Birds outperforming everything

[Tam]

Any reason to farm something except chickens/ducks ?
Do you?

Tried ducks, and boy, they are damn awesome - free of labor work (only unfert eggs hauling en masses), consumption is low, egg production is very high.
Why did I bother with all these milking animals when I can get 20 ducks and fear nothing. Previously I had to make 3 hydroponic farms to maintain rice for colony+animals, at this very moment ONE farm is enough thanks to birdies and their low appetite.
Can not imagine chickens' performance.

As carrying animals you have horses/donkeys, they are riding animals as well.

Any reason to bother with other animals except "I am bored and want to try something else" or "I have them until I get my birds"? Especially those with wool sheering? They always looked like animals for low difficulty, because building wealth with a wool farm seems not ok for higher difficulties.

[glass zebra]

Milk is easier to dosage, having the same nutrition as other stuff. This is important when you are making survival meals or when you mix ingredients. 1 spot of milk storage just behind 1 spot of meat storage will make your all your little meat gets used up and nothing gets wasted. Milk is also edible raw without a mood penalty and can be consumed by event the highest royals. Combined with it's shelf life, it makes for decent travel food early on or even later on for royals.
Wool is very good for temperature clothing and I guess for cape trading, though I always got enough leather to keep my crafters busy, but if you got lots of crafters or human primacy, it might be a decent option. Anything that isn't a chicken or a duck will also give you leather, even all of the other birds will. How useful that is for you you have to decide yourself. In plain math for raw feed for nutrition, chickens always win.
Wool and milk animals are also available in better temperature surviving types and mixed labour types for e.g. caravan carrying or even riding. If you are feeding them rice, you can also make simple meals to feed cows for really efficient (not work efficient) feeding. You can not do that to chickens because their tummy is too small. A cow can even feed itself magically with its cooked milk and still give you leftovers.
Many other animals also eat other things than plant stuff e.g. raiders. I guess that is the main point of pigs.

[Astasia]

Cows are 50% more nutrient efficient than ducks, and 25% more than chickens. You do have to milk them, that's the cost for them being "better."

Dromedary is the same overall efficiency as chickens, again you have to milk them rather than just collecting eggs, but they also serve as pack animals.

Chinchillas are slightly worse than chickens, but their fur is one of the best temperature insulators in the game as well as being very beautiful and valuable.

Tortoises are the most nutrient efficient animal in the game, more than twice as much as chickens, but you need to build up a lot of them and they require taming upkeep.

If there is something specific thing you want from animals then there is probably a best option for you in the game with nothing else being very comparable, but that animal is going to be different for different people and different games depending on the circumstances. There is a rough balance for animal nutrition intake to protein output, this includes eggs, milk, meat, and how quickly they breed, their utility is for the most part balanced against their efficiency so that if they are better at certain things they are less efficient as food, or if they have an extra cost they are more efficient. Most animals have a niche.

The only animal in the game that falls way below this and isn't viable for one reason or another is the alphabeaver.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Astasia:

The only animal in the game that falls way below this and isn't viable for one reason or another is the alphabeaver.

Their niche is to keep the swamp trees at bay. You an assign them basically a zone that looks like a walking path through your map and they will keep it a bit free without much colonist input. I think at least. Never tried. You an also just build a stone path.

[pauloandrade224]

Originally posted by Tamm:

Any reason to farm something except chickens/ducks ?
Do you?

Tried ducks, and boy, they are damn awesome - free of labor work (only unfert eggs hauling en masses), consumption is low, egg production is very high.
Why did I bother with all these milking animals when I can get 20 ducks and fear nothing. Previously I had to make 3 hydroponic farms to maintain rice for colony+animals, at this very moment ONE farm is enough thanks to birdies and their low appetite.
Can not imagine chickens' performance.

As carrying animals you have horses/donkeys, they are riding animals as well.

Any reason to bother with other animals except "I am bored and want to try something else" or "I have them until I get my birds"? Especially those with wool sheering? They always looked like animals for low difficulty, because building wealth with a wool farm seems not ok for higher difficulties.

Chicken are even better they produce a ton of eggs said eggs can easilly give u a hundred chickens and they are quite meaty to boot for such a quick to grow creature

Just make sure u dont get too many chickens tho

[Astasia]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

Originally posted by Astasia:

The only animal in the game that falls way below this and isn't viable for one reason or another is the alphabeaver.

Their niche is to keep the swamp trees at bay. You an assign them basically a zone that looks like a walking path through your map and they will keep it a bit free without much colonist input. I think at least. Never tried. You an also just build a stone path.

I guess I was thinking more in the terms of breeding them as a nutrition supplement to your colony in addition to whatever possible utility. I don't think it's possible to breed alphabeavers since they half starve to death every night, and keeping more than a few fed is impossible. If you had a single alpha beaver and a really large pen though I suppose it could be beneficial to keep the trees cleared so more grass could grow, or for that path idea. I don't know though, they aren't very intelligent at finding food and will sit there and eat fresh saplings that provide 0 nutrition while their malnutrition continues to build at a rapid pace. I suspect they would starve themselves eventually even with plenty of sufficiently grown trees in their allowed area.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Astasia:

I guess I was thinking more in the terms of breeding them as a nutrition supplement to your colony in addition to whatever possible utility. I don't think it's possible to breed alphabeavers since they half starve to death every night, and keeping more than a few fed is impossible. If you had a single alpha beaver and a really large pen though I suppose it could be beneficial to keep the trees cleared so more grass could grow, or for that path idea. I don't know though, they aren't very intelligent at finding food and will sit there and eat fresh saplings that provide 0 nutrition while their malnutrition continues to build at a rapid pace. I suspect they would starve themselves eventually even with plenty of sufficiently grown trees in their allowed area.

I didn't mean to keep a pen clean but really just to keep certain parts of your map tree free. This is really just useful on maps like a swamp, where the vegetation can make it extremely hard to walk through the map and you can't put down flooring on marshy soil to prevent tree growth. Breeding them is possible, but not good. No idea why none of them lost their baby due to malnutrition in my test, but you just need to tame/buy a few to keep paths clean anyway. I just tested it for some more days in a swamp and they do not seem to starve even in winter. They can eat freshly spawned trees and did run very far to do so. Saplings still provide 15% nutrition. They do not eat life plants either, so you can just let them roam through your fields.

[Tam]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Cows are 50% more nutrient efficient than ducks, and 25% more than chickens. You do have to milk them, that's the cost for them being "better."

I suppose so, but for me the biggest concern was lab-free farm, and birds are damn nice on that, Simply separated males from females, and that farm 24/7 producing eggs even with my animal handler lying in a hospital due to mechanoids raid. With usual cow/yak farm I was constantly malding about no1 able to milk these creatures during the recovery phase.
Smol colony problems I know, still.

But for a big colony isn't it easier to slap more birds without worrying about efficiency.
It must be a 15+ people colony to not think about lab work.

[psychotron666420]

I'm over 100 hours into the game and haven't even seen a chicken or duck yet.

I got like 30 horses and I culled my cows and alpacas to minimal.
I keep my 50 animals fed with just a massive hay fields, haven't had problems.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by Tamm:

Originally posted by Astasia:

Cows are 50% more nutrient efficient than ducks, and 25% more than chickens. You do have to milk them, that's the cost for them being "better."

I suppose so, but for me the biggest concern was lab-free farm, and birds are damn nice on that, Simply separated males from females, and that farm 24/7 producing eggs even with my animal handler lying in a hospital due to mechanoids raid. With usual cow/yak farm I was constantly malding about no1 able to milk these creatures during the recovery phase.
Smol colony problems I know, still.

But for a big colony isn't it easier to slap more birds without worrying about efficiency.
It must be a 15+ people colony to not think about lab work.

There are going to be situations where you want animals to milk/shear/train because it's what one or more of your colonists are mainly good at and you want to throw as much work at them as possible to keep them productive and skilled. Like if you are doing a rancher ideology with animal specialists and all you have are chickens, that's kind of a waste right.

During winters when chickens can't graze, the difference in efficiency does directly become colonist work as well. Requiring 50% more hay for the same amount of protein over the course of the winter is not an insignificant investment, especially on say a boreal map with longer winters.

Milk in a cow doesn't go bad AFAIK. You can just let it sit there until your handler is ready to collect it, much like crops you generally want an excess sitting in a freezer so you can deal with situations where you can't harvest for a while for whatever reason.

[MP]

There is also a performance cost associated to animals. Hundreds of chickens are going to drag your FPS down. Cows make more sense then, as one cow provides the nutrition of
dozen? chickens. Plus, they're more efficient at converting hay to nutrients, someone on Reddit did the math and came up with 60% hay to nutrition efficiency, whereas chickens have 20%.

Take that however you will. Chickens are great to bootstrap your ranch, however cows are an excellent long-term option.

Also, a cold snap murders chickens like nothing, while cows withstand it just fine. It was a carnage, chickens froze before I managed to build a heated barn.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Milk in a cow doesn't go bad AFAIK. You can just let it sit there until your handler is ready to collect it, much like crops you generally want an excess sitting in a freezer so you can deal with situations where you can't harvest for a while for whatever reason.

The milk also doesn't come out during downtime but eggs do, so it's still wasted.

Originally posted by Astasia:

During winters when chickens can't graze, the difference in efficiency does directly become colonist work as well. Requiring 50% more hay for the same amount of protein over the course of the winter is not an insignificant investment, especially on say a boreal map with longer winters.

I feel like you could expand on this because chickens eat ~0.22 per day and give 0.25 per day while cows eat ~0.86 per day while giving 0.7, if you just follow the info card. The actual numbers seem different though.

Originally posted by MihaP:

There is also a performance cost associated to animals. Hundreds of chickens are going to drag your FPS down. Cows make more sense then, as one cow provides the nutrition of
dozen? chickens. Plus, they're more efficient at converting hay to nutrients, someone on Reddit did the math and came up with 60% hay to nutrition efficiency, whereas chickens have 20%.

That 60 20 number is 4 years old and animals have been changed multiple times since then. Now it's mostly about baby chicks wasting nutrients, not grown ups.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

I feel like you could expand on this because chickens eat ~0.22 per day and give 0.25 per day while cows eat ~0.86 per day while giving 0.7, if you just follow the info card. The actual numbers are not like this though.

The other factors include how much meat an animal generates divided by the time it takes to reach adulthood, and how much nutrition a baby consumes before it reaches adulthood. Basically though cows provide a lot of meat in addition to milk.

https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Animals#Feeding_animals

Overall efficiency of a cow is 1.436, chickens are 1.253, ducks are 1.003.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Astasia:

Originally posted by glass zebra:

I feel like you could expand on this because chickens eat ~0.22 per day and give 0.25 per day while cows eat ~0.86 per day while giving 0.7, if you just follow the info card. The actual numbers are not like this though.

The other factors include how much meat an animal generates divided by the time it takes to reach adulthood, and how much nutrition a baby consumes before it reaches adulthood. Basically though cows provide a lot of meat in addition to milk.

https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/Animals#Feeding_animals

Overall efficiency of a cow is 1.436, chickens are 1.253, ducks are 1.003.

For a cow to reach adulthood For a cow to be pregnant most of the time you have to add a male for every ~4 cows+, which is an additional 0.215 minimum food cost per day per baby (usually more). If you only eat chicken eggs or the milk, you do not have this cost. I've had this discussion lately: https://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/3199244571753184505/#c3199244571758332423
The numbers on the wiki do not reflect the total cost, just a cost per life stage. The total efficency per animal is less than the adult number and it does not include the cost of the male which does not give milk while only eating and rolling on impregnation. Raising a cow for meat will often give you less than 1.0 nutrient efficiency but leather in addition to the meat. On top of that, I have no idea where the wiki got the consumption per day numbers from. They seem to add baby consumption and mother consumption (without father consumption) to reach some number. If you just add the father consumption, this is usually already close to 1.

[Tam]

Originally posted by MihaP:

There is also a performance cost associated to animals. Hundreds of chickens are going to drag your FPS down.

You font have to breed hundreds, 30 ducks already spamming egs like mad, I can not imagine how good chickens are.

[Astasia]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

For a cow to reach adulthood you have to add a male for every ~4 cows, which is an additional 0.215 food cost per day per baby. If you only eat chicken eggs or the milk, you do not have this cost. I've had this discussion lately: https://steamcommunity.com/app/294100/discussions/0/3199244571753184505/#c3199244571758332423
The numbers on the wiki do not reflect the total cost, just a cost per life stage. The total efficency per animal is less than the adult number and it does not include the cost of the male which does not give milk while only eating and rolling on impregnation. Raising a cow for meat will usually give you less than 1.0 nutrient efficiency but leather on top of the meat. On top of that, I have no idea where the wiki got the consumption per day numbers from.

If you aren't using enough male chickens to fertilize eggs to grow chickens and slaughter them shortly after adulthood, then you aren't gaining the meat per day value of the chicken so the efficiency would be lower.

The chart serves as a comparison of all animals rather than an exact number to build a base around, which is why I assume the male numbers aren't factored in since breeding interval is fairly tight and there's enough RNG to make it difficult to exactly calculate. In a situation where you are optimally breeding, harvesting and butchering that is how those animals perform compared to each other.

The wiki states it requires 1.45 nutrition for a chicken to reach adulthood over 12 days. I don't know how that number was determined either, but given the 0.22 nutrition per day of an adult chicken and the 0.09 nutrition per day of a baby, it sounds like it's in the right ballpark.