Comprehensive animal data and best animals

[dp_alvarez]

Hey Folks,

I've been playing with animal data in rimworld for the past couple days and would like to share my results.
I wanted to analyze which are the "best" animals for each purpose, and also compile a spreadsheet with comprehensive and up-to-date animal data as the wiki is out of date and missing a lot of information.

All the raw data is contained within the two spreadsheets attached to this post and on these links:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1zBY-ncCgdaqDff43jAaamGebNd8d-yXGXOgiGiPRp_I
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1NHjyX0xvqhsXbLLhlnbuffPzlRTjpUNs1SFISQyZn1k

First, lets think about the main uses for animals:

• Combat, keeping your valuable colonists safe from harm
• Caravaning, obviously
• Hauling, to free up precious work time
• Producing materials (wool, leather and chemfuel)
• Convert grass and other unusable nutrition on the map to something edible
• Convert vegetables to animal products
• Convert unusable meat (human or insect) to something edible

Now for the list of which I consider the best animals for what purpose.


Muffalo and Dromedary
Muffalo is the overall best caravan animal. Also produces both wool and milk, good efficiency as food producers at around 30%. Also usable as combat animals if needed.
Dromedaries are a bit worse on all aspects, but get them if you have no access to muffalos or want the camelhair.
The most versatile animals. Get them as fast as you can, but pay attention as they do eat quite a bit in the winter.

Wolves
Overall the single best and most versatile animal. Eats very little, is the second-best hauler and a very good fighter, what else is there to say?
If you can choose only one animal after muffalos, get wolves for sure.

Warg and Bears
The two overall best combat animals. Bears have stronger attack and more HP, but wargs eat less, move faster, produce less filth, take less work to keep tame and reproduce at double the rate.
They can also haul, but not the most efficient for that purpose. You can let them free on the map and they will hunt their own food, since almost no wild animal can harm them.

Cougar and Panther
Second-best combat animal. Not as strong or efficient nutrition-wise compared to bears, but still very strong.
Since you likely will take a while to get enough bears/wargs, keep some of those around to complement them.

Cow
The best nutrition producers, by very far at over 60% efficiency. One cow produces enough milk for 3 fine meals per day.
No other animal comes even close to cows in terms of nutrition efficiency, as the closest herbivore is around 30% efficient.

Foxes
Best hauling animal nutrition-wise. Does require some minimal work to clean their filth and keep tame, but that should a far smaller problem than nutrition on most colonies.
Also the most efficient way to turn human/insect meat into animal meat. Just drag the corpses to a room with a few foxes and kill the foxes when they reach adulthood. Nutrition efficiency of around 50%.

Boomalope
Produce chemfuel. Can also be used for meme combat tactics as kamikaze units (boomrats are better for this).
Pay attention as they eat quite a lot.

Lynx
Good combat animal if you can't get wargs, bears, cougars, panthers or wolves.
If you can, prefer any of the above.

Labrador Retriever
Best hauling animal work-wise. They consume a lot of food, so mostly useful if you have too much food and rather free-up some of your colonists time.

Thrumbo, Megasloth, Elephant and Rhinoceros
Most powerful combat animals, and elephant is also the best caravan animal. They are, however, extremely expensive to keep fed, hard to obtain and/or hard to keep tame.
Use them if you can afford it, but for the same nutrition you could have a lot more of the other animals instead.
Great if you live somewhere with year-round grazing.

Cobra
Highest DPS per nutrition in the game. They are quite slow however and have little HP.

Boomrat
Reproduce VERY fast, move fast, are hard to hit, and eat little, great if you want to use kamizake tactics.

Tortoise
Well armored, hard to hit, reproduces very fast and eats little. Problem is they do too little damage and are far too slow for most purposes.

Pigs, Chickens and Wild Boars
Avoid. Widely recommended, but they actually are bad at producing food, bad haulers and bad fighters.
Better options exist for every purpose. Of course if you have no better option avaliable, use them.

[Pangaea]

Thank you. This is a fantastic piece of work, and extra math and analysis compared to the XML files. Great stuff!

Scratching my chin a bit about cows being "best" to slaughter as babies (noooooooooooooooo), coupled with their high nutrition efficiency, which presumably also relies on milk from the adult females.

[Canute]

Just one comment about hauling animals.
Sure wolf's and bear got a good combat role because of their strenght.
Their weakness are their high wildness.
The tamer will spend significant more time to renew the training since he will fail more often.
And i miss the Husky, they are basicly inpair with Labrador.

[dp_alvarez]

Just one comment about hauling animals.
Sure wolf's and bear got a good combat role because of their strenght.
Their weakness are their high wildness.
The tamer will spend significant more time to renew the training since he will fail more often.
And i miss the Husky, they are basicly inpair with Labrador.

Huskies eat 25% more for just 10% extra combat power, labradores are much more efficient.

You are absolutely right about their wildness. I don't find that to be a very large problem in my games, but could be depending on your play style. So another animal that is less efficient nutrition-wise but more efficient work-wise could be a better choice.
The problem I have with that is the animals that are work-efficient eat SO MUCH MORE than bears/wargs.

[Canute]

Huskies eat 25% more for just 10% extra combat power, labradores are much more efficient.

Husky come's in charge when you play on extreme cold biome's since they have -50°C and Labrador just -30°C which is ok for the most other biome.

The problem I have with that is the animals that are work-efficient eat SO MUCH MORE than bears/wargs.

Once you start to play with mod's you should take a look into Minion's :-)
These yellow Tictac's are very nice multitools.