The logic around feed troughs needs some refinement

[YellowApple]

I've got a small ranch of about 7 Ulfens, and I've got 3 feed troughs.

Last winter my survivors nearly ran out of food because they spent all spring and summer dumping all their harvests into the troughs only for all those perfectly good fruits and veggies to rot away. I fixed that by forbidding everything except slop, and putting a workbench right by the troughs that does nothing but make slop.

Okay, that's fine and dandy, except now the survivors only fill one trough at a time, and won't put any slop into any other troughs until the first one they picked is completely full. This wouldn't be too much of an issue, except...

...the Ulfens are absolute morons when it comes to feeding themselves. They have no concept of "well another Ulfen's using the trough now, but I'll go feed myself as soon as that one's done". Nope, it'll just sit there starving to death until I go send a survivor to lead it directly to the trough, and even then that only fixes the issue if I'm lucky and some other Ulfen hasn't decided to feed itself in the meantime. I guess this is realistic (in the sense that IRL cows are also pretty dumb), but it's really annoying to have to micromanage basic biological functions to prevent cows from going berserk and designating themselves for slaughter.

I was able to partially work around the latter issue by ensuring that livestock can at least access both sides of the trough, which ain't ideal (it'd be nicer if survivors would instead evenly distribute slop across all troughs, or if I could build troughs of arbitrary length) but it's a start.

[ddan24]

Same here I feel like I'm missing something but it's annoying that it puts all of the meat in it

[Bjørn]

I haven't tamed animals in the game yet, but I've seen there are modded feed troughs in the workshop. Rreducing capacity or something, making them easier to manage / restock. And some have built in freezing, keeping food from rotting. Things like that.

[Daynen Drakeson]

Ranching mechanics need some serious work. Animals are too dumb to survive, too fragile to fight, too easy to swarm and too unproductive to be worth the time it takes to make slop. They need to be usable as beasts of burden or plowhands or something. Let us research some animal armor so they can run around goring bugs on their horns or whatever. As is, ranching is just not worth the trouble.

[Bird]

There's another issue. Pretty ugly one.

I've got only 6 ulfen, feeding them hay, mostly. (sometimes - in winter - exclusively)

But my survivors seem to get stuck in the trough-filling job for long times. i.e. they start filling the trough, and as the animals are eating some of it, they keep re-filling it, often 8 to 10 times, just walking up and down with 4-6 pieces of hay.

Then if I lower the priority of the task for the person, another takes it up and does the same running back-and-forth.

That is just moronic, and very time consuming.

And I really wish there was a way to stop this behaviour :(.

[Flin Fredstone]

Originally posted by Bird:

There's another issue. Pretty ugly one.

I've got only 6 ulfen, feeding them hay, mostly. (sometimes - in winter - exclusively)

But my survivors seem to get stuck in the trough-filling job for long times. i.e. they start filling the trough, and as the animals are eating some of it, they keep re-filling it, often 8 to 10 times, just walking up and down with 4-6 pieces of hay.

Then if I lower the priority of the task for the person, another takes it up and does the same running back-and-forth.

That is just moronic, and very time consuming.

And I really wish there was a way to stop this behaviour :(.

The screenshot and first part of the text might be of use to you.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1324130/discussions/0/6597293990959911381/#c6597293990959975169