How does one keep tons of animals fed?

[Hottox]

I wanna do a run based on raising animals for food, but i have a problem with not keeping them alive long enough. They always starve because my colonists dont haul food to the stockpiles fast enough.

[Narrowmind]

Honestly, is that even a valid playstyle?

[Swordmouse]

It's much easier in biomes with long/permanent growth seasons for obvious reasons.

With enough grazing area, farm animals feed themselves. If space is limited and the pasture is insufficient to sustain the animals present, dandelions are hands down the best grazing crop, though of course that requires your colonists to dedicate time growing. To minimize colonists running back to replant single tiles constantly, it's best to disable replanting until a sufficient chunk has been eaten, so a farmer only has to return occasionally. For biomes without year-round growing, growing and storing hay is the most hands-off way to maintain farm animals.

You do not want your farm animals/herbivores grazing on anything other than dandelions - a common beginner mistake is to assume haygrass is the natural choice, but it is vastly inferior for grazing purposes and meant for kibble production/wintering.

For trained animals, omnivores like dogs and bears as well as trainable herbivores are by far the easiest to sustain. While kibble and nutrient paste are more efficient in terms of nutrition, a hands-off system can easily be achieved simply by growing a surplus of crops and zoning them into shelves designated to store the associated veggies/mushrooms, and some trainable animals (pigs, elephants etc) can graze just like farm animals.

If for whatever reason you need to stretch your resources or otherwise have carnivores, you'll want something efficient like chickens to provide a constant influx of meat/eggs. As a substitute, you can expand or build an additional freezer to hold all of your raider corpses and feed your carnivores/omnivores that way, but that may or may not be sufficient depending on what storyteller you're running (how frequent your raids are) and how many animals you have.

Hauling can be a big issue as you mentioned, but anything able to graze should either be feeding itself, or be penned in the hay barn for winter. A few exceptions exist, like having a chicken pen in a mountain base etc, but generally it shouldn't be a problem. And anything smarter than a grazer can be zoned over food, and are probably helping carry it besides - bears/dogs etc don't "graze" so you have every reason to zone them over your crops so they can not only feed themselves on the odd harvested stack, but also help carry it wherever it needs to go.

[Wolfie]

Jungle and if you have a force weather event for rain just leave it

[Veylox]

You keep grazing animals in a really wide zone on a year-round summer map.

And even then you're honestly not getting good food compared to what you would've gotten ditching animals and using the zone to grow veggies instead, but at least it's better than the alternative, which is trying to grow haygrass faster than the animals can chew through it.

There was a topic here few days ago where someone talked about a compact chicken set-up that supposedly brings tons of food, I never really managed to replicate it but you might want to try that

[Radiosity]

Originally posted by Hottox:

They always starve because my colonists dont haul food to the stockpiles fast enough.

You ARE using Allow Tool, right? If not, I highly recommend you fix that immediately, it fixes a great many frustrations with pawns not hauling stuff urgently enough.

[Siamese55]

It depends on how many you are talking and your creature balance. I've done pretty well with a kibble/hay grass stockpile in the barn and hay grass pastures in the temperate biome. It is a decent sized enclosure, though not huge by any means. I started with yaks, got timber wolves via taming for combat/etc., traded for ducks, and finally traded for alpacas. Between the eggs, milk, meat from occasional hunting (my colonists have a religion where they get upset when they kill creatures so generally emergency only), my hay grass pasture and my rice and potato fields, and general foraging for berries and what not there is usually plenty to eat for everyone. I do trade for food occasionally, but I am never desperately waiting on a trader.

I also want to point out I am not incredibly efficient either, especially compared to some of the strategies outlined above. I don't have a colonist solely dedicated to caring for the creatures or even plants, but I do have a couple more weighted to them. I also have a few xenotypes with metabolic deficiencies requiring more food, but as a trade off I can abuse them more when things get serious (like when the cannibal pirates are burning everything down and we start losing yaks and wolves).

The most touch and go points were actually building the pens and establishing the fields. For that I would generally recommend acquiring/taming after that is taken care of, if possible, and starting small and working your way up. Secondly, defending them. Non flammable material building pays in spades, as always. Then I mentioned it already, but I am also using Ideology and Biotech which allow for some interesting ways to get what I want out of my colonists. If nothing else they can be happier when dealing with animals or be genetically modified to care for them better.

[marcusaddamsson]

Originally posted by Swordmouse:

With enough grazing area, farm animals feed themselves. If space is limited and the pasture is insufficient to sustain the animals present, dandelions are hands down the best grazing crop, though of course that requires your colonists to dedicate time growing.

Huh. I never looked it closely (clearly you have), but dandelions, eh? I wonder why when you use 'auto-cut' on a field, it auto-selects dandies...? I'm a *big* fan of the planting a field in a pasture to augment their food, essentially overpowering them with your planters, and I also like to segment off sections w fencing that I can uncork when needed.

But dandelions, eh? Why's that? I will definitely do that going forward... I've just been planting haygrass.

[AlienWired]

How I do It..........

I pretty much, fence in all of the choke points on the map. Then plant my "cross", which makes the pasture.

Then I plant a GIGANTIC and I mean HUGE hay field. That gives them the ability to eat the "wild" and also eat my field.

Normally, I then start building a "hay floor" around in different locations and putting down animal beds.

[Kalli Kalypso]

Originally posted by AlienWired:

How I do It..........

I pretty much, fence in all of the choke points on the map. Then plant my "cross", which makes the pasture.

Then I plant a GIGANTIC and I mean HUGE hay field. That gives them the ability to eat the "wild" and also eat my field.

Normally, I then start building a "hay floor" around in different locations and putting down animal beds.

How do you manage raids that would attack your animals? Interesting idea. Share a screenshot?

[The Yeen Queen]

Originally posted by Hottox:

I wanna do a run based on raising animals for food, but i have a problem with not keeping them alive long enough. They always starve because my colonists dont haul food to the stockpiles fast enough.

Grow dandelions in the pen. Plant haygrass outside the pen and stockpile it in a barn you build adjacent to the pen. ( Small building, animal flap for the door connected directly to the side of the pen. Animals can go in and out, also good for shelter when it gets cold. ) Don't grow haygrass IN the pen. The dandelions provide more grazing nutrition than the haygrass, the haygrass provides more when harvested and stockpiled.

[AlienWired]

Originally posted by Kalli Kalypso:

Originally posted by AlienWired:

How I do It..........

I pretty much, fence in all of the choke points on the map. Then plant my "cross", which makes the pasture.

Then I plant a GIGANTIC and I mean HUGE hay field. That gives them the ability to eat the "wild" and also eat my field.

Normally, I then start building a "hay floor" around in different locations and putting down animal beds.

How do you manage raids that would attack your animals? Interesting idea. Share a screenshot?

I don't get raided often as I play pretty "Friendly" games.

I find just trying to survive is a challenge in itself and have fun trying to just set up the "perfect base".

But if I were to get raided it wouldn't be a problem because not all of the animals within the pasture I make are "tame"... Just mend the fence. Go back to pasture as normal...

(How do I take a screen shot, I forget......)

[AlienWired]

I think I did it.......


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2910449543




Off to the edges of the maps, that you can't see in the screen shot, are other wild animal spawns, that stay behind the fence. Unless a fire happens, then it creates an opening and lets the animals in...

Then you repair the fence. Usually the pasture is big enough that raids are irrelevant(if you have chosen more conflicting games).

Just fix the fence and let them respawn. Sometimes it spawns horses or elephants what not that you can tame.

IN the first shot you can see the HUGE hay field, that is partially planted. If you want it fully planted, just make sure that your pawns focus on grow.

Also... Let a panther live... Keep an eye on them as they are an extra source of food, after they kill, just hit "Allow" and take their food if it's been killed within a day. It's a good way to thin the herd without having to actually hunt yourself.

Just so I absolutely know how to post screen shots from now on.... Here's a second one that shows how the fence cuts off the choke points, can also do this with steel walls to help prevent raids, or at least, make them come from a certain point you wish.

It also shows all the wild life that spawns in these little sections and then they come in to your pasture.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2910454181

[Narrowmind]

How many cows would it take to be able to support one pawn only on animal meat?

[Swordmouse]

Originally posted by marcusaddamsson:

But dandelions, eh? Why's that? I will definitely do that going forward... I've just been planting haygrass.

Growth speed is definitely the biggest reason - dandelions grow roughly 3 times faster than haygrass, and the nutrition obtained per tile when grazing is virtually identical. Thus herds can be fed entirely by/boosted with much smaller fields where natural grazing is insufficient, and cold snaps/spring thaws/disasters are much, much less disruptive to food production, even trivial.

They grow SO fast in fact, you can plant them during toxic fallout and they'll STILL mature fast enough to be grazed on. You'll still lose some of the crop to toxicity, but yeah... grazers can easily be maintained during toxic fallout instead of panic-slaughtering whole herds when caught unprepared. It's a tip I've personally never seen mentioned, oddly.

Lastly, as a "decorative plant" dandelions are also immune to blight I believe, not that it would matter much anyway, since the crop would be back at 100% in a few days.

[marcusaddamsson]

Originally posted by Swordmouse:

ol' snip-o-roonie

Huh. Interesting. Very interesting. Didn't know that. Thank you, sir!