Alpha Animals Advice/Experiences

[SereneK]

I've always enjoyed this mod but I haven't met many of the new fauna it offers because they usually make rarer appearances than generic animals.
What experiences have you had with this mod's creatures and did they fulfill the function you intended?
Meanwhile, these are my experiences.

Feralisk - bastard strolled into the base, ignored the bullets, and ate someone's bonded dog. Not a corpse was left to bury. I learned to set traps earlier after that.

Radyak - This thing gives free uranium and just eats wild grass. Unrefined uranium goes for about $42 a piece. Great early-game pet.

Gigantelope - A less useful Radyak because I rarely use caravans. Can be butchered for an astounding amount of meat though.

Dusk Rat - Didn't observe any difference from normal rat.

Arcturan Sky Eel - once had a Manhunter pack of them. Gives electric shocks that often result in cardiac arrests. Great, fast, herbivores to tame and I think they nuzzle as well.

Frostling - got this one from a crashed cargo pod (Vanilla Events Expanded mod). Unfortunately I'm in a temperate forest biome, so this snow predator lives permanently in my fridge, nuzzling the occasional visitor. Effective combat beast but I don't like seeing blood on its pristine snow white fur.

Royal Ave - I have the rainbow ave and it looks really exotic. It's about as dangerous as a Cassowary.

Bouldermit - probably good for late-game when your ore resources are depleted, but even then you might just want to build a quarry. Butchering this creature is annoying, because it produces 3-4 random rocks in your abattoir and not much meat. But it apparently does a lot of damage and definitely sponges a lot of bullets. Still, felt quite bad killing it with a single Revolver-wielding colonist because it moves so slowly it couldn't land a hit.

Wildpod - they seem pretty good; generates free food and apparently great as a bullet sponge because it literally absorbs them (haven't tested against bigger raids yet). But I'll probably cry when they inevitably get roasted by Molotovs.

Side note: Pairing Vanilla Events Expanded mod with Alpha Animals gives you crashed Cargo Pods with animals from Alpha biomes even though you are not playing in an alpha biome map. It's Awesome (at least for now).