keep small predators around, and maybe add a training option for pest control or something, so animal handlers can train them to get better at it or do it on command as well as on their own when hunger drives them to hunt and eat.

I think if we had to worry about rats and such getting into our food supplies we'd all be singing the praises of those cats and small dogs.

[Perq]

Its RimWorld. For anything that cannot do work, the only answer is:
Hats and meat.