Rimworld Food Help

[rimmer21]

I don't want my animals coming inside of the colonists' structures and raiding my stockpile for food so how can i make it to where the animals have something to eat besides hay and kibble that my colonists' dont need for cooking? And also how do I feed my prisoners without giving them access to the stockpile?

[Hans Lemurson]

I often store surplus corn in an unrefrigerated granary next to my animal stables so that if their feed ever gets low, I can switch them to a more generous restriction zone that includes the granary should my hay/kibble stores get low for whatever reason, but not give them free reign of the entire 'home' area.

As for prisoners, you need to assign somebody to the "Warden" job, and they will periodically feed meals to your involuntary guests.  Alternately you can install a Nutrient Paste Dispenser in one of the prison walls and let them get their own food.

[Canute]

Or use RimFridges and place one at the prison area.
Hauler will refill these, so prisoner can feed them self. Works with a stack of pemmican too.

For Animal it is a bit more complicated.
At first create a new zone, assign your freezer and your dinning zone and other places your store food/meals.
Maybe include your growing zones too.
Then invert these zone (a button at the zone managment) and assign them to all non-hauling animals.
So the animals get forced to eat grass.
But it can happen that the animals don't find enough grass anymore (winter or some events). Once you get the animal Starvation warning, i unforbid some animal food (hay,kibble) i allready stored at the animal zone.

[Limdood]

@ OP....i mean...you kinda answered your question in your question..

How do you have them eat
- more than kibble and hay?
- that colonists don't need for cooking?
- without coming into colonist buildings?

well....you make it available to them.  They're coming into your buildings because
- they're allowed to
- that's where the food is

So you need to address those points.
- disallow animals from those areas (if they're used to haul goods into those buildings, then "oh well" - you're going to have to deal with some animal consumption)
- provide food in an alternate location
- provide food that isn't just kibble and hay, which means
    - it needs to be something the colonists won't haul to their buildings
    - it needs to be something that the colonists won't use in their cooking
    - it needs to be something that is plentiful enough to provide continuous food so the animals don't starve
           - seems like human meat, insect meat, and a different crop, planted and disallowed from cooking bills and cooking stockpiles is your best bet, ideally in a separate, refrigerated or frozen room that animals are allowed in.

As an aside, why do you need more than kibble and hay?  hay will feed all non-carnivores other than dogs, and kibble will feed all animals. 

If you're just trying to feed dogs, who won't eat hay or grass, and don't want to make kibble, then you can plant one of the 3 crops that isn't your main food source and just set a separate stockpile for them where the dogs sleep that only takes that crop, at a higher priority than the main cooking ones.  BUT if you're just trying to feed dogs, you're probably using the dogs for hauling, and they're probably hauling into the kitchens anyways, and they're going to occasionally eat your meals.  Your solution here would be to set 2 different stockpiles.  one for food that the dogs will haul, and one for meals and other stuff that the dogs will not haul AND shouldn't be eaten.  Then restrict the dogs allowed areas so that they are not allowed to get within 1 tile of the restricted stockpile.  They may still path through that area, but they won't perform any actions in disallowed areas, including eating.

If instead, you're trying to feed carnivores, then kibble is your best bet, since you can seriously stretch your meat by mixing it with veg into kibble.  Pretty much every time, it's the meat that's the bottleneck to keeping and feeding carnivores, so kibble solves that better than just providing them raw meat (more efficient too, 50 food units from 20 meat and 20 veg).

Finally if you're just trying to feed herbivores or non-dog omnivores, use hay or let them graze outside.  There's no need to reinvent what is already the best choice for keeping your animals out of colonist food supplies.

[Shurp]

If you're feeding large carnivores, why not feed them simple meals from vegetable and bypass the meat bottleneck altogether?

[B@R5uk]

Better yet! Why not feed all the animals with NPM? You can turn into NPM every raw food excess you have. And corn+NPM is the best combo for ratios nutrition/work amount and nutrition/growing cell.

[Canute]

Just need to train your animals to push the button on the NPD ! :-)

[B@R5uk]

Well, that's the problem! I solved it making dedicated freezer for NPM adjacent to barn with sleepeng spots for dogs and dromdaries. Also I set a zone that allows dromdaries to sleep in barn and go to freezer to eat. You can observe funny scene every moning: dromdaries waking up and running in flocks to freezer to eat. It's also should be noted that with large animals all the 0.9 nutrition of every meal is used without any loss.

If you make efficient layout NPD will have 11 adjacent hopers and it allows you to use one hungry pawn to produce 11 * 75 / 6 = 137 NPM in one approach. It will be enough to feed medium sized herd for 2-3 days. Just every second moning you need to select pawn heading to eat and make a bunch of meals for animals. This manual input is a tradeoff for high efficiency colony. Well, at least I trained my dogs to haul ingredients to hoppers.

But food efficiency was not the only concern which led me to invent this setup. With a lot of wool and milk animals the herd needs really large pastures, especially on hard biomes. And this lead to another problems: to train and handle animals pawns have to travel really large distances. Also wool and milk tends to be left outside for too long and deteriorates a lot becoming not suitable for selling. Indoor barn solves this problems, but leads to question of efficient food supply which I've addresed above.