How many animals is too many?

[rkagerer]

Still playing my first ever Rimworld game (in A17), and my settlement has grown to 49 colonists.  That's fine, and I know them each by name.  But I'm drowning in animals.

Got around 130 huskies and labs, 200 alpacas, 100 muffalo, 135 hens and a few other randoms (handful of roosters, half a dozen grizzlies, etc).  Feeding everyone takes some work.

Roaming herds do wander in here and there, but the wildlife in my local map is effectively exhausted.  I naively tried to become self-sufficient on chicken eggs but those buggers are lawnmowers on steroids.  The first season they vacuumed up nearly all the grass on my map before I realized what was going on.  After discovering hay is a more efficient nutrition source, I installed some giant fields and bred a ton of dogs to help pull in the yearly harvest.

I try and stockpile at least 100k each of hay and corn over the growing season.  Also found it helpful to send most of my pack animals to a nearby "animal colony" over the summer.  This keeps them from munching up all the grass around my primary base, so when I bring them back for the winter I can still let them out to graze during the occasional mild streaks.  I can ping-pong them between settlements when one has a cold snap.  The second base, which runs just a skeleton crew, is also a decent source of meat and minerals.  Once it's all mined out, I tear it down and move it.  (Already pillaged everything from two nearby map tiles and am on my third - I put this one a little further south and am hoping it might be more permanent).

That said, I'm still constantly starved for meat.  I trade for it.  When there are raiders I feed the bodies to the dogs (I don't butcher human anymore - don't like the global debuff).  I hunt the heck out of encounter maps - even fly in muffalo in air-express pods to haul it all home before the timer runs out. 

The dogs aren't shy about breeding and I finally realized a lot of my meat is going into their kibble.  So now new litters go straight to the slaughterhouse.  My puppy-butchering handlers are not popular for this ;-).  In spite of this I think I still might need to trim the pack down by half.  Which is a bit lamentable since they're all fully trained.  I also immediately butcher any pack animal that gets named, before they get a chance to bond (sorry, nuzzlers).

The reason I'm hoarding alpacas and muffalo is that I plan to split my colony - half will stay and build the spaceship, the other half will make the long journey to the arctic.  I'm working on stockpiling survival meals, high-end gear, rare building materials, etc.  No idea what I'll find when I get there, so I intend to haul a LOT of goods (I know I can trade, but neighbours aren't plentiful up there and I don't want to be stuck out on the ice under-supplied).

That said, I think I might have gotten just a little carried away  ;-).
How many animals are too many?  Am I insane?

Don't talk to me about lag.

I recently read cows are better than chickens (both from an efficiency perspective and in alleviating game engine pressure) and am thinking of switching, if only I can find a breeding pair.  Any guesstimate how many I'd need to sustain my colony purely with agriculture and domesticated animal products?

Blights are nasty, too.  Just had a blight that instantly took out HALF my crops at my main base, without warning.  That's a lot of corn.

Unloading large caravans is a pain.  I've hauled enough loot a couple times to fill up ALL my pack animals.  I send them to sheltered zone when they arrived and go through each animal to tell it to drop its items.  I wish there were a way to manage caravan animals "en masse".  Or at least a hotkey for the "Gear" menu so you don't have to drag your mouse cursor back and forth like crazy between each animal / menu click.  (If I don't do this my colony basically shuts down for several days while the haulers unload everything)

Any tips from other mastersmasochists who play the game to this ridiculous level of population?  (Unfortunately I didn't know about Colony Manager when I started...)

Click for pics: https://imgur.com/a/czpBW1D


(list keeps going)

[5thHorseman]

Wow I never have more than 2-3 haulers and never have more grazers than can survive on the grass that just grows on the map. I sell the rest.

[rkagerer]

Yeah I wonder if the game should have a mechanic that introduces disease when your animal empire becomes too overpopulated.  That would encourage players to slaughter/sell in order to counter the endless breeding.  If that were implemented it'd be nice if bonded animals were [mostly] immune to disease (makes sense since they'd spend more time with their owners than in the herd, and their owners would lavish more care and attention onto them).

[khun_poo]

To me, I think 30 doggos was an ideal hauler number. They can haul almost instantly. I don't like to breed a pair of doggos because the pregnancy slow down the mother dog and it is hard to control the dog population. I'm personally against slaughter my dog too (I'm a dog person lol).
So, I usually buy all the dog from trader in the same sex so that they won't breed.

Just like you mention above. Cow are superior to chicken. I love to have a cow around somewhat 1-1.5 times my colonist number. Bull should be limit to around 1-3 in numbers since they can't milked. Slaugther the mature bull and keep the young bull is good for meat too (but too much management :/).

About packed animal I like Elephant the most. They carry a lot, tough as hell, and walk very fast compared to other. The only downside is that they eat too much and can't produce anything. So, around 5 elephant is enough for completing world quest nearby your settlement (like destroy the outpost and carry back everything).

[Canute]

30 dogs ?
With B19 you need to retame them constantly, i don't think you can maintain this many at B19 anymore.

And because of these retame thing of B19 you need to rethink many old animal solutions.
Chicken you don't realy need to tame, just keep them in a room and drop hay/kibble into that room, and collect the eggs.
But a cow need to be tamed that you can milk her.
Currently i am unsure how many animal's a good animal handler can handle.

[khun_poo]

30 dogs ?
With B19 you need to retame them constantly, i don't think you can maintain this many at B19 anymore.

And because of these retame thing of B19 you need to rethink many old animal solutions.
Chicken you don't realy need to tame, just keep them in a room and drop hay/kibble into that room, and collect the eggs.
But a cow need to be tamed that you can milk her.
Currently i am unsure how many animal's a good animal handler can handle.

It's still doable with 2-3 animal handler. Dog have around 2 week until their tamable reduce. Their tameness is 0% too so is easy to re-train them with lv 7+ animal skill colonist.

By the way, In B19, even chicken or cat need to retame too.

[BLACK_FR]

I have skewed view because I play only Merciless. On that difficulty you have always consider what is optimal and what is excessive. My sense that you have to have fighting animals to help you with pod drop raids and have some utility in the same time. In B19 animal were nerfed (and that's good), so my opinion that "less than ten, but strong" is right answer.

[Canute]

By the way, In B19, even chicken or cat need to retame too.

Untamed chicken lay egg's too, so i think there is no reason to tame them.
Except you want them to move to a different zone/room.

[Bobisme]

i play B18, to many is when the game can't run lol, i had to massacre over 600 boars ,exponential growth, clicking a boars history would crash the game and the pawns would move a step and the game would freeze move a step n freeze heh.
(in total about 1000 animals in 1 colony.
lesson learnt lol

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[Bobisme]

The actual list of animals...

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[Canute]

Geeeeshhh, should we rename the game into Feed the Galaxy ? :-)

[b0rsuk]

Perhaps I'm alone in this, but I think self-taming and "alpaca/husky/labrador retriever join" events need to be toned way down. Having a highly skilled Animals colonist doesn't feel like much of an advantage in early game because you're spammed with animals. There's little satisfaction when the event is so common, and it EASILY overshadows Animals skill. To the point where they can be a major strain on your first winter's food supply, even a newbie trap if you're too soft to butcher them.

[sadpickle]

I'm not sure if animals are worth it, as a food source. They should be but at present I just don't see it. Chickens once produced quite a lot of eggs but the rate at which they lay eggs was nerfed and now I really don't think they're worth the trouble.

The main advantage of livestock is a reliable protein source. I played Boreal Forest where I thought I might need some but there is so much Elk, Caribou and occasional Muffalos that it's arguably the most meat-rich biome type available. Rearing animals might be useful in desert, where there's practically nothing of substance except occasional camels (elephants? I never saw any in desert). The main problem with rearing animals is everything worth slaughtering takes too long to grow, and requires enormous quantities of hay to reach adulthood. In desert arable land is at a premium so it might not even be possible to grow enough hay, and the biomes where arable land is abdundant have plenty of hunting.

That said dogs are still useful for hauling, and having alpacas/muffalos give you a reliable source of wool that can be sold, and they are useful pack animals.  But I feel like the ranching-for-food aspect of animals got nerfed into oblivion.

[Scavenger]

Yeah I wonder if the game should have a mechanic that introduces disease when your animal empire becomes too overpopulated.  That would encourage players to slaughter/sell in order to counter the endless breeding.  If that were implemented it'd be nice if bonded animals were [mostly] immune to disease (makes sense since they'd spend more time with their owners than in the herd, and their owners would lavish more care and attention onto them).

He did already make an upkeep cost for animals, to have some sort of penalties who just producing a massive Army for relatively free haha. But having diseases spread would be awesome also!

[Bobisme]

I avoid boars now, they breed uncontrollably, need the neuter option.
pigs and boomrats are also terrible for that ( i play B18.. i heard they nerfed the boars, for good reason )
I have a few pigs, i kill all adults bar 2 every few days..  to feed my uncontrollably breeding panthers lol

The players that want to breed like crazy get the issues of having to feed them all, so there is still a cost.

Disease spread would be a great addition