Starving Chickens

[katsuragi]

I'm not satisfied with manufacturing drugs and guns.... I want a chicken farm too

Problem is they are all starving? What do chickens eat? It says "live plants" but I can't find anything to plant around them that they eat.

[FrozenSnowFox]

Plants must be 60% or above grown for animals to eat them. However letting them eat plants is insanely ineffecient. You could feed a baby chick on 1 haygrass or a haygrass plant. The plant if harvested could feed the chick for weeks but if you let it eat the thing itself it'll eat the whole plant. Haygrass is generally the goto for animal feed since it can be stacked up to 200 per square and harvests in fairly large batches in a fairly reasonable timeframe.

Of course if you don't want to bother with haygrass you can just zone off an animal area with grass and let them feed off that. Just watch out for predators because bears, wolves and all sorts of critters will eat them.

[katsuragi]

ok thank you. I was trying haygrass but I didn't let it grow long enough before I paniced and switched it to something else.

Colony is low on food right now after 2 months of acid rain and blights so these chickens are pretty much doomed but next time....

Edit: ok... not doomed per say. I set up a single square to throw simple meals into until the hay garden is ripe

[FrozenSnowFox]

Originally posted by katsuragi:

ok thank you. I was trying haygrass but I didn't let it grow long enough before I paniced and switched it to something else.

Colony is low on food right now after 2 months of acid rain and blights so these chickens are pretty much doomed but next time....

In the future always have a greenhouse or hydroponics room to fall back on. You can make a greenhouse simply by walling and roofing a patch of plantable soil and adding a sun lamp then heating/cooling the room as necessary. It's very good for surviving long Toxic fallout and Volcanic winters. If you need fast food potatoes and rice are best. Rice in hydronics bays grow at 230% speed.

[katsuragi]

This is crazy because this is absolutely the greatest trial these colonists have faced.

I didn't plan ahead or anything I was just like "chickens? hell yeah lets raise chickens"

Then suddenly I had 50 chickens decimating my garden before I realized what they were doing.

[FrozenSnowFox]

Originally posted by katsuragi:

This is crazy because this is absolutely the greatest trial these colonists have faced.

I didn't plan ahead or anything I was just like "chickens? hell yeah lets raise chickens"

Then suddenly I had 50 chickens decimating my garden before I realized what they were doing.

Yeah chickens are natorious for exploding in population if you don't manage them right. You either butcher the babies or you seperate the roosters so they can't fertilize the eggs otherwise your colony will be devoured by the things. If you haven't already go into full culling mode, slaughter everyone except a few pair of breeders until you get a handle on the situation.