Help with ranching - too much work

[Hones]

Hello there!

I currently have a neolithic-medieval style colony focused on ranching and animals, but I just can't seem to get the hang of it. Can somebody give me some basic tips concerning animal amount, pen size and the like?
I have a 50/60 days growing period. I have some lamas, cows, horses in a pretty large pen (something along the lines of 11+ nutrition/day in the decription of the pen marker, not used fully); I also have lots of timber wolves for hauling and fighting, some rhinos for breeding purposes and their sweet, sweet leather and now i managed to get my hands on a few thrumbos. Any animals that are zoneable I have set to unrestricted, so they can feed themselves but I just can't seem to get ahead of the food curve. I produce metric tons of rice and hay but it all gets eaten more or less instantly by my ravenous horde of fluffy friends...

Help?

[desrtfox071]

Make more food. Seems pretty simple to me.

If you want something more specific, please add some screenshots and better descriptions of the number of animals, etc. Including how much breeding takes place and any culling of you do that as well.

[Witch ~]

I just put a mod that increases grass 10x.

Ranching otherwise is useless

[brian_va]

Make sure your crop fields aren't accessible to the grazing animals. There is a grazing land mod that keeps them from eating the whole plant, but it's still best to not let them eat the plant. Grow fields of hay, if you either use or are open to using the vgp mod you can make silage from hay and veg for a net gain in nutrition (it was at one point anyways).

Kibble from hay and meat works fine, I've seen where some just make massive numbers of pemican and everyone eats the same, people and animals.

But with all those animals, you just need more space dedicated to feeding them. I usually have some horses for the caravan stuff, but ranching is usually more trouble than it's worth.

[Mana]

Too much work / more trouble than it's worth... does that mean most people only grow veggies & cook veggie meals? Or do you hunt? I do all of the above, more for roleplay than game efficiency. But I've seen multiple posts saying ranching isn't worth it.

In short, are those that don't ranch vegetarians?

[brian_va]

Nope, hunting is generally plentiful. There's obvious exceptions but generally ranching is equally difficult in those biomes. Usually worst case scenario you send a hunting party to a different map tile to get some meat and leather. I don't think it's any more of a time sink than animal training and food production for them, plus it helps skill up their shooting.

I don't think I've ever used the meat or veg only fine meals, and don't even bother making different bills for meat or veg only simple meals. Usually as soon as I can meet the requirements I make fine meals and that's it other than survival meals. But I also generally go overboard on food production to the point I have to sell some of it off or make stacks of chemfuel to use it up.

That said, if you want to role play it as ranchers, it's certainly doable, you just have to put in the effort.

[jacobellinger]

Originally posted by Hones:

Hello there!

I currently have a neolithic-medieval style colony focused on ranching and animals, but I just can't seem to get the hang of it. Can somebody give me some basic tips concerning animal amount, pen size and the like?
I have a 50/60 days growing period. I have some lamas, cows, horses in a pretty large pen (something along the lines of 11+ nutrition/day in the decription of the pen marker, not used fully); I also have lots of timber wolves for hauling and fighting, some rhinos for breeding purposes and their sweet, sweet leather and now i managed to get my hands on a few thrumbos. Any animals that are zoneable I have set to unrestricted, so they can feed themselves but I just can't seem to get ahead of the food curve. I produce metric tons of rice and hay but it all gets eaten more or less instantly by my ravenous horde of fluffy friends...

Help?

chickens are what I usially go for for food. cows are good too. everything else is a 'nice to have' but not very producted for larger colonies. set your auto slaughter to allow a max for adult female cows and 1 breader bull. after this slaughter every baby born because baby cows actually offer a good chunk of food but waiting for them to grow up cost more than it's worth imo.

[Steelfleece]

Rice is labor-intensive and best for short growing periods or sudden increases in demand/loss of stockpile. Switch to corn when you can. Much better food per man-hour of labor, and you get about the same food per season out of it.

[marcusaddamsson]

Dandelions! I swear... they've really improved my animals diet. Especially since you've got such a long growing season, if you plant a big ol' dandelion field right in the middle of your pasture, they'll just munch on that all the time. It grows so fast, it's ridiculous.

Even with my Boreal Forest run, the dandelions really help that transition from kibble in the winters to feeding off the land again. Seriously. Try it. Don't need mods, etc. Vanilla ftw!

[Wasted]

sell or slaughter most animals, don't worry you will get more later.

also danelions like marcus said.

[marcusaddamsson]

Originally posted by Wasted:

sell or slaughter most animals, don't worry you will get more later.

Very good point! One of the dangers of animals is colony wealth. Whenever the game decides it's time for raid/etc, the strength of the raid is base on colony wealth, aka all your stored stuff, including animals. So if you're carryin' a huge herd of animals... your raids will be much more difficult. Whereas if you were to sell them, you take the reduction of wealth as it converts to silver... but then you can spend the silver on more stuff to defend the colony. Plus, you get ally points and social xp in the process... which creates a bit of a positive feedback loop.

Also... I notice that the game wants to keep a 'set' number of animals on the map. And your tamed animals seem to factor into it. Meaning if I'm not seeing much to tame, I'll take my herd to the nearest outlander settlement, cash 'em in for some goodies... and when I return, the map will be filled with new stuff to tame (again, more positive feedback loop).

Repeat, Lather, Rinse.... or whatever.

[Vermillion Cardinal]

I'm no vanilla ranching expert (modded all the way) so I might likely get corrected by real experts, but if I were in your shoes I'd rationalize my animal types. I'd drop the lamas and rhinos and grow devilstrand instead (if your medieval run permits it), for starters. Your long growing season makes that more feasible than my preferred climate (10/60 to 30/60). If devilstrand isn't an option I'd keep the rhinos; you likely won't have the cold conditions that need lama wool as much.

I don't use fighting animals at all so I can't say whether you can realistically rationalize things by dropping the wolves for thrumbos instead if you manage to breed them successfully. At least the latter can be left to find trees to eat on their own without fear of most predators.

I'd also restrict the number of horses; unless you're frequently transporting heavy goods in large quantities or launching large raids I doubt you'd need a lot of them, just enough to get the travel speed boost for travel. Consider more frequent smaller caravan trips instead if you've got a dedicated trader.

Cows too; don't need more than 2 males, and assuming you aren't running something like 50+ colonists a small herd should be enough, especially if you don't mind hunting for topping up (which is also good for training shooting, and in your climate game should be easy to find).

[Prismaa]

I have small ranch with like 2 male cows or rams, then like 3 female cows/sheep, and i set auto butcher to butcher everything above them (adults only and even pregnant ones) and I'm swimming with meat, not sure if auto butcher for pen is vanilla since i haven't touched vanilla in ages but yeah, doesnt need too big pen for them to feed on grass alone, for winter i might grow some hay and make kibble

[mb3]

What are you ranching for? If you are ranching for meat, try raising chickens. I have a 15 nutrition pen filled with chickens. I keep 12 roosters, and 20 hens. everything else is auto-slaughter. It doesn't sound like much, but my pen is filled with a hoard of chicks and under age chickens. As it currently stands, I have a serious excess of chicken meat. I sometimes switch to Luxury carnivore meals just to try and keep my freezer clear of frozen chicken meat. Usually I have about 3500 frozen chicken meat in stock. Also, you will get hundreds of eggs as well. Other than that I keep a couple horses, and a couple camels. To supplement there food I grow a small patch of hay, and I keep a 5X5 roofed pen with animal flap doors in the pen to keep the hay longer. Oh I also keep about 30 guinea pig's in the pen for fur. Although they are a pain since fences won't keep them in, so my animal guys need to constantly re-tame them. I'm thinking about getting rid of them.

[Laurie]

Dont forget to separate the males and females after you have enough animals. Inbreeding in this game does not exist, so kill all males except for a few

[super_jqp]

One word: Auto-slaughter.