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Some can serve as meat shields (and meat)
While come are labor intensive (others can graze wild and be fine most of the time), and carnivores are especially tricky to balance out (hunting, farming, etc to feed them)
The best are utility critters that can serve as food source (milk/meat/eggs), utility (caravan hauling), textiles (wool for winter outfits), or as combatants (all can in a pinch, but many will die)
Alpaca is a nice easy one : decent hauling, wool, milk, and can graze for food (and not completely useless in combat if pressed)
The muffallos were good till they lost the milk. But they still can do most of the same. Same with Camels.
Omnivores are also useful such as wild pigs, bears, and some canines. Though mostly as meat and combat pets
Farm animals are somewhat useful if you grow haygrass/extra veggies for cold snaps/winter
They also have some that can haul, but those I limit to raw material hauling by excluding the living/food areas. So they bring in wood, metal, stone, etc.. without worrying about them eating meals/materials and leaving dirt everywhere
I tend to have one pwn be a "Beast Master" who tames everything, and during raids and battles they are my last line of defense. If the main line breaks and I'm in trouble or I need pressure off, The beast master releases their charges and more often than not its enough to save the day and salvage the situation.
Pets are worth it.
My last beast master had a dozen german shepards and bears. They took out one of those mechanoid hives.
Anyhoo, pets are a mixed bag. Very handy for hauling once you get them trained up, but once in a while the extra care gets annoying. My lead farmer's dog, for example, doesn't seem to be able to hunt, so I have to feed him manually, and whenever I get his pathing wrong and he gets into the fridge, he keeps going after the chocolate stash.
If you don't fridge the corpses they go rotten and then only boars will eat them. You have to keep em fresh for the picky ones.
One bonus a lot of people tend to forget is nuzzling. A pawn that is subjected to this kind of behaviour gets a +4 mood boost for a full day. It's not much, and it shouldn't be the one and only reason to keep pets, but it's a nice bonus.
combat: they are either good fighters themself, or works fine as meatshields. having a squiral with you on hunting doesn't sound like much, but if your pawn gets attacked by his pray, this one squirel might be the few seconds your pawn needs to get into your base behind turrets and traps. better the pet than your pawn. some are better than others, but in the end, they all have the same goal: either kill the enemy or die befor one of your pawn dies.
farm: farm animals should be obviosly. cows give milk and meat, pigs meat and so on. you can have a storage your pawns never realy see inside to store corpses of your enemies, they work great as food for pigs, cows need hay that you need to farm, but are a safe way of securing meat. boomalops produce chemfuel, if you want to (and they work fine as moving mines)
caravan: pack animals. 5 horses are easier to maintain than 5 pawns, and they can carry more than those 5 pawns (as far as i remember). again, some pack animals work better than others, some carry lots but will slow down your caravan, others carry less and give your caravan a nice speed boost.
"pets": small little animals that can give your pawns a mood buff, can't remember what it is called. if you click 'i' on animals like cats, you see an entry that is not listed on most other animals. have them in your recreative areas or work spaces where your pawns are. some are great, but not to many!
some animals can work as haulers, some animals fall into more than 2 category, some are easier to maintain (like cows or pigs) others are a nightmare (hares for food.... good luck in regulary mass taiming 20+ animals), but all of them serve a purpose or another
Pack animals, in particular, are pretty important any time I send out a caravan for any purpose. Horses carry 75 kg each. A colonist carries 35 kg, but equipment weight counts against this, and then net is often 20kg or less. I'd never be able to carry back 2500+ steel from a mining site without pack animals.
Horses and donkeys are both pack animals and haulers. They significantly reduce my colonists' need to haul resources around.
Cows, yaks, and goats convert wild grass into milk. Milk's an animal product, so it can be combined with corn to produce Fine and Lavish meals. Milking consumes colonist time, but so does harvesting corn.
Boomalopes produce chemfuel. Mine produce far more chemfuel than I need for my backup generators. Chemfuel is a fairly nice trade good, since it's valuable and lightweight. The main problem with boomalopes is that you can't casually slaughter them for meat, since they'll explode.
Huskies are my primary in-colony haulers. Because they have access to my food supplies, they end up eating colonist food, but 0.4 food per day each is worth it for reducing the amount of hauling my colonists must do.
Wargs, panthers, and grizzly bears save my hunters time by hunting wild animals. They eat some of the body, but my colonists butcher the rest for meat.
Muffalos, yaks, and sheep produce wool, which can either be sold directly or made into clothing or armchairs. They can also be slaughtered for meat.
Cats and terriers are probably my most problematic animals, since their main benefit is the +4 mood boost from nuzzling a colonist, and it's too random to be reliable. Cats will feed themselves on rats, though, and can be sold for cash or slaughtered for meat if you get too many of them.
The +5 mood boost from a Bonded animal is far more reliable, but getting it is sheer luck.
Bigger animals are pretty effective at keeping most melee attackers away from your ranged combatants. This is a big help against insect infestations, and not bad when dealing with tribals. If these animals die, it's generally not a big deal, since you still get to butcher them for meat. That's often their long term fate anyway.
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Now that we've talked benefits, let's talk costs.
Animals don't "consume a lot of resources" unless you're doing it wrong. Granted, it's easy enough to do it wrong, I know I did when I first started dabbling in animals.
The main way to "do it wrong" is to feed them on hay or colonist food instead of pasturing them. Cormac mentions cows "needing hay." Cows don't need hay unless it's an emergency. Normally all they need is wild grass.
The critical thing is to allow your animals to roam most of the map, but prohibit them from touching your food supplies. Do this, and most animals will feed themselves. Herbivores will eat wild grass. Predators kill wildlife, eat some of the body, and then leave the rest for your colonists to butcher for meat.
You do want to grow hay, but it's for emergencies. Hay is for deep winter when the wild grass stops growing, or toxic fallout events when anything wandering outside will eventually die.
Training time is the main upkeep cost for most animals. Generally this isn't much unless you're training the animal to haul, and hauling is an obvious benefit. That's a time cost, but the haulers save far, far more colonist time than they consume in training.
With some animals you need to train them periodically just to keep them tame. For 0% wildness animals like dogs and cows, there's no "keep tame" cost at all. For muffalos, yaks, etc. it means periodically re-training them. I've found it tolerable with pretty much all my animals.
It's probably a bit of a pain with large groups of small, high-wildness animals. Cormac mentions hares, which are only 18 meat each, and 75% wild. I've never tried raising those.
Because those small critters grow up prity fast they hardly need any training to keep them tame. they are born tame, and that wares out by the time they are grown. So maybe you need to train them once and if one does go wild its much easier to retame them or kill them then bigger creatures lwith hoofs and horns.
Honestly every game i start is a pain until i get those huskies (or labrador if i can't get huskies)
Alpaccas are great for the wool, easy to tame and you can leave them grassing.
Its great for clothing in the early stage and you can sell both the wool and the babies, when you have enough, for some extra silver.
Cows for milk as milk can replace meat when making food.
Like Alpaccas you can just leave them grassing.
Otherwise there is alot of animals that gives different benefits.
But it all depends on what you as a person like.
Offcourse the most important factor is your biome.
Having lots of alpaccas and cows is impossible on deserts compared to forests f.ex
aside from that, the extra effort put into feeding and training them to haul something every now and then seems like a waste for me; simpler to just stick someone as a dedicated hauler and cleaner and let it be. to each their own tho.