Will animals die without food?

[Wolf]

Or do they simply enter a non-productive state until fed again?

I ended up with an overcrowded island and now they wont produce anything. Until I can offload some extra I wondered if separating some extra and not feeding them might also solve the issue.

[rdbury]

They seem to do fine without food, but you don't get milk/wool/whatever if they're hungry. Separating be sex seems to work and you still get animal products. The devs seem to be playing with overcrowding mechanics so your island doesn't get overcrowded too quickly, so how it actually works seems to be changing; what I experienced in my playthrough won't necessarily be what you experience. I'd say drop off the pets you have now on some suitable island, but a beacon there so you can identify it in the future. That will at least remove overpopulation as a possible variable.

[Tachyon]

You only feed them to initially tame them and after that it's just to get resources off them. They don't starve if you don't feed them, which is lucky because they currently don't feed from troughs. They aren't breeding either. They did both until a recent patch, so I've read in here.

[Blender McBiscuits]

No AFAIK they don't die. It's a "soft" survival game, you don't need to eat either.

Also AFAIK you can't drop the little bastards off into the sky either! You can put them on a platform, then destroy it, but I think they end up falling back onto your island! You could try offloading them onto another island, that ought to work.

Also separate them by sex. Have very few males, you can't milk 'em after all. For alpacas and sheep the sex doesn't matter, but still, have just one or two rams / whatever a male alpaca is called. Put them in an enclosure somewhere to keep them from bothering your females. I've been told on here that that works.

You can tell goat sex by the udders the female adults have, as well as the males having bigger horns. The same is true for sheep, the rams have big curly horns. And lovely fluffy fleece!

You probably need less goats altogether. Just a couple make lots of milk, which you only need for cooking, and maybe another thing. I'm swimming in milk with just a couple of female sheep to milk every day. Where wool is much more useful! Wool sails, IIRC, are much bigger than leaf ones. You get much more wind take with just a few of them, enough to shift a decent-sized island. And they're so much more attractive than crappy woven leaf "cloth".

There was an update where you could use linen to make sails but they've removed that now. Shame. Would have been good, even if it was just medium-sized sails. Currently flax is only good for making torches, it's easy to meet that need. Also the seeds are used in a recipe to make bread. One of the demo videos shows a woman player demonstrating a few recipes. Nice!

[Blender McBiscuits]

Originally posted by rdbury:

The devs seem to be playing with overcrowding mechanics

Yup, and it's pretty stupid! Animals will still breed if they're overcrowded, they'll still produce their products. Look at real-life farms, packed to the gills in horrendous pens in giant sheds, shut in body to body with their heads stuck through a steel gate to reach the enormous pile of food. They still grow, produce milk, and even breed if you sneak up behind them with the special tool.

A few cute animals on an island aren't going to get so depressed that their hair stops growing. They're overcrowded when they start falling off. And absent the ability to teleport around the island, if I plop them all in a lower field, they're not gonna bother me.