How to get my herd animals to only eat haygrass

[Spitz the Sheikah]

If they are on my fields with haygrass growing, will they only eat that and not my other crops? Also, any way to make them stay in a specific area? Cause I'm making a city district and a farming district of my colony, and I want my muffalo herd to stay on the farm. Is there any way of doing that?

[MayoCulpa]

Zone restrictions!

I dunno how other people do it, but I like to create a different allowed area for each general category of animal, like Animal haulers, Grazers, Small animals etc. If you assign all the herd animals to a zone which does include the stockpiles where you keep your haygrass (or the field if you want to let them eat from there), but does not include the fields of other foods or your fridge, that should work.

This wiki article has more info about the controls:
https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Zone/Area

[Monoxide]

If they are on my fields with haygrass growing, will they only eat that and not my other crops?
They will eat any plant they have access to.

Also, any way to make them stay in a specific area?
Yes, zoning restrictions which I highly recommend (see below)

Cause I'm making a city district and a farming district of my colony, and I want my muffalo herd to stay on the farm. Is there any way of doing that?
Yes, again zoning districts.



A few things to note - Feeding them from "growing" haygrass is extremely inefficient. If you want to use a crop to have them graze from, use dandelions. They spread on their own as well, helping out.

You can set a zone and dictate what animals go there, and they will only go in that zone unless they break and leave the map. By default the game gives you two zones; area 1 and area 2. I usually use these two until I need to make more. I set my animals to area 2 and typically give them a grass field (mod).

A good vanilla layout that I often use is to make a long, rectangular zone for animals. At one end have a barn for sleeping, in the middle have a dandelion field, and the other end make a silo with harvested haygrass. The benefit to this is that the animals will have a barn to lay eggs in if you have those types, and they will graze through the field before getting to the haygrass reserve. This helps keep food supplies built up for fallout, winter, volcanic winter, or any other issue that comes up.

[Spitz the Sheikah]

ohhhhhhh I knew about restriction zones, but haven't used them so far. Plus, I didn't know you could use them for animals too! Thanks both of you

[MayoCulpa]

Edit @ OP: Yvw!

Originally posted by Monoxide:

A good vanilla layout that I often use is to make a long, rectangular zone for animals. At one end have a barn for sleeping, in the middle have a dandelion field, and the other end make a silo with harvested haygrass. The benefit to this is that the animals will have a barn to lay eggs in if you have those types, and they will graze through the field before getting to the haygrass reserve. This helps keep food supplies built up for fallout, winter, volcanic winter, or any other issue that comes up.

That sounds like a good setup. And dandelions are a great tip, I hadn't known they spread on their own! I've never had chickens until recently and have always minimally heated my barn (if all the animals' minimum comfortable temperature is -20C, why not, eh?). But I keep seeing all their eggs "ruined by temperature." Can't let 'em wander around outdoors in the winter, I guess. Not even inside of walls as trapline bait for carnivorous wildlife.

[The Knowledge Seeker]

Time to make a few adjustments! Thank you for the dandelion tip! I know they add to beauty, but didn't know that animals can graze on them.

Yeah, I learned about the animal zoning and have been having luck with it. I set it up just inside my future wall that will have a trap maze. It is where I am dumping the corpse, and what doesn't get eaten, gets turned into kibble. I might just do away with that and build a double walled room to burn with the campfire till I get real burning power.

[Astasia]

Raw dandelions still have extremely low nutrition per unit of work and time compared to harvested haygrass. I don't know how large a field you would need to be able to disable sowing and sustain it per animal, but that would essentially just make it normal grazing, that's pretty much what you would need to achieve to make them effective though.

[MayoCulpa]

Hmm I see what you mean about labor efficiency of dandelions vs wild vegetation. If the dandelions spread and sprouted on their own they'd still have to do it really fast to outpace how fast the herbivores would eat them. And yeah harvesting haygrass vs letting the animals eat the sprouts clearly seems like the better choice in terms of plant yield.

Early on before I have extensive walls, I second-guess myself a lot on "giving the grazers maximum range area / not letting them get too far from the barn so they can get inside in a timely manner when raids come."

I've never had a dumping zone close to my base - I tend to put it fairly far away, tucked into a rock crevice or something to minimize colonists looking at corpses by accident. Carnivorous animal haulers are all zoned to "everywhere except the prison" anyway so they can go out and snack when they feel like it. In my current game I actually had to add extra dumping zones because my first one was full and I didn't want to extend it out into the open field next to the rock formation.

[M.K.]

Originally posted by MayoCulpa:

... labor efficiency of dandelions vs wild vegetation. If the dandelions spread and sprouted on their own they'd still have to do it really fast to outpace how fast the herbivores would eat them....

All you need is a sufficiently large ratio of dandelion field per browsing animal.

It is nowhere near as efficient as haygrass at producing nutrition per surface area, but it is infinitely more efficient at producing nutrition per colonist labor input, as dandelions regrow themselves, the same way wild grass does.
And a field of dandelions provides much better browsing nutrition than the same area under natural grass.

[martindirt]

I'm use 2 zones for animal food production.
1 growing zone is the grazing zone. Growing tallgrass, pinecushon cactus (or wat) -desert biome-, or rimind paintbrush.
2nd zone for haygrass, animals not allowed there, but the hay goes to the backside of the barn, where they can eat it, when they don't have food (or when the barn is full).

Its a lot of farm labour work, but I'm like to have a farmer, who do nothing else but farming. (Maybe hauling, delivering and cleaning if he have some empty time). Usually, I'm end up with 1-2k corn, same rice and near 1k potatoes. When I'm reach this point, I'm order my cook to mill flour from the grain, switch the 3 fields to healroot/smokeleaf/dream flower/some tasty veggies or fruit... So farming never stops at my colony(s), only when cold days or toxic coming.

[MayoCulpa]

Hmm. This is a lot of good food for thought! (Hehe, food.)

Maybe I can experiment with dandelion fields, say, under the part of my turbines' exclusion zones that don't have solar panels on them, or even the nearby area outside my walls where I've extended the grazing animals' non-emergency allowed zone. Thus far I've been able to stick to my "zero conduit" power build - avoiding Zzztt the hard way aka fun way! - which uses up a lot of land space.

My boreal forest has a 20 day growing period. I sited my base sort of midway between three of the bigger patches of rich soil on the map. I've got a one-sunlamp greenhouse on one of them but my goal is to make two-sunlamp greenhouses on each of the other ones. I'm planning on using the greenhouses for colonist food production and planting mostly haygrass outdoors during the spring. So I could try a mix of haygrass and dandelions -- maybe zone the grazing animals so they can eat the dandelions but leave the haygrass alone till it's harvested and in the barn.