Dealing with bear’s making a mess..

[Furry Eskimo]

Soooooo,, I started training animals, and they kept eating all the food so I expanded operations and made a massive farm specifically for followers and their food.. Eventually got some polar bears and kept them safe until their population grew. Eventually I let them loose and they turned out to be great workers and defenders! Now I have an army of workers who focus on moving food from the field to my gumbo freezer. Problem is though, they make a huge mess, everywhere.. Any suggestions? I’ve seen somewhere that hay floors are more resistant to animal filth, but it seems silly to tear up my silver floors to replace them with hay. For context, I had too much money from selling crops and decided to hide it in the floors to save space in the megapodes of warehouse I have. Also, shouldn’t I be assaulted by bandits for having this much stuff?

[Playzr 🐵]

I would suggest the bins from Vanilla Furniture, they're slow to clean but if you build enough in and around your barn they might be able to keep on top of it or make it more manageable. Then there's Project Rimfactory. You can build a small drone station that will clean the area around it, or if you have the resources you can build a larger drone station that will haul and clean the whole base for you. This is if you want to completely automate the cleaning, hauling and maybe even growing, cooking and feeding of your bear army. Sounds like you could do with replacing your army of haulers with drones and let the haulers do more skilful things.
Alternatively, you can have a colonist or army of colonists set to always clean. They're always so miserable though. You could give them a limited area so they're not off cleaning some corner of dirt at the edge of your base.
I take it the army of bears is for defending your colony rather than to sell them / produce meat / fur. Maybe the raiders are afraid to get mauled by bears.

[Vermillion Cardinal]

If the concern is indoors filth, have the storage areas be connected directly to the outside via alternative entrances. Zone your animals so they path through them instead. Should do the trick unless of course your entire courtyard is made out of silver, I guess.

Assuming you aren't having them draw stuff from virtually everywhere, you can also narrow their operating areas (like killbox zone to the incinerator) to reduce the places that need cleaning caused by them wandering about. They only need food and a place to sleep besides that after all.

Grab yourself a slave or two dedicated to cleaning while you're at it.

[steflef]

Misc. Robots, Misc. Robots ++, and Autocleaner mods all offer automated ways to keep your base clean as well. I have a preference for the Misc Robots ++ units, as they can be assigned a zone, and can all be recalled / activated with one click :)

[kevinshow]

Make it where the storage that they take food or items to, is on the outskirts of your colony.

The other case is, you can have similar animals helping to haul, but don't let it be the bears. Smaller animals with less filth, like dogs, can do the trick as well.

[xicewindex]

Forbid the bears in living/working area's and make a stockpile just outside and let them haul there. pawns/dogs can take over and haul it in the freezer.

Tamed predators are great to haul from the map to your base (fields outside, steal, chunks, wood ...... )
But inside your base they give more hassle than benefit imo.
After all, they are most usefull for defence and the hauling is just a small extra benefit

For inside I prefer to use dogs and those are zoned so they never step outside except to the stockpile the predators haul to

[Furry Eskimo]

Hmm, ok, thanks for the advice! It may in-part be by fault since I have most of my animals in the bottom and left side of the map, while the upper right is devoted to farming, so there’s a lot of traffic in the middle.. This made sense to me originally because it meant people were always crossing the key location in the middle of the map. As my success grew I started making stuff out of silver just to get rid of it, plus it made people happy. The storage rooms are now impossibly massive and have internal and external entrances, with double layered walls. The housing is next to it and has a wall-gap-wall to reduce penetration from expletives. I used to let dogs live with the people, but then the polar bears were better, so I swapped them out, and I didn’t realize that was an error.. I did that because the farm didn’t reliably have enough food and I wanted the bears to stay as close to the people and extra food as possible. Now my colonists have a mental seizure each time they go into the fridge due to the ugliness, so I’ve had to place multiple top tier massive statues in there. Every so often I lock the whole place down and tell them to clean, but there’s no way to set a weekly priority level, like,, oh, ot’s Sunday, everyone focus on cleaning!

[Playzr 🐵]

Are you using any storage mods or just placing every stack on a single tile? Because that can really take up a lot of room.

[Furry Eskimo]

Originally posted by Рlαγζr 🐵:

Are you using any storage mods or just placing every stack on a single tile? Because that can really take up a lot of room.

I wasn’t using any mods. Once locked inside the characters more efficiently stack some of the items, but stack sizes seem quite small.. Frustratingly, iron seems to be more rare than silver. Sure there’s iron in the mountains, lots, but actually building weapons with it is very costly.. I originally used it for making walls, and I’ve begun to replace it all with stone, but I didn’t realize I’d need a non-stop stone cutting station, so my waste stone pile isn’t very close, and it takes a while to process.. Lots of items get moved around and around, leading to more dirt on the floors. On a few occasions I’ve been tempted to ditch all the animals I have, since feeding them takes so much food in the winter, but I need meat too. I think farming wasn’t designed to be done this way, haha. I basically just roped off half the map and build one big barn..

[Playzr 🐵]

The breeding does get out of hand after a while. Chickens are very bad for this which is why I don't bother. There comes a point where I sell all the males so they stop breeding or it becomes laggy and impossible to feed. It's very easy to become attached to the animals and not want to kill them for meat, but ask yourself do you have the bears or do the bears have you?

[Furry Eskimo]

lol. It took me forever to get chickens.. I collected almost everything else first, but I didn’t realize how many there would be.. I’ve been trying to convince myself to just focus on a few.. I was collecting milk, and furs, etc, but most of it just seemed the same. Wasn’t sure what was good and what was bad. The extra milk seemed to Dave a few of my people from starving, but those animals also seemed to eat the most, soooooo…. I think I tamed one of those super rare animals once, but it ddin’t produce much fur, so even though it was valuable I was left wondering why I’d even want to bother with them.

[Playzr 🐵]

If you want resources and more haulers there are mods and other ways to obtain them. Having an animal occasionally haul one item is nice until the novelty wears off, then you want something more substantial. Cows are good for milk, so you don't have to hunt for meat to make lavish meals. Chickens are good for eggs. Having to manually cull the herd can get tiring, especially with chickens. There are ways to automate that with Project Rimfactory. Then there's the Replimat mod that you just chuck raw food into and don't need cooks anymore.

[glass zebra]

Vanilla has auto-slaughter settings.

[Furry Eskimo]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

Vanilla has auto-slaughter settings.

I figured that out eventually, but it didn't help much when I have ~5 of every animal, leave al the babies alone, and don't kill pet animals. lol, I probably invented my own problems..

[Vermillion Cardinal]

Sometimes you just have to be tough; neuter excess animals and/or sell/slaughter down to what is needed regardless of age (if slaughtering, just set things so they target the young as well). Set things so all fertilized eggs get tossed into a freezer as soon as possible.

Your people must be spending a lot of time in or traversing your filthy storerooms while in bad moods for them to go crazy about it; I'm cramming all my barn animals into a small space, and it's utterly horrendous in there without straw flooring, but my guys just shrug it off as they milk the cows and replenish the nutrient paste dispenser.

[Playzr 🐵]

5 of every animal? What is this, Noah's ark?