Maintaining and breeding livestock

[jerrypocalypse]

Couple questions regarding keeping livestock animals.

Are the offspring already tamed?

How long does it usually take to get offspring of alpaca, guinea pigs, and hares? (those are the only ones I've managed to get pairs of so far, 1 pair of each).

Is it recommended to make a pen to keep them all in? If so, what are some basic tips for this?

How do you set colonists to collect things like alpaca wool?

[Overeagerdragon]

Offspring will be tamed but NOT TRAINED

Pregnancy differ per animals with Elephants taking forever to breed and chickens breeding so fast you might end up at a critical mass situation where they breed faster than you can butcher them. In your case Alpaca's will be the slowest at some 15 days (IIRC) whereas the Guinea Pigs and Hares will take around 3 days. I might be totally wrong on gestation time though....

Didn't understand your 3rd question...but I think you meant to ask whether you zone them....people differ on that. Personally I prefer to make a large barn and a pasture (about 2x the size of the barn) and keep animals in there via zoning. I'll make 1 zone the pasture (includes the open field and the barn) and 1 zone for animal safety which only has the barn....that way I can quickly get my boomrats and boomalopes inside if there's a raid and I can't spare them as mobile bombs.

Colonists that have Handle/Animals at a high priority will automatically sheer/milk any animals that are ready to be done so. You can check the animal for Milk Fullness (at 100% they can be milked by a handler), Egg gestation (at 100% they will lay...that label will also indicate if the egg is fertile or not), and Wool (whici includes exotic "wools" like Armor plate sheddings if you play with modded animals)

Hope that helped :)

[Praeceptorem Poloniae]

1st question: Yes
2nd question: If your pair of animals can produce offspring, you can check how long pregnancy takes (if you hover over pregnancy icon in animals tab you can see progress in [days passed]/[pregancy period]
3rd: Own what? Barn? If those animals are not haulers (or you have no grazing area) restricting animoos to only barn is sensible area provided you have way to provide them with food. If you have grazing area, I would keep my omni/herbivores out of my barn, sending there only in case of emergency such as raid
4th: Worktab - Handle - besides taming, it covers slaughtering and harvesting animal products

[Kittenpox]

If you're okay with mods, this one is particularly good for farming animals:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=715565262

[jerrypocalypse]

Sorry, there was a typo in the 3rd question, I fixed it. It should have said should I make a pen for them. You both answered what I was asking though. I hadn't though about a barn plus pasture area, I'll definitely be using that idea. Thanks!

Some elaboration on breeding. Do the animals generally get pregnant fairly quickly or is it RNG where I could get unlucky and have it take weeks before the pregnancy timer even starts?

And do you have material preferences on material? I'm thinking maybe limestone just to keep it fireproof. I'm in my first year of this playthrough (I recently started playing with the Royalty update after not having played since EA), so I don't have access to plasteel or the like yet.

I'm avoiding mods at the moment and just playing vanilla with the Royalty DLC

[Praeceptorem Poloniae]

Breeding... I think you can call time that is needed for animals to mate based on RNG
About materials - if possible, I make all my structures (with exeption of beds) from non-flamable materials, but if I'm pressed for time/have no access to such, then I use less than ideal materals like wood or steel (also plasteel is flamable, but far less than wood, but if you are going for metal with both strenght and non-flamability, uranium is material to go)

[Overeagerdragon]

Originally posted by jerrypocalypse:

Sorry, there was a typo in the 3rd question, I fixed it. It should have said should I make a pen for them. You both answered what I was asking though. I hadn't though about a barn plus pasture area, I'll definitely be using that idea. Thanks!

Some elaboration on breeding. Do the animals generally get pregnant fairly quickly or is it RNG where I could get unlucky and have it take weeks before the pregnancy timer even starts?

And do you have material preferences on material? I'm thinking maybe limestone just to keep it fireproof. I'm in my first year of this playthrough (I recently started playing with the Royalty update after not having played since EA), so I don't have access to plasteel or the like yet.

I'm avoiding mods at the moment and just playing vanilla with the Royalty DLC

I can vouch for colony manager but that's up to you.

As for the other questions you asked:
Whether an animal will get pregnant from any romantic encounter with another animal is largely up to RNG (though I swear there's hidden modifiers at work that we as playerbase simply don't know of. I swear chickens are more fertile than germs on a toiletseat)

As for materials; if your barn is part of the outer wall or direct inner wall after the outer wall I highly recommend Granite as it has the highest HP-stat out of all the non-flammable (but inexpensive) materials but DEFFO go for something inflammable if you want to try your hand at breeding boomalopes/boomrats.
If you're playing your game as a basebuilder and have the time/resources; then I would deffo check out more valuable materials like Uranium now that turrets have become such a maintenance drain AND maybe build a seperate area inside your barn for animals that tend to go feral if untended or have side-effects upon death (like the boomalopes). You can build some interesting trap rooms by combining double or triple layered walls in your boomalope barn and then covering the floor in highly combustable materials.....just don't tell the geneva convention ;)

[flu007]

Animal pregnancy: I think that, if you see the animals getting some lovin' - which is basically indicated by hearts above them - then it's a guaranteed pregnancy, but not sure about that. If not, then the success rate seems to be quite high, at least.

Do keep in mind, however, that you won't know that they're pregnant until they're in their second trimester. (At least for mammals, with eggs you can see straight away whether they're fertilized or not.)

[jerrypocalypse]

Perfect, thanks everyone! Barn construction will begin in the spring!