How do you feed animals in a pen?

[Reck]

I've got a single donkey in a pen that's ran out of food and is now starving, how do I get my handler to bring some food over to him?

If I right-click the donkey I just get a "can not rope donkey: already in best pen" message.

[Zane87]

There is no grass growing in the pen? Otherwise, make a stockpile, set to high priority and only accept hay. Roof/enwall it with animal flaps to allow access and prevent deteriorating (will still spoil but hay spoils very slow)

[Kingskiller]

kibble works fine too . requires meat and hay but you can easy preserve it a lot longer

[Companion Cube³]

how do you move the kibble into the pen

[mcb0ny]

Make a storage in the pen for animal food with higher priority that the storage you are currently keeping that food in.

Animals can eat from storage zone or from shelves.

[AlienWired]

I plant hay garden plots all over....

[Limdood]

The same way you move any item to any other place.

Make a stockpile or shelf in the pen. Tell it to accept the food you want at a high enough priority that people will bring it. If the animal gets to serious enough malnutrition to go incapacitated, then you can rescue it to "an accessible unreserved animal bed or sleeping spot in a safe temperature"and they'll feed it manually if you have applicable food. But that only happens if they get incapacitated

Note that if you want to get fancy, you can use animal flaps, which count as part of the pen, but block temperature, to connect the pen to a freezer

[Ensoon]

I usually put shelf in the barn or in the pen - food won't deteriorate, spoils very slowly and animals can eat from it (same thing with meat and my indoor pets). Also when animals ate whole grass from some pen are I make them growing zone and plant hay there.

[MadArtillery]

get a larger pen so grass grows, grow dandylions, or make a stockpile and dump stuff it can eat in it.

[brian_va]

i usually use necromancy.

[The Blind One]

I recommend you plant dandelions in the pens of animals. Not only does it look aesthetically quite pleasing, dandelions are really good at providing raw plant food for your animals beyond what the official pen marker may say it provides.

Dandelions are objectively better than haygrass in what the raw plant provides when placed in a pen and when animals are naturally grazing in the pen. Dandelions grow in ~4.5 days compared too ~13 for haygrass and provide 0.25 raw nutrition vs 0.30 nutrition for haygrass.

In other words, if the plant is getting eaten by animals, you can get more than 2x as much food out of dandelions than if you had planted haygrass. 0.75 vs 0.30 nutrition in the same time.

Plz do note that if you plant haygrass outside of pens and harvest them, then haygrass IS better than dandelions. After 13 days of haygrass you will get 0.9 nutrition in hay vs 0.75 for dandelions.

Haygrass can also be saved and stored for winter times while dandelions cannot as they can only be eaten raw.

Hence plant dandelions inside pens to be eaten raw by animals, and haygrass outside of pens which is harvested manually and saved for winter.

[Matt]

I tend to build the pen quite big, and put growing zones inside... i set most of it to grass, and have a couple of 3 deep rows of Daylilies.

Daylilies grow quick, and give decent nutrition... you can grow hay or make kibble elsewhere, but that is what i usually have in my pens, and it works for me.

[peppermint]

Do not feed the animals. Wait for them to get malnutrition and collapse. Keep 5-6 animal sleeping spot with medical on.

This saves colonists a lot of time if you just need eggs, milk or fur. The colonists will rescue the collapsed animal as priority and feed them food in the medical spot.

[brian_va]

It's not everyday a quad necro comes around

[Triple G]

Originally posted by peppermint:

Do not feed the animals. Wait for them to get malnutrition and collapse. Keep 5-6 animal sleeping spot with medical on.

This saves colonists a lot of time if you just need eggs, milk or fur. The colonists will rescue the collapsed animal as priority and feed them food in the medical spot.

The thread is quite old, but instead of waiting for them to collapse, which means they need more food to begin with, as starvation increases the hunger rate, and would also mean they would miscarry the one or other time, one can also place one or more shelves in the barn, which contains the food You want them to eat, instead of having the colonists feed them with lavish meals and food rations, or ambrosia, or beer. One can adjust the priority of one shelf, so it gets filled if the actual animal food gets low. Like if You have winter / summer You put one shelf to haygrass and corn, and put it on low priority in the summer so it gets filled last with haygrass, but on important or critical priority in the winter, so it gets filled with corn if the haygrass runs out. Or if something like toxic fallout happens, which usually kills all life which is not under a roof, which also means the animal food - so You probably want a backup strategy anyways, which is independent of having no roof over it, as it may last like 30 days till You get new food even with a year round season. Like 15 till the fallout is over, and another 15 till You can harvest again, which is the most boring event in the game, so one could as well disable it...

If it´s about saving time, it´s faster to fill a shelf than to feed any animal or pawn - as in both cases they need to go the way anyways, but the action is faster, as it´s done instantly. And without a mod the pawns would feed the animals with the next best food they can find instead of food for the animals...