How do I feed my chickens?

[BrowneHawk]

So I'm starting to get the hang of the game. STarted a new colony with 3 chickens. I have the animal zone for them set. Have boxes for them. I restrict them to the animal zone because i don;t want them in my base. Pretty sure they are eating the eggs they lay. Because I'm not seeing many eggs and they are some how getting fed. I tried to set up a nutrient paste dispenser but no one seems to use it. Was hoping the chickens woudl eat from it. The hopper has eggs sitting in it, I have all ingredients checked green.

Maybe I'm putting to much thought into this, any tips on raising me some chickens? I'n my last colony I burnt through most of the huntable wild life. Trying to fix that with chicken.

[huwie]

I set up a chicken area, set up a stockpile in the chicken area and store haygrass there

[Ficelle]

Like most animals, they eat grass on ground if there is any, so you dont really need to do anything.

In cold season, this grass die, so you need hey or kibble (or any vegetables)

Usually, i store hey and kibble the whole time with no access for animals.
They will go eat grass all by themselves.

When winter comes, i just put them all in the stored hey area.

[BrowneHawk]

Ahh one more thing to grow, didn't think hay was for the chickens. The hay option seems a lot cheaper and easier than having the paste dispenser no one wants.

[Ficelle]

Just look at the ! on the selected animal panel (or even colonists if you want to see some stuffs and stats...) to see what they eat and general stats.

Perhaps there are exception but mostly it is

Kibbles for any animal
Hey for any non strict carnivorous
Better food if you want

[BrowneHawk]

pretty sure the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ are canabalizing the eggs.

[CmdrJohnGimbal@EliteDangerous]

Yes the other animals will eat the eggs so you can set a zone up to hold the eggs like the freezer and set the priority very high. Then your hauler is more likely to move them the second they are laid especially if they have hauling on a top priority. You can actually set the zone the chickens are in to forbid eggs so the colonists should move them pretty quickly.

[Caban]

Be careful when dealing with chicken... they are probably the most overpowered entity in the whole game and need balancing. (Check out my screenshot about the chicken wandering)

When a bunch of wild chicken wandered into my map and became self-tamed (I think it was 5, 3 hens and 2 roosters), I thought it'd be neat to keep them. Boy, was I wrong.

After a few days they had eaten all the grass in my growing zone outside the mountain base, which forced me to change their zone to outside the walls.

Fast forward like 1 season.

Raiders killed a bunch of them, but it wasn't enough. I never slaughtered any of them and now I have about 200 chicken, the map looks like a grass-empty wasteland for the most part and triple speed kills my framerate because of all the chicken. That's why I decided to get rid of them.

Now: I hardly got any meat from them because we weren't able to haul them fast enough, and my map looks like the landscape of a Fallout game. Dessicated chicken corpses EVERYWHERE, hardly any grass (IN A JUNGLE), and lots of missing trees because we weren't able to deal with the beavers due to the fact that we were busy slaughtering, butchering and hauling dead chicken and chicken corpses.

So remember: Slaughter them and regularly eat the eggs and be sure you have enough hay available to feed them. You do not want to end up like me.

[Kai]

Originally posted by Caban:

Be careful when dealing with chicken... they are probably the most overpowered entity in the whole game and need balancing. (Check out my screenshot about the chicken wandering)

When a bunch of wild chicken wandered into my map and became self-tamed (I think it was 5, 3 hens and 2 roosters), I thought it'd be neat to keep them. Boy, was I wrong.

After a few days they had eaten all the grass in my growing zone outside the mountain base, which forced me to change their zone to outside the walls.

Fast forward like 1 season.

Raiders killed a bunch of them, but it wasn't enough. I never slaughtered any of them and now I have about 200 chicken, the map looks like a grass-empty wasteland for the most part and triple speed kills my framerate because of all the chicken. That's why I decided to get rid of them.

Now: I hardly got any meat from them because we weren't able to haul them fast enough, and my map looks like the landscape of a Fallout game. Dessicated chicken corpses EVERYWHERE, hardly any grass (IN A JUNGLE), and lots of missing trees because we weren't able to deal with the beavers due to the fact that we were busy slaughtering, butchering and hauling dead chicken and chicken corpses.

So remember: Slaughter them and regularly eat the eggs and be sure you have enough hay available to feed them. You do not want to end up like me.

Dem Mirechickens.

You could setup locked rooms where the chickens are forced to stand on 1x1 zones for containers and starve to death while the rooster fertilizes them to make more chickens.

Chicken factory.

At least until the chickens start to stack on top of each other and end up fusing when you have 100 chickens stuck in 1 square grid.

[Herpetic Seal]

Originally posted by Caban:

Be careful when dealing with chicken... they are probably the most overpowered entity in the whole game and need balancing. (Check out my screenshot about the chicken wandering)

When a bunch of wild chicken wandered into my map and became self-tamed (I think it was 5, 3 hens and 2 roosters), I thought it'd be neat to keep them. Boy, was I wrong.

After a few days they had eaten all the grass in my growing zone outside the mountain base, which forced me to change their zone to outside the walls.

Fast forward like 1 season.

Raiders killed a bunch of them, but it wasn't enough. I never slaughtered any of them and now I have about 200 chicken, the map looks like a grass-empty wasteland for the most part and triple speed kills my framerate because of all the chicken. That's why I decided to get rid of them.

Now: I hardly got any meat from them because we weren't able to haul them fast enough, and my map looks like the landscape of a Fallout game. Dessicated chicken corpses EVERYWHERE, hardly any grass (IN A JUNGLE), and lots of missing trees because we weren't able to deal with the beavers due to the fact that we were busy slaughtering, butchering and hauling dead chicken and chicken corpses.

So remember: Slaughter them and regularly eat the eggs and be sure you have enough hay available to feed them. You do not want to end up like me.

I can only imagine on my ♥♥♥♥♥♥ laptop, it actually goes to single digit frames in high speed from the dynamic tree leaves... Should I slaughter them as soon as they're born?

[BrowneHawk]

@Caban, I'm curious were you able to sell the chickens? I'm playing on classic build mode. I get trader pretty often, so that i can sell the excess chickens to them. Didn't run into the chicken problem except some jerk raiders came and almost wiped out my females.