Animals die from hunger!

[viks92]

For some reason my animals have starved to death. Cant quite understand why since there are put in pasture with grass, which I noticed disappears quite fast, so I gave them even bigger pasture, but still they died. Am I doing something wrong or is that a bug? BTW animals I had wore horse, yak, goat and 2 eves.

[AlP]

What grass did you pasture them on?

[viks92]

Originally posted by AlP:

What grass did you pasture them on?

Grass
But i am not sure since now there is loam

[Gosera]

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Grazer there table that show the recommending size per animal and how much they eat and going from that you get a minimal of 19x12 pen for the horse, yak and goat

[Morkonan]

Originally posted by viks92:

Originally posted by AlP:

What grass did you pasture them on?

Grass
But i am not sure since now there is loam

"Grazers" need to be pastured on the surface level until you discover Caverns, which will allow cave moss/whatever to start growing undergound in your fortress.

If the pasture is too small, one should see alerts that they're fighting each other or you'll see evidence of that. (Blood in the pasture/etc. Not sure, there, since I just make sure to assign a big pasture since I can't be bothered to min/max it based on a per-animal calc... :))

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Pasture

Not all animals are grazers. But, for example, in the case of egg-layers that use Nest Boxes, they'll only lay eggs if they have a suitable pasture and a Nest Box within it.

[viks92]

Originally posted by Morkonan:

Originally posted by viks92:

Grass
But i am not sure since now there is loam

"Grazers" need to be pastured on the surface level until you discover Caverns, which will allow cave moss/whatever to start growing undergound in your fortress.

If the pasture is too small, one should see alerts that they're fighting each other or you'll see evidence of that. (Blood in the pasture/etc. Not sure, there, since I just make sure to assign a big pasture since I can't be bothered to min/max it based on a per-animal calc... :))

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2014:Pasture

Not all animals are grazers. But, for example, in the case of egg-layers that use Nest Boxes, they'll only lay eggs if they have a suitable pasture and a Nest Box within it.

I already know that not all animals need grass, I just didn't have that problem in my previous runs so I kinda panicked a bit. Also i had problem with wolverines fighting my animals so i assumed blood was from that.

[TyCobb]

A common pitfall is ignoring animals brought by migrants. By default, they end up in your meeting area which is normally underground and stone. They will starve and die unless you move them to one of your pastures.

[Surik]

I had the same problem.
Thing is, if they breed the new animal go "outside" the pasture, so do as animals you bought from traders. Always remember to check the pasture animals to see if there are some horses or lambs that are unchecked to that place

[stormfeather]

Animals born to a mother assigned to a pasture get auto-assigned to that pasture as well. The exception is with egg layers, since the hatching process doesn't link the baby up to the pasture in the same way for whatever coding reasons.

I've had problems in the past with egg-layers that also need grazing (like elk birds I think it was) will sometimes starve sitting trying to hatch eggs that aren't fertile. They won't graze while sitting on the eggs, and if the eggs don't hatch....

But that's not the case here since it's not egg layers being affected here. Explanations I can think of have mostly been mentioned before:

- Pasture is too small (since different people have different ideas of a "big" pasture).
- Something keeping the animals busy and not grazing (being constantly frightened maybe, or dwarfs having a tug of war with them after milking/shearing, which I think may have gotten fixed, forgot what caused it).
- Lack of grass in the pasture (after a fire or whatever, just naturally not a grassy location).
- The starving animals are from migrants or traders that you forgot to assign to a pasture.
- In previous versions I'd say maybe it was burrow mistakes, assigned to a burrow that was indoors by accident and were wandering out of the pasture to go to it, I had some animals getting hungry with civilian alerts in the past IIRC, but can you even assign animals to a burrow now?