Animals seek safe tempurature

[VitaKaninen]

For those who live in cold climates but also have zonable animals, do they keep them indoors 100% of the time to avoid frostbite, or can they leave them unrestricted?

Will the animals seek safe temperatures on their own, or will they sleep outside and lose all their feet to frostbite instead of coming inside where it is warm?

My animals keep wanting to sleep in my freezer and get frostbite instead of moving to a warmer area when I leave them unrestricted. Is this normal?

This is not realistic at all. All animals even down to the insects will seek warmer places when it gets cold.

[MadArtillery]

Why is your freezer cold enough to give animals frostbite? I know pen animals will hide from temp and toxic fallout, dunno about non pen animals. Just give them beds. Good if they get sick anyway.

[Astasia]

Animal AI is extremely minimal for performance reasons. If their bed is in the barn they are probably fine, otherwise you are probably taking a chance letting them wander. The same goes for humans pawns though honestly, if they don't have a bed and fall asleep in the cold there's likely to be issues.

[VitaKaninen]

Originally posted by MadArtillery:

Why is your freezer cold enough to give animals frostbite?

Several reasons:

1. So that when a solar flare hits, the freezer will not thaw out before the flare is over.
2. To prevent infestations there.
3. In a very small freezer, the temperature jumps by 10-20 degrees when a few large animals enter the freezer, and if they all decide to sleep there there is not enough wall space to put in enough coolers to prevent it from thawing out.

I like to keep meat racks in my freezer and allow my pigs to eat the corpses. Pigs are only comfortable down to -5c and If I keep the freezer at -15, and 10 pigs decide to sleep in there, they will drive the temperature up too high and things will rot.

If I keep the temperature at -20 or less, and only one pig sleeps in there, then they get frostbite.

I have about 100 pigs in a 5x8 room, so beds are no good.

[VitaKaninen]

I am currently playing a Noah's Ark playthrough where I want to rescue 2 of each animal on the planet while also adding a lot of modded animals.

I would like to not have to micromanage them to prevent frostbite, and just allow them to forage outside but come in when it gets too cold. Since I will have animals from every biome in the world, some of them will have very little cold tolerance.

Is my only recourse to keep them all inside or to relocate to a warm biome?

I love playing on maps with lots of snow, so I always leave the climate adjusters when they land so it is a permanent winter like in Narnia.

[Astasia]

You are probably going to have to create specific pens or areas for some of them. There are only a few animals, like reptiles, birds and bugs, that should have any issue on a map with any sort of growing season.

Minimum safe temperature is -10C below minimum comfortable temperature. An animal with -20C minimum comfortable temperature is completely fine outside at -29C for an unlimited amount of time. Typically it only gets that cold on permanent winter maps, at which point there is no reason to even let the animals outside.

[Ivarukฅ(^•ᴥ•^)ฅﾉ彡]

heh i was getting a heatwave on my tile, and all the wildlife was running what id presume to be the coast this one has. i was looking for danger on the tile like something out of a movie when i just saw a bunch of rhinos booking it

[The Blind One]

Most animals are perfectly fine in cold winter biomes with the exception of mostly reptiles, jungle animals and the more delicate farm animals such as chicken -10, turkey -8, cow - 10 and pig -5.

Since you have a 5 degree buffer you won't need to worry really until temperatures drop below -10c in most cases. It's pretty rare for that too happen unless you get a cold snap during winter or are in a very cold biome.

When I get a cold snap during the winter I put all my animals into an extension of a walled off and roofed geothermal power plant to keep the heat in. Put in some feeding stockpiles and you're good to go.

[VitaKaninen]

Like I said above, I like to play on snowy maps. My current biome is 1.4C average (-17 to 19) but I have 2 climate adjusters active, so that is -18.6C average (-37 to -1).

I have lots of indoor space for them, but I would like them to forage as much as they can to save on kibble. I am using the Graze Up mod so that the plants are not destroyed by grazing and they can eat through the snow.

[Astasia]

There's not really going to be any grazing happening with those temps, at least not for very long. Plants don't grow below 0C and have to be above 50% grown to be consumed, even short periods slightly above 0C will not really do anything as plant growth is slowed massively below like 5C. "Eating through snow" isn't really the issue in winter either, below -10C all plants/trees are considered "leafless" and can not be eaten. Any plants still remaining on your map are going to die of old age within the next year or two, and as long as it is below 0C no new ones will spawn.

So if you want to keep your map cold and snowy all year, you are going to have to give up animal foraging and you might as well just move them all inside.

[The Blind One]

Originally posted by VitaKaninen:

I have 2 climate adjusters active, so that is -18.6C average (-37 to -1).

You should get rid of those climate adjusters asap. Your animals will not have anything to forage at that temperature even if you use graze up (I use it too). Eventually they will have dug up all the edible plants and with those temps, they ain't coming back.

[VitaKaninen]

I am also using the Regrowth mods, specifically Tundra which adds more plants to the game. I only recently got the 2nd climate adjuster, so I can not say for sure, but the cold climate plants appear to be growing in the cold. It is -22 right now, and they are all at 100% growth.

I will post back if all my animals begin to starve in the first year with no temps above freezing.

[Astasia]

I mean, then maybe you can find a mod that sets all animals comfortable temperatures to like -100C.

[VitaKaninen]

I am trying to be realistic. Plenty of places have temperatures that stay below freezing year round and the tundra plants grow there just fine.

[VitaKaninen]

Completely unrelated:
I had a group of Thrumbos wander in and I used inspired tamings to grab 3 of them, but one had a bad back, so I shot them full of bullets till they went down.

Then I had my low level doctor rescue them to inside my gates and fix them up. After they were healed, I kept them inside my gates for about 20 days for no particular reason. Then I let them out. That was 26 days ago and they are still just hanging around on my map.

I wonder if they will stay here forever or if they will eventually wander off... It has been 46 days so far.

Maybe it is because I gave him brain damage...

[The Blind One]

Originally posted by VitaKaninen:

Completely unrelated:
I had a group of Thrumbos wander in and I used inspired tamings to grab 3 of them, but one had a bad back, so I shot them full of bullets till they went down.

Then I had my low level doctor rescue them to inside my gates and fix them up. After they were healed, I kept them inside my gates for about 20 days for no particular reason. Then I let them out. That was 26 days ago and they are still just hanging around on my map.

I wonder if they will stay here forever or if they will eventually wander off... It has been 46 days so far.

Maybe it is because I gave him brain damage...

Did you tame them or are they still wild?

If you tamed them they won't leave the map ever unless you release them to the wild again.