Food for Animals

[PyroMancer]

I've seen in mentioned that feeding animals Kibble is the most efficient means in term of nutrients gain for growing animals to get food. However I have been doing the math on this and it doesn't seem to add up.

Kibble requires 1 Meat and 1 Veg worth of Nut to make 50 Kibble. That's 20 meat and 20 Veg to get 50 Kibble. All the items have a 0.05 Nutrient value so you are only getting a 25% increase on your Nutrient.

However a simple meal requires 0.5 Raw food worth of Nutrients and finished simple meal gives 0.9 Nutrient. Thus you gain an 80% increase in Nutrient value by using simple meals to feed your animals.

[Henry of Skalitz]

Kibble can use insect meat, human meat as meat ingredient and hay as vegetable ingredient. Can be cooked faster than simple meals as well.

[Astasia]

Kibble is absolutely not the most efficient way to feed animals. It's OK for feeding carnivores allowing you to put some hay into their diet and expand your meat supply (though large predators are fine eating all vege simple meals), but it's wasteful to feed it to omni/herbivores as just feeding them raw hay is much more time and resource efficient.

Mostly, kibble is travel food for carnivores on caravans. If you take a pack of wolves to raid some base a week away, having a lot of kibble on hand is very useful.

[gimmethegepgun]

Kibble is also much more efficient than meals when feeding small animals like chickens, since they'll only take as much as they need instead of eating way more than needed by eating a meal.
Still, it's less efficient than pemmican for the same purpose, and really not worth it if you're using hay.

Originally posted by Astasia:

Mostly, kibble is travel food for carnivores on caravans.

Though, do note that wargs can't eat anything other than raw meat or corpses.

[Kay]

Originally posted by PyroMancer:

However I have been doing the math on this and it doesn't seem to add up.

I did my own, mainly stuff you didn't seem to consider:
A grizzly bear requires .56 nutrition a day. It eats a simple meal a day and its wasting a whopping .34 nutrition a day eating that meal.
It eats kibble and its wasting .04 nutrition a day.

A husky requires .8 a day.
.1 is wasted from the simple meal
Nothing is wasted from kibble.
In fact, since kibble is made in batches of 50, you have around 3.1 days of food for a single husky every time you make kibble. Since it ate ~16 pieces. You only have 1 day of food for a husky per simple meal made.

It is more efficient than simple meals purely because it wastes fewer resources if overeaten. Don't just look at how much nutrition is gained, but also look at how much could be lost to the void when an animal overeats to fill its stomach. As there is no bonus when anything overeats in this game. Just a net loss.

Also, here are some other bonuses kibble has over simple meals.
Doesn't require wood or electricity to make as butcher spots/tables don't require power to operate. Meaning that during a flare, you can still make food for your animals.
Cannot transmit food poisoning.
Much faster to make compare to simple meals.
It doesn't spoil, only requiring being in a roofed storage building and not in water.
18 pieces of kibble = 1 simple meal. Remember, you make 50 pieces each run. This can equal more days of food for your animals.

[VoiD]

I mostly used it as a way to convert nutrition as mentioned above.

Nutrition isn't the only thing worth keeping in mind, making kibble also takes some extra labor from other activities.

[glass zebra]

Originally posted by Kay:

I did my own, mainly stuff you didn't seem to consider:
A grizzly bear requires .56 nutrition a day. It eats a simple meal a day and its wasting a whopping .34 nutrition a day eating that meal.
It eats kibble and its wasting .04 nutrition a day.

No they don't. They start eating the simple meal when they are at about a bit more than ~0.55 of 2.15 of their total stomach, getting up to ~1.45 and wasting exactly 0 in the process. They do not eat 1 meal per day just out of routine.

Originally posted by Kay:

A husky requires .8 a day.
.1 is wasted from the simple meal
Nothing is wasted from kibble.
In fact, since kibble is made in batches of 50, you have around 3.1 days of food for a single husky every time you make kibble. Since it ate ~16 pieces. You only have 1 day of food for a husky per simple meal made.
[...]
18 pieces of kibble = 1 simple meal. Remember, you make 50 pieces each run. This can equal more days of food for your animals.

And you make 1 meal from 10 raw food while the 50 kibble take 40 raw food. You get 4 simple meals from the resources that one batch of kibble needs, which equals the nutrition of 72 kibble. In you example the husky has food for 4 days if you use simple meals instead of the 3 days from kibble. However huskies do eat when they are missing ~0.6 nutrition though (not 0.8), so meals and kibble would be similar in efficiency, if it would be true that they are not wasting any nutrition of kibble.

The bonus of kibble is that you can water down the meat for your carnivores, that you need it for training (where meals can not be used), that it can waste less for animal with very small stomaches, that it lasts forever and is quickly produced with no poison. The go-to feed for herbivores is hay (of if you really wanna input a lot extra work power: simple meals) and for a lot of the others you can still raise efficiency by putting simple meals next to their sleeping spot. Kibble is for animal handlers and for easy storage.


If you wanna do the math, look at how much feed is produce per nutrition spend and the actual stomach fill up. Don't just look at the hunger rate and "produced per bill" and assume stuff from that. You examples do not reflect how animals eat in Rimworld.

[PyroMancer]

Originally posted by glass zebra:

Originally posted by Kay:

[...]
18 pieces of kibble = 1 simple meal. Remember, you make 50 pieces each run. This can equal more days of food for your animals.

And you make 1 meal from 10 raw food while the 50 kibble take 40 raw food. You get 4 simple meals from the resources that one batch of kibble needs, which equals the nutrition of 72 kibble. In you example the husky has food for 4 days if you use simple meals instead of the 3 days from kibble. However huskies do eat when they are missing ~0.6 nutrition though (not 0.8), so meals and kibble would be similar in efficiency, if it would be true that they are not wasting any nutrition of kibble.

You hit on what I was gonna mention after reading his post. Overeating doesn't matter as much as long as the overall gains are still higher. With Kibble you get 25% increase in Nutrition amount where as meals you get an 80% increase. So even if over eating drops that down to 30-40% in "some cases" it's still a higher yield.

Also late game I tend to favor larger animals so they have larger stomachs.

Originally posted by glass zebra:

If you wanna do the math, look at how much feed is produce per nutrition spend and the actual stomach fill up. Don't just look at the hunger rate and "produced per bill" and assume stuff from that. You examples do not reflect how animals eat in Rimworld.

On the feed production I'm assuming you are referring to Crop Yields?

The crop side of things is something else haven't really touched on in this thread but has been something I've give a bit of thought to. People rave on Kibble because you can use the fast growing Hay Grass for the food stock. But I'm not sure how much better this is. Looking at the Wiki it shows Hay Grass has a 1.39 per day. Where as the most recommended staple crop for colonist Corn has 1.05 per day. This is a tiny .34 more per day or 3 days to get 1 extra (0.05 Nut).

That however is raw numbers and if you factor in the process conversion that corn gets an 80% boost making it an effective 1.89 per day. Where as the Haygrass to kibble only gets a boost of 25% making it have an effective 1.74 per day. Then corn comes out on top even if the number of raw goods on Hay's side is higher.

But even when doing the math on that I feel it doesn't paint the full picture as those numbers on the wiki are pure grow time, it doesn't take into account sow and harvest times. This is most notable in Rice which has 1.08 per day yield rate. Yet every time I try to go rice I find I have a lot less food on hand and my colonist are constantly busy in the fields compared to when i setup a corn farm. So longer grow crops tend to work out better in the long run as they require less maintenance than short term crops. Which is why I'm not so sure the Haygrass quick grow rate is really as much of a point in it's favor.

Side Note: I always have a dedicated cook in my colonies with Bills set to Make Until. Early game it's often Make Meal x4 until 10. Then later I increase it as needed to ensure there is always a decent stock. This way I get long perish rates of raw foods while only needing small fridge for meats and colonist tend to eat the meals before they perish, though I still have small walk in fridge near dining area to store meals.

[glass zebra]

Hay is good to feed raw. Kibble has an advantage of being able to use hay, but if you have animals that can eat both hay and kibble, there is little reason to throw in animal products and work+haul time. Hay also stacks to 200 and lasts a long time, which is a big bonus for filling your barn. The last part of my comment your quoted was also still to the person I responded to. You can't just look at hunger rates to say how much nutrition is wasted on meals.

Sure you can compare hay with rice and then maybe think about making simple meals to feed to your animals, but harvesting hay and hauling into the barn is a lot less work than harvesting rice, hauling it to the kitchen, making meals and hauling those to the barn. Work time on crops do not matter matter that much with high plant work speed (this is especially true with Royalty fiend hands), but e.g. corn vs rice still has the benefit that your farmer needs to run around less. Hay does not only have more yield per day than rice, but also needs harvesting about half the time (but still more than corn) and no extra cooking after that.

That "tiny" extra that hay has more than rice is more than 30%, which is about the same "tiny" extra that simple meal nutrition has compared to raw hay. I've done simple meal runs with mushrooms->simple meals->milk and while it works, but it's a lot of extra work and more storage concerns.

Don't think of hay only to make kibble. It's a great raw feed. Kibble is really just for your animals that can't eat raw hay. Getting animal products is also the main reason why people ranch in the first place. There are also enough people who just train animals with raw veggies when possible.

[AlienWired]

Yeap!!! I always end up being food for animals...

Mostly mad squirrels.