Observation about automatic Animal Slaughtering

[Jea Kimsteed]

I realized after a few hours of playing that the villagers seem to have some sort of "automatic animal slaughtering" function. However, I've observed that it...doesnt seem to make sense, AND i've run into the problem of not being able to cancel it once the village has decided that animal needs to die. The instant I cancel it, it reappears as a task.

Case in point. In the Continental Dawn scenario, I'm firmly in the copper age, on my way to bronze. Now, I've got more goats and pigs than I know what to do with--there are like 30 pigs and 40 goats, compared to my 10 cows, 4 sheep, and 5 donkeys. So I check the management, and over half my pigs/goats are "old" which seems to be about the point they mark them for slaughter. So I have to go in and manually select all these animals for butchery (which, given that meat is the ONLY purpose, really, of the domestic pig seems a tad silly.) But, to make matters worse, the very INSTANT a Donkey or a sheep hits old age....GOTTA SLAUGHTER IT, YOU CANT STOP ME, PLAYER! I literally had a donkey attached to a cart, pulling stuff, and couldnt cancel the slaughter command...and I had to watch as while the cart was moving, some rando peasant comes up and just...butcher's my man Tarok's donkey. Its like ....uh....dude. The donkey's useful. The sheep are useful--old sheep still grow wool, old donkeys still pull carts. Stop killing them.

This is, of course, made worse by the fact that the ones they particularly seem super excited to kill are the ones I'm having difficulties getting to reproduce enough to create a stable population. (Sheep and Donkeys, in this case.), while they mostly ignore the ones eating me out of house and home (Goats and pigs). I'm not sure exactly what the coding says about priorities and slaughter, but...maybe a feature to exclude certain animals from auto slaughter? Like how in the real world, unless people are starving, you tend not to slaughter your work animals because they are more valuable for the work they do than the meat they are made of.

[Mahzrael]

If you have animals set to infinite, you will always run into an issue - maybe not this one, but something will happen.
If you set your animals to some managable number - your villagers are either trying to keep the animals at this cap, or, trying to "clear room" for the spring crop of babies by killing off the old animals.
If the animals die of old age, you get no resources from them ( no meat)- so your villagers are trying to be "helpful".
In general, you will want 1 extra stable ( if i set my animal cap to 40 animals, i will want to build 3 stables) - this prevents newer, youngers animals from getting slaughtered due to lack of room. You will also want to increase your cap at the end of winter, and lower you cap at the end of summer. So if your base is 40 animals, you might want to allow 50 in the spring, since they need no indoor room, and you might want to then selectivly slaughter off the weakest before winter sets in and people have chosen to use the old donkey to pull something - if its already been culled in the fall, they will have to select a younger donkey.

As soon as your done with gathering the seasonal food item (planted/harvest crops , harvest berries) , you will want to use primal vision to scope out herds of roaming animals and babies - every spring, 10 of every animal baby will wander within reasonable range of your cap , you just have to spot them when they do - so spring time is a great time to check primal, often.

[robert.leonard.ologu]

The game is still frustrating, it looks like they don't care about game play

[Quoellfrisch]

set the limit of animals so it fits your straw supply. they will automatically slaughter the old animals. but you are correct, in some cases the slaughter comes at the worst possible time ;-)
typically if you set an other animal to slaughter you can cancel the automatically set one.

with those animals you face problems breeding, check the spreading of age and sex. I feel it works best if you tame new animals during 2-4 years so you have young and grown up. otherwise you end up of having only old animals which die out slowly.

[MacLaughlin]

It is frustrating... 2025 and I'm playing, the game has been finished and left over, it seems... Anyway, I can't have more than 3 sheep, same issue, they keep slaughtering them and they rarely reproduce.

[pdoan8]

Auto-slaughtering, when:
- Animal population above the limit. AI will try to slaughter "reasonably", and maintain good ratio of male/female.
- Very old animals regardless of population. AI will slaughter that last few if they are very old.

Animal reproduction:
- Male will still be viable in old age. However, female will stop reproduce at old age.
- Have a good male/female ratio. Each additional male will increase the reproduce chance by ~15% (if I remember correctly). So, having 2M/3F might be better than having 1M/4F.
- Have a sustainable population. Pig reproduce rather fast, so you can have lower limit at 10-15. Other animals should be 15-20 minimal.
- Have extra stable room.

Taming: you might need several attempts to achieve a sustainable population. You can also tame addition young and manually slaughter older animals (female) to keep the population going.

[threethreethree]

Originally posted by MacLaughlin:

It is frustrating... 2025 and I'm playing, the game has been finished and left over, it seems... Anyway, I can't have more than 3 sheep, same issue, they keep slaughtering them and they rarely reproduce.

With this info, my first guess is that you don't try to tame very many, hoping they'll reproduce with only 3 or 5 or some other very low number you have, and then they eventually get old so your people slaughter them simply because they've gotten too old, despite any limit settings.

You need to try and tame 15 or 20 or more animals for livestock, and all as close to each other in time as you can manage - you don't want the first ones tamed to get old before you tame more to reproduce with them.

[ticot007]

automatic Animal Slaughtering is very good when you have a lot of animal like 100 + it save you a lot of management and keep yor level of meat, bone and skin high

[Draken]

Originally posted by MacLaughlin:

It is frustrating... 2025 and I'm playing, the game has been finished and left over, it seems... Anyway, I can't have more than 3 sheep, same issue, they keep slaughtering them and they rarely reproduce.

The issue is not the automatic slaughtering. It's that it's a bit difficult to get a breeding population going.
New tamed animals as well as bought once only have a single fertility period thanks to how the animals age. After that they can't actually reproduce anymore. If that single reproduction window is missed, for example because no matching breeding partner is available, your breeding will fail.

Trying to establish a breeding population with 3 sheep is incredible difficult. I would advice you to try and tame more until you got at least 10 at once, and even that is often too low a number for a stable population. 20 is basically the bare minimum.

Any animals that are auto slaughtered even with high population limit are of old age and unable to reproduce anyway. They would have keeled over and died soon anyway.

[MacLaughlin]

Yes it worked. Indeed I had too phew. After I tamed up to 12 it became sustainable, thanks fam

[threethreethree]

Originally posted by MacLaughlin:

Yes it worked. Indeed I had too phew. After I tamed up to 12 it became sustainable, thanks fam

AWESOME!! glad to hear it.