Giant Elephants starving to death

[Eqqsquizitine Buble-Schwinslow]

I miraculously managed to tame 5 giant elephants and train them for war.

However, my 4x4 embark is not big enough to feed them for more than a few days, despite it being almost entirely covered in not only grass, but edible plants and fruit-trees as well.

As I understand it, giant elephants are grazers, but your dwarves can still feed them, for instance during training. But are they purely limited to those two modes of feeding? If the ground in their pen is littered with fallen, ripe fruit, wouldn't it make sense for them to eat it?


(Think) I Found the issue on Mantis, made an account to report it but can't figure out how that works (no option when prompted to select the "project" my issue is related to, among a few other things), so now I'm desperate and posting it here instead.

I'm 99% sure this is either the exact issue I encountered, or a highly similar one:
https://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/mantisbt/view.php?id=4113#bugnotes


Anyone else struggle with feeding huge grazers? What did you end up doing?

[derpenstein]

There's a very simple solution, there is a game setting called "grazing coefficient" I believe, you bump that from it's default by something like 1000-10k. I generally do this even if I don't have giant grazers, because digging up huge underground pastures for my animals is even worse for fps than just having tons of animals.

[Eqqsquizitine Buble-Schwinslow]

Originally posted by derpenstein:

There's a very simple solution, there is a game setting called "grazing coefficient" I believe, you bump that from it's default by something like 1000-10k. I generally do this even if I don't have giant grazers, because digging up huge underground pastures for my animals is even worse for fps than just having tons of animals.

Oh, right. Cool. I'll try changing it gradually and seeing if it helps.
Is 1K the minimum I need to start at..?

[Eqqsquizitine Buble-Schwinslow]

I maxed out grazing coefficient and they're still starving, and so is my Lama.
They're eating all the grass on the embark site, but still getting closer and closer to starving to death.

Gonna try restarting the game and see if it makes a difference.

Perhaps changing the value in-game won't have any effect until the game is restarted..?

[Gosera]

Originally posted by Eqqsquizitine Buble-Schwinslow:

I maxed out grazing coefficient and they're still starving, and so is my Lama.
They're eating all the grass on the embark site, but still getting closer and closer to starving to death.

Gonna try restarting the game and see if it makes a difference.

Perhaps changing the value in-game won't have any effect until the game is restarted..?

In the other thread you are in, i gave a bit of information about how much that elephant need to eat, to put it lightly its like a 30x30 pen per elephant on defualt coefficency, so it will mostly never be able to eat enough grass before dying.

When it comes to the values, it should change the effect in the save, but you may haft to verify it in the ini

By putting the coeffeciency to 5000 should in theory reduce there pen size to a 2x2 per giant elephant

[malthenielsen]

They're ENOURMOUS so it's not so strange there's a limit to how many of them can live on an embark.

The wiki says one of them is the size of 666 dwarves, so I gues it compares to feeding 3330 dwarves. Which is a pretty hefty task :)

If you should butcher some of them the wiki says 1 can give 1100 pieces of meat!

[Commisar Jon Fuklaw]

As per the mantis thread you posted, altering the grazer value in the raws may be necessary, Giant elephants' food requirements are no joke.

[57th|Flinx]

Until you find out how to handle the problem, put them into a cage. animals in cages need no food.

[kheftel]

There's another option, if you put a grazing animal on a chain, dwarves with animal care labor enabled will feed them from your food stockpiles. I haven't tried it with anything nearly as big as elephants though, and not in the steam version (yet), but it was in 0.47, the latest pre-steam classic version.

[malthenielsen]

Originally posted by 57th|Flinx:

Until you find out how to handle the problem, put them into a cage. animals in cages need no food.

Maybe he could keep them caged and only let them out when they are needed?

[polle]

how much food does a dwarf bring em? would be cool if they come up with a barrel full of lavish meals and feed one after the other hehe. maybe you can play around that with giant farms

[kheftel]

I didn't really pay attention, I think just like one meal at a time, I just noticed my llamas etc were no longer starving to death 😅

[Eqqsquizitine Buble-Schwinslow]

As I mentioned, I maxed out the grazing coefficient, increasing it from 100 to 1000000, meaning grazing should (if I understood things correctly) be more than enough to allow my Giant Elephants to survive on the available grass.

Though, full disclosure, I can't verify this, because I lack formal higher education, and the grazing equation exclusively throws out errors when I try to enter it (with the appropriate numbers filled in) into a calculator.

But regardless, my one stray Llama certainly shouldn't be starving now.
It shouldn't even be starving with the default coefficient in place.
But it is.

No matter how much any of my grazers eat, they are slowly descending into starvation.

I checked "d_init.txt" to verify, and the gracing coefficient is indeed set at 1000000.


What could be causing this? I only use three mods, and they all exclusively add/modify graphical assets, absolutely no changes to creatures, entities, or anything else of the sort.
(The mods are "Rounded hills", "Squad & Burrow Icons", and "Interface Tweaks")

Furthermore, I've used those mods previously while running a "cattle farming" fort (Elk Birds, actually. I managed to overcome their suicidal reproduction habits) and all animals assigned to the underground pasture (which was less than half the size of my current pasture) managed to stay fed in that fort with absolutely no issue, at the default 100 grazing coefficient.


I'm starting to think my fort might just be irreparably bugged, which is a damn shame.
If I can't even keep regular-sized grazers fed, I guess I'll just have to farm cats like all the other Urists.

[pezenwever]

Your file might reflect the value you set, but I experienced myself grass not growing back after changing the grazin coefficient during a game. My yaks turned everything into a brown puddle.
However, in a new game with this setting the grass didn't change at all. I had a full green map with plenty of yaks trampling around.

[Gosera]

Originally posted by Eqqsquizitine Buble-Schwinslow:

As I mentioned, I maxed out the grazing coefficient, increasing it from 100 to 1000000, meaning grazing should (if I understood things correctly) be more than enough to allow my Giant Elephants to survive on the available grass.

Though, full disclosure, I can't verify this, because I lack formal higher education, and the grazing equation exclusively throws out errors when I try to enter it (with the appropriate numbers filled in) into a calculator.

But regardless, my one stray Llama certainly shouldn't be starving now.
It shouldn't even be starving with the default coefficient in place.
But it is.

No matter how much any of my grazers eat, they are slowly descending into starvation.

I checked "d_init.txt" to verify, and the gracing coefficient is indeed set at 1000000.


What could be causing this? I only use three mods, and they all exclusively add/modify graphical assets, absolutely no changes to creatures, entities, or anything else of the sort.
(The mods are "Rounded hills", "Squad & Burrow Icons", and "Interface Tweaks")

Furthermore, I've used those mods previously while running a "cattle farming" fort (Elk Birds, actually. I managed to overcome their suicidal reproduction habits) and all animals assigned to the underground pasture (which was less than half the size of my current pasture) managed to stay fed in that fort with absolutely no issue, at the default 100 grazing coefficient.


I'm starting to think my fort might just be irreparably bugged, which is a damn shame.
If I can't even keep regular-sized grazers fed, I guess I'll just have to farm cats like all the other Urists.

With max coefficency and the ini says the same number, it shouldnt need more then a 1x1 pen, so what happens if you chain/cage them? and the only thing that may throw you off in that equation its just -3/4 is -0.75

Other then that the mods shouldnt impact this and if they still are starving while being fed on chain/cage then something has bugged out in that save

[Unagi]

Or maybe your use of the coefficient is backwards? Not sure why you would want it to be bigger... It should be made smaller.

The formula for a Grazer is such:
GRAZER = 20000 × G × (max size) -3/4.

where G is the Graze Coefficient.

Seems like you may like to make the number smaller, not bigger.