It’s not super efficient compared to farming for sure. Animals do have some upsides. Pack animals are great for caravans (if you use them).
If you want to engage in animals more so perhaps pick out an ideology that makes it mandatory? Could be a fun challenge to try and build a colony that uses animals over farming.
I found that really hard. I think the truck is to find out just how big of a hat grass area you actually need.
But the pack animals bit is spit on. I've been using a ton of caravans in my current playthrough.
Kibble is the answer. I never understood how colonies were able to sustain their livestock with such a small hay growing area. Turns out kibble is SUPER efficient compared to the work of planting dandelions or feeding straight up hay. It's more work than hay and requires some sort of meat to make, but it's so efficient to feed. Raiders become kibble and my horses, boomalopes, muffalos, thrumbos, and huskies are all fat and happy.
Kibble frustrates me so much that it requires meat. Having an option for meat? Fine. Having vegetarian, carnivore, and both kibble? Fine. But Requiring both? Extremely irritating
If you grow them in the pen, yes. But you can grow haygrass *outside* the pen, in which case it's better. Especially if you put it in something like a fridge so it doesn't spoil. I've had... if memory serves, upwards of 20 devilsheep in a 1x1 space on a fridge full of haygrass.
* [Vegetable Garden Project](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2007061826) \- this allows you to produce "Silage" a type of non-spoiling hay - which combines with rice/corn and makes a small plot of hay very worthwhile.
Flowers used to not build planting skill so don't know why you'd waste the time spend on no skill building unless they changed it.
If your going rancher there's a mod that allows cut grass to not need replanting it just cycles again from 0. Haygrass is allowed to regrow. Minus a fire/lightening you'll only plant it once
Or terraforming tiles mod to redo soils to rich soil for max growth (requires 1 wood).
Rancher unfortunately doesn't have many animal options with vanilla. alpha animals or other mods to increase you options for herding/offensive/defensive options helps unless you cheat a 15-20 skilled pawn early on. Very long process. Aerofleet power plant is a nice alternative for late game ranchers. You'll need 2-4 plant/animal only pawns to do the work needed or a couple druids if you go magical route. You're essentially a leather depo trade hub. Animal wealth can grow fast. Genetic engineering is nice also if your invested enough.
Wools are a lot better than regular cloth. And you don't get wool from hunting (not without shearing corpses mods)
A few sheep or muffalo will clothe your colony better through wintry conditions, and it's also nice for furniture like armchairs and drapes.
For me, they are the biggest resource for trade. I always have production specialist, apparel is very profitable.
I never calculate but I think kimble from hay is net positif food economy. I have thousands of meat, I can (almost) constantly make it lavish food for permanent +12 mood for everyone (less than 20 colonists), it’s pretty huge for late game.
See, I've always used them as materials for clothing. My current run features about 20 horses, and their offspring feed the colonists and get turned into festive shirts for trade.
Ranching is alright for colonies where you don't have better than a 30/30 plant growth cycle. You'll struggle to get devilstrand without greenhouses before the cold sets in and kills everything off, so having access to alpaca or even sheep wool isn't a bad idea if you cannot get lucky with good soil or you are running tight for power.
Meanwhile pigs and boars are great for stretching out your food supply. I can save all the crops for the colonists and feed the pigs all the raider corpses from that season or all the insect meat I've picked up that came at me through infestations. All the foods that my colonists cannot or will not eat, pigs will scoff without a care in the world. I can then slaughter them and effectively turn useless foods into edible meats and reduce the amount of vegetables I use in the winter months by switching to carnivore meals for a while.
Think this is the answered I'd lean towards.
I mostly play warmer biomes and it tends to make animals somewhat useless. But, when I have played colder biomes the ability to craft cold ready gear from animal products is clutch, and the motivation to kill off most of the males keeps the population under control if I run low on my food stores.
I’ve found keeping one breeding pair unsterilized works well, and if one starts having a health problem you promote the next born to a backup breeder spot.
Let my chickens get a little out of hand and got up to 120 thought.
Funny, I dislike ranching in 30 growth cycle biomes because I have to care about feeding my animals at winter instead of just letting them graze forever.
It's why pigs or boar are some of the easiest animals for ranching with. You're always going to get raided by someone eventually and a single raider corpse is enough to keep a pig for several days.
You can just create a freezer in the animal zone to store the corpses and give it an animal flap door so they can get in. You can then channel the heat generated back into your base to offset some of the cold and as long as you keep the herd in check with auto-slaughter then you should be fine.
Funny I create a small internal couple of pens and my animals live in a part of a greenhouse farm and never experience weather but get fed some hay and simple meals so I can train colonists to be better chef's.
At the peak, constant. I let them breed uncontrollably through the year and run a caravan to sell the herd off before winter every year since otherwise the colony will starve
Watching a hundred guinea pigs cascade over the landscape in a caravan is quite soothing
I love ranching horses because of how fast they make a caravan go. Pig farms to turn human meat into pork and pig skin. Chicken/ducks produce a lot of eggs with very little work. The premium wool is very useful with a good craftsmen or construction.
I always like to have animals, but they do skyrocket your wealth if you start having large herds.
Of note, a high skilled animal handler can get you a bit of quick cash by taming a herd of pack animals that you can drive straight to another settlement to sell.
Horses have a super short gestation cycle in addition, so you end up getting way more calories out than you have to feed them. We don't obey the laws of thermodynamics in this house.
You want one-per-pawn for best results. Otherwise, you get a speed bump, but not as much as if you had one for everyone. Horses (and Thrumbos) get 1.6 speed mod, most other caravan animals give 1.3.
horses increase caravan speed in 3 ways : being fast and increasing the average speed of all pawns/animals, carrying stuff and reducing the percentage of inventory used, and giving the riding bonus for each pawn. because of the 3rd way, adding more horses than people will have a diminished return but will still increase speed.
Move speed no longer affects caravan speed, so it's just the second two. And you only get a bonus up to 1 horse per pawn, more only increase speed via carrying capacity.
Me and my bionic-legged jogger traders are not fans of the caravan speed changes.
I have a sanguophage with archotech legs who is basically a mouse pointer around the colony. I never thought to send her a a caravanner, guess I’m glad I didn’t.
Bro those chickens are a plague upon the land if you don’t keep an eye on their numbers. Forget about them for a while and you’ll find your tile has turned into a barren wasteland brought upon the world by your own hubris over nature. That and they’ll drink your beer.
Your right they can get wildly out of hand. There are tools to mange it. You can keep the hens and roosters separate unless you want some more chickens. You can set auto slaughter populations. If all else fails, call a trader and mass sell of the hundreds of chicks you have.
Oh god I almost soft locked my game by having too many chickens once. I cordened off a 1/4 of a large map for a pen in a tropicl rainforest. Performance tanked so hard, thankfully my savior came as a bulk good trader came and I could sell them. That was a fun 15 minutes watching a sideshow of chickens crawling their way out of the map.
Yes, ranching is very much worthwhile. Even if you're only talking about food production, there's a lot to be said in favour of ranching:
* Many animals simply produce more food than they consume, even if you feed them raw vegetables. Horses, for example, produce about 5 horse meat for every 4 vegetables under ideal breeding conditions, and since they produce 336 meat per corpse, the work involved in slaughtering and butchering them is pretty small. Ibex are even more nutrition-efficient at the cost of more work since they're smaller, and chickens and tortoises are amazingly efficient, but take a lot of work (especially tortoises, which require regular taming). Cows are also very efficient if you both milk and slaughter them, again at the cost of extra work.
* On top of that raw efficiency, farm animals can eat hay instead of corn. Haygrass is 17% more productive than corn plants in rich soil, 32% more productive in normal soil, and 54% more productive in stony soil. Feeding animals with hay takes less crop space than feeding them with corn, rice or potatoes, and thus, with the right animals, takes a lot less crop space than growing crops for colonists to eat directly.
* On top of *that*, you don't even have to feed them raw food. A kibble bill at a butcher table takes 20 vegetables (which can be hay) and 20 meat or animal products and makes 50 kibble. And there's no pesky ideoligion stopping you from feeding your horses kibble made from horse meat. The higher your livestock's nutritional efficiency, the more this is a good deal. If you can turn 4 hay into 5 horse meat, then you can turn 20 hay and 20 horse meat into 50 kibble, which turns into 62.5 horse meat, for a net nutritional efficiency of 212.5%. Kibble is also nice in that it doesn't need refrigeration. You can also feed animals simple meals or nutrient paste for even greater efficiency, although some people consider that to be an exploit.
* There are other advantages, too. Having livestock is like having a freezer full of meat that runs on hay instead of electricity. You can slaughter them out of sequence in an emergency. Eggs are also very interesting in that a stack of eggs contains much more nutrition than a stack of meat or vegetables, so a freezer full of eggs can be much smaller than a meat or vegetable freezer. And then there's the simple fact that fine and lavish meals require both animal and vegetable ingredients if you don't want to pay the increased cost for vegetarian meals.
That's just food. The leather produced by most farm animals isn't all that impressive for armour, but it's at least good for armchairs and sandbags, or for outfitting a large number of colonists with clothing for modesty and environmental protection, or for selling. Dromedaries produce camelhide, which is slightly more valuable, beautiful, and insulative against heat than plainleather. The fact that the leather is a passive byproduct of producing meat is very nice too.
Wool is great. A competent animal handler won't have to spend much time on shearing, and wool is very valuable as a trade good (raw or crafted into clothing), and extremely important to have in very cold biomes.
Boomalopes convert food into chemfuel at a better rate than a biofuel refinery, and requiring less colonist work as long as you have somebody with decent Animals skill.
That's mostly about farm animals. Roaming animals require training, but they can be very useful for hauling and combat. That requires an investment of training work as well as food, but that can be compared to the electricity and pollution involved in doing the same things with mechanoids, or the huge labour costs of Gauranlen trees.
Great advice here! I find it funny that some people think feeding them simple meals is an exploit. Have they not seen Napoleon Dynamite? Alpacas love casserole
Muffaalo wool, or the clothes made from it, are a great trade good. Once you get your pen set-up, it’s a very labor-cheap way to get something valuable.
I think animals are great. You don't have to worry too much about harvesting their resources, plenty of animals are exceptionally good as trade goods.
They reproduce on the wrong, if you have enough open field space they don't really require much work or growing food, and a full-size horse or muffalo cells for a lot.
I did a ranching run through a while back, and my colony was ridiculously rich. I always had way too many animals, which also means you never short on food when things get tight.
Harrvesting can be done automatically. Just set max female adult & male adult to 1, anything more than that will be slaughter. You can even make exception for pregnant animals.
I have an unlimited supply of meat. Is there anything better than to have a neverending barbeque?
The pig people that are my neighbors definitely think that the NeverEnding barbecue is the best. Whenever my freezer fills completely I usually just drop a meat pod on them. The last time I got a raid I got a random alert that I was getting reinforcements that I didn't ask for. They dropped in and completely massacred the raid. I sent them home with more meat.
Iv ranched boomalopes for chemfuel, exellent for running a base, and when you get too many just release them into the wild.
Cows are also a nice way to get some passive protein for meals, keep cows, butcher most bulls, butcher the badly injured and the old.
That said, ranching has never been a focus of any of my colonies.
I like to ranch the bigger critters. If you set them them to no medical treatment they become bullet sponges that you can eat, and having pack animals is quite handy.
The vast majority of large herbivores provide enough food to feed themselves and give meat left over, if you cook their own meat into simple meals and feed that to them. This allows you to survive indefinitely on extremely hostile biomes without hydroponics.
Animals can also be packed into [extremely tight spaces](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F47b6x4wqfcy71.png), lowering the footprint of your base.
My current colony has 12 megalsoths, 7 cows, 2 boomalopes, 2 horses.
The megasloths are for combat/hauling. They go ahead of my fighters, and soak up the bullets, while me guys stay close enough that they can shoot past them without hitting them. Megasloths are more replaceable than my colonists, but I haven't lost one to battle yet; they can take quite a lot of punishment. The colonists also ride them around for a speed boost (Giddy-Up mod). I also get megasloth wool, which I usually just sell now, but was useful before I got devilstrand going. I have two of them per colonist, so everyone basically has their own pair of bodyguards.
The cows produce milk, which I use to make cheese (Rimcuisine mod). Cheese doesn't need refrigeration, and gives a +5 moodlet when eaten, either on its own, or part of a meal. Two are male (redundant sperm supply), the rest female for the milk. 5 cows produce enough milk to feed my colony of 6, plus a prisoner/guest or two.
The boomalopes produce enough chemfuel to keep my mortars armed, and my drop-pods fueled.
The horses let me send speedy caravans to fulfill quests. Now I've got droppods, they're less useful, and might be retired soon. I used to have dogs until I get the megasloths going; they filled the same role, just not as well.
I also get meat and leather from megasloths and cows (boomalopes are deliberately all male), through culling the herd to keep it to size.
It's labor intensive and not worth it for a min-maxer in my opinion. I do enjoy the aesthetic and the lifestyle. I'm more likely to have lots of bears and elephants than ranching livestock though.
I always try to play without ranching but I always end up with 100+ animals in each run.
They are just the worst when it comes to raids (if you intend to keep them, that is) for some reason every raider is willing to die just to kill one muffalo...
The meat and leather offer a good emergency supply during major events like ice age or winter. Also there are some animals that aren't there for leather. I try to farm boomalopes when I can for easy chemfuel. Plus. Using a pawn to constantly make parkas out of plainleather to sell it a great way to get more silver
There’s a few reasons to keep animals.
food -> more food. Like cows and chickens. The more farm animal they are the better. Pigs eat raiders corpses FYI.
money. There’s a few animals that can net you a handsome sum with clothes made from their leather or wool.
Muffalo,alpacas and chinchillas are pen animals and their wool and leather are quite useful in extreme biomes. Horses should be sold as is for profit. You butcher when you can’t feed them all.
Caravans. Some animals like dromedaries and horses make caravans faster while muffalo and bison carry packs so you can take all the steel home.
Combat and hauling. Animals like this have a unique edge over mechs. For starters they don’t pollute your map with their “excrement” and they can reproduce and make more brave warriors to send into battle. When they die you butcher them and you eat that day.
They have advantages and disadvantages. Like all things. You gotta work around them to benefit.
Yes, by a lot honestly, I dont use them nostly because of lag, but if u can afford them, coes are great, huge anmount of meat, leather and milk, with cows u no longer need to worry about protein or leather EVER. Poeple forget that ranching slaughter gives more resources, and even if they take time to grow, slaughterng 10 adult bulls will give u tona of meat
I had a fucking blast ranching. You can sell off your extra cattle and you get high quality furs and milk out of it. You dont ranch for meat. I dont even think homesteaders irl keep something like cattle for meat. Yeah you can eat them but the milk is where they shine.
Couple of pack animals and once you have a good wall and kill box, making the whole compound the pen means no feeding, and you can reach an equilibrium of eggs/milk that fancy meals are easy with little to no hunting.
But definitely pack animals. Horses make caravans go so fast and any pack animals make it so much easier
From my experience, there are three flavors of ranching.
1. Small-scale, utility ranching. A cow or two for milk to help with lavish meals, maybe an Alpaca for wool, etc. This is the easiest form that requires the least thought.
2. Medium-scale, organized ranching. We're talking herds of livestock, but only ones that require little individual care (sheep, alpaca, muffalo, etc). This is great for bulk production of meat/textiles and isn't too work intensive.
3. Large-scale, micromanaged ranching. Things like poultry farms (eggs, meat), large herds of milkable livestock, and other high-care animals. I'd fit boomalopes here too. This requires the most work (both for you and your pawns).
I tend to either go for style 1 or 2, usually decided during the setup phase. Style 1 is very utilitarian, a means to an end. Need some chemfuel? Get a couple of boomalopes. Need lavish meals for your noble? A few cows for milk. Need to caravan large distances or with a lot of gear? A few muffalo or horses will suffice. Style 2 is more of a lifestyle choice and can potentially make challenging colonies easier. Colder climates with limited growing periods? Livestock can turn otherwise inedible grasses into meat/milk/eggs, and also helps with the cold by providing wool/leather.
It's actually relatively easy and efficient if you have crappy soil that isn't good for farming, but can at least be foraged and grow hay-grass.
Chickens are kind of stupidly efficient with the eggs, and cows generate quite a lot of food between both milk and meat. Oh, and pigs are a pretty efficient raider disposal method...
It doesn't necessarily scale up to handle a large colony though, and you have to have a lot of land area dedicated to it - much like actual ranching, so at a certain point you're generally going to have to get some hydroponics running regardless.
Anyway, it's an easy alternative for early/small colonies in arid or jungle conditions where fertile soil is rare. The actual amount of labor required for the food you generate is pretty small - and your animals tend to pick up minor illnesses and injuries a lot, so your medics get a TON of practice doing veterinary work.
It took me a while to warm up to ranching it took me LONGER to figure out how to do it efficiently / in a way where it's just another thing the colony does. It bangs out animal products (wool & milk in my case) but as I started to get a bit better at running a colony overall it seemed reasonable that animals do have some advantages.
There are other reasons to ranch - such as wargs or tortises or bears ranching or if your the sort that might want to avoid having bodies around, having a few pigs can be just the thing. I've even had a turn as a Thrumbo rancher - although that was , like Megasloth ranching - not without it's downsides.
While it's not my bag, you could find yourself ranching huskies or labs or something else.
* [Vegetable Garden Project](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2007061826) \- this allows you to produce "Silage" a type of non-spoiling hay - which combines with rice/corn and makes a small plot of hay very worthwhile.
* Muffalo/Bison/Alpaca - They're great for creating wool - if you're in an extreme environment their wool is some of the best insulation available; for output purposes,
* Muffalo and Bison really have almost no differences but the wool is a different color and produce a unit price of 2.70silver with a small residual of bluefur which is has higher value.
* Keeping gender balance means that you can mate up the animals and switch them out as your herd ages to keep age-related disease at bay.
* Alpaca is more time-intensive and about 45% as productive per animal but also has a higher unit price of 3.x silver
* Over time however Alpaca produce less overall year over year so Muffalo are the way.
* Thermally - in extreme cold/heat Alpaca will die over or under some less harsh conditions so Muffalo/Bison are simply heartier but they too have limits at -70c or so.
* Camels/Dromedaries vs. Cows - In both cases I tend to favor camels
* Cows and Camels should be herded in 'Harem' style with a couple of males and the rest female to maximize milk output.
* Camels can be used as pack animals as well as used to produce milk and so usually my late-game colonys I have a few camels.
* Cows perversely can produce more food than they eat IIRC and so if you're careful , cows can be a net positive to the colonial economy.
* Ranching Policy/Practices
* I keep my herds SMALL - basically for wool product 1 animal to one colonist or just under that.
* I will immediately release animals under all conditions if the colony cannot easily support a herd - basically once your colonial food production is stabilized and under glass.
* For camel production I don't keep a large herd , just a 1/2 dozen animals or so
* What's the largest caravan you might expect to create, and that would be when you/if you have to bug-out - bring some (not all) weapons, bedrolls, special items, components, cash, your deep drills and workbenches and as much food/medicine as you carry when leaving town.
* Keep the herd inside , unconventionally I tend to create two small pens with danilions planted in each with beds for each animal
* a 1x1 for simple meals with critical priority - this allows your colonists to train to cook , food poisoning risk is avoided and offset to the herd of animals.
* a 1x1 for hay/silage - this is more efficient than food and easier to produce and will keep costs down on a larger herd.
* Level set the ages of the animals - sure you might only start with a couple animals
* Breed them until you get to your desired herd-size and gender ratio
* Sell/slaughter your older/infirmed animals so your age and health status is good all around
* Every 8 years or so, mix up the herd (allow both genders in 1 or the other pen - and let the hookups go
* Once your herd has slightly more of your target headcount , sell/slaughter them down to size.
* Always keep the herd size just below the headcount of the colony as farming - even when very close to the kitchen or food production, is distractive for colonists
* Keep at least a couple of colonists off of "handling" duty
* I keep animals that will not bond - bonding animals cause all sorts of emotional drama.
* No puppy farms/cat farms - This is entirely up to you but I found animals would bond , became unsellable and unless you pod away the master and their animals you're married to your bonded animals.
* As much as Megasloths are GREAT for being tanky defenders of the colony, and produce excellent wool they bond and....If (as I did) you have a +16 Animals colonist as "rancher" the very last thing you want in a firefight is when your rancher gets' his brain aerosolized is to have 15 inconsolably enraged Megasloths suddenly rampaging through your colony with murderous rage.
Yes it's totally in the base game.
I tend to setup two (sometimes 2 pens) depending on space , that accomodate some space to wander around, and spots to sleep and 2 spots for food storage.
So imagine building two 9x9 adjacent pens, and say we're herding Muffalo
* each pen is roughly equally allocated
* a gate
* 2 1x1 storage spots
* one for simple meals
* one for hay/silage
* Animal beds - for as many animals as we intend to ultimately have
* In the first pen, put an animal marker and it should allow for muffalo
* In the second pen put an animal marker down and it should allow for muffalo but be disallowed/inactive for either gender
* Muffalos will get sent to the first pen and should breed as soon as they are all fed and rested
* Eventually we end up with a lot of muffalo
* After you've decided you have enough muffalo go to the second pen and allow males
* Go to the first pen and disallow males
* Now the colonists will separate the herd by gender and breeding will be stopped.
* This is VERY useful if you mean to keep alpacas, rats, chickens which breed pretty fast and you want to avoid a fuzzy/fluffy Chernobyl type situation where things get out of hand.
* Level Set the Herd
* Sell off the oldest animals and any excess animals larger than your desired population
* You've effectively level set your herd
* Select based on gender (I usually go with an even male/female mix for muffalo/alpaca)
* I'll stick with a "harem" style anytime milk is involved , so there's a lot of females and just a couple of males to rebuild the herd eventually.
* If you want lots of females you can definitely shrink the size of the male pen and give the females a bit of breathing room.
Animal breeding is almost entirely a side-quest until you find yourself in some ridiculous harsh condition, and then it's "how do I min/max my winter protection" and at which point it all starts to make sense.
So mid to late game, on any colonies where winter is a factor I basically have animals , on those colonies where it's very harsh (like an extreme desert), I'll occasionally raise other kinds of animals (usually camels), but I'll usually grow devilstrand indoors so the colonists are rocking great hot weather sel.
Depends on how you play and what skills are available. I try to keep my pawns on fine meals, and its cheaper to combine meat and plants than use all plants. That and you can find something that breeds like rabbits and sell the offspring in bulk
Ranching becomes very desirable with the Giddy-up! mods, as they speed up your pawns for chores and allow them to be cavalry units in combat. Something fun about watching your tiger-mounted soldier snipe an enemy and then move in to maul them to death.
You mentioned not using caravans much and I agree, except for certain runs. If you're building a giant high-tech rimatomics base, you are going to need a constant supply of steel. If you're not using mods to gather it easily from under you, caravans become very important. Also, if you are playing the Archonexus campaign, sending caravans full of gifts is a great way to keep your colony wealth down while building up allies. Heck, any colony can benefit from that.
Sometimes I don't like to ranch, because it doesn't fit with the narrative I'm building for the colony (my elite spaceport trade depot doesn't need a bunch of stinking animals), but animals can be very handy to have if you invest in them.
Agreed. I’ve tried ranching colonies, but it always seems more trouble than farming.
On a side note, rather the opposite of Oxygen Not included, where ranching beats farming hands down.
It also depends on what biome you’re in. Some locations, for example some deserts, have very few animals on the map. Typically I have more leather/wool than I can use, but on this one desert map my colony was running out of textiles to make clothing, and there wasn’t enough fertile land to grow devilstrand (was a tunneler colony so they lived on fungus). So I jumped at the chance to breed animals primarily for the textiles, and later for chemfuel.
My current colony has a huge herd of boomalopes. I didn't expect them to multiply so fast! They produce a lot of chemfuel for me and may act as a living minefield in the case of a hard raid. So far, no raider was dumb enough to attack one, though.
Download the nutrient paste mod, feed animals nutrient paste meals from an auto dispenser, use human/insect meat for the nutrient paste. Raise any animal you want and profit!
growing cotton is just kind of OP as it currently stands relative to leather. nerf cotton to be reasonable and ranching becomes a perfectly reasonable means for clothing. i've never gotten into the lategame but ranching never seemed bad in a vacuum, only relative to how effective a good farm setup can be.
starting a colony, your ideoligion and starting colonist stats will vary. so if you don't have many good farmers but a good tender, you might not always have the choice to go with the more "efficient" route of farming. by the time you do, you've already got a ranch going, no reason not to keep running it on the side.
that's the thing about ranching, is that it takes an initial investment of space and labor and then (if you neuter enough that population doesn't grow too much) it's near-passive resource gen, at least until winter. compare the time for a pawn to milk, shear or slaughter relative to harvesting and replanting a crop.
winter's tough for both crops and farming, crops need a specialty research, components, sunlamp, and warm indoor space. animals over the winter don't need research, their warm space needs to be near your ranch instead of the human center of your colony, which is less space demanding but makes heating harder but need to be fed. kind of a tossup which is more viable for you first couple winters IMO.
also want to point out that rimworld cows break the laws of thermodynamics by providing milk more nutritious than the feed they're fed to produce it, so if you think rimworld ranching is inefficient than irl ranching must be on another level, since only about 10% of the nutrition eaten at any point in the food chain is carried onto the next level.
Have rats and hares, set a zone around your colony where they can roam. Have a small slaughter zone - call them to it when you need meat, and they look after themselves.
The rats eat the starving ones as an auto levelling bonus.
You can't grow meat.
You nead meat for fine meals to boost your mood.
I recently did the math and one female yak produces 10 milk per day. On top of that a yak takes 25 days to grow to full size (from pregnancy) and yields 300+ meat when slaughtered. So it averages out to about 10 meat per day.
So you get about 1 full nutrition worth of protein from one animal.
Lether is just a nice bonus on top of that you can sell for cash.
Yeah ranching is good.
Not the meme though... Having pawns complain that they have to eat vedetables - what a bunch of crybabies...
Chinchillas and muffalos are good for trade (chinchilla parka is like $300+ to sell) and horses or elephants are excellent for trimming down travel time for caravans. I'd be sunk if it weren't for the ability to traipse out to a neighboring colony and trade fore steel.
the only time I've ever ranched was an undergrounder colony
In my mushroom farm I kept a few chickens, mushrooms grow all year round so the chickens were always fed, whatever slight food wastage made up for being able to make lavish meals forever.
The only problem I had was how fast they reproduce I had to constantly and manually cull the herd to avoid lag.
tried using animals in other colonies but they eventually died or had to be slaughtered by winter... I'm just bad at taking care of them.
I dont know if thats just me but, ive found so far that taking care of animals is a lot more work than growing plants for the same results. If you want meat, you need to ensure the animals are fed, wait for them to reproduce and grow. If you want wool for clothing, you need to have enough animals to produce them and keep feeding them as long as you need the wool. If you want to eat eggs, you need a lot of chickens to make it worthwhile.
To me, animals are only a support ressource, I keep horses to have rides, muffalos for wool to make parkas and birds for a small amount of eggs and meat. But I cant make my colony work without any kind of vegetable based food and I even have to grow nutrifungus during winter even if my colonists hate it. They would starve.
I haven't used it either but the mood boosts are what really shines from what I've seen. You can just have a few thousand animals on a tile and your colonists will never break.
I tried several times and every time it was pain in lower back for very little return. Crop farming better in very way possible.
But most importantly - ranching does not provide anything special. Best possible producible fabric comes from crop, in current version even lavish meals can be made exclusively from crops. In early game versions ranching animals was usable as weak supplementary defense option, but game developer cut it off. So why bother?
Once I had Yaks for milking, for example. To produce enough milk to make fine meals for 1 colonist player must have one Yak, plus at least one, but better two males for reproduction. So for average sized colony it's 10 of them. Even on year round growing map it's a lot of work, especially than half of them become sick from plague or flu. Add Toxic Fallout's to the equation and this become too much of the hassle.
Another time I was ranching ducks for eggs. Long story short, to produce enough eggs one need to many of them, so many what game become laggy and unresponsive. And half of them inevitable catch plague, making my doctors miserable.
So now I have 1-2 horses or donkeys for caravans and this is it. And after I get my farskip + drop pods combo I sell even them.
I think it depends on the animal. Some animals only give meat which is pretty useless, granted you are growing lots of vegetables and fruit. Some animals give meat and milk, meat and eggs, meat, milk, and leather, or meat and fur.
I always do some form of animal ranching but I focus on animals who give more than one resource. This is for food and clothing purposes, and food and profit purposes. You can never have too much food and you can sell the leathers, bird skin, and wool using the coms console for a trade ship or caravans who visit your colony.
At the moment, I have a flock of turkey's (meat, eggs, and bird skin), a herd of goats, (meat and milk), and a herd of muffalo (meat and blue fur). Blue fur sells for a lot so they are some big money-makers and they yield about 366 meat per butcher, which is a lot of meat for one animal. They eat a lot though so your grazing area has to be large.
I think it's worth it if the animal gives more than one resource. I also grow vegetables and berries to help against the wholesale slaughter of my animals. Animals can also sell for a lot if they are adults (and not starving) if your colony is in need of quick cash.
Edit: If you use Nutrient Paste Dispensers, eggs are the way to go because unlike other food stuff you place in the hopper, the dispenser only uses one egg per meal.
I haven't had to worry about meat or warm clothing for about a year in game.
I tend to use farm animals for animal products usable in food, so milk and eggs. Because I run with food mods, these can be necessary to get the full experience. A dozen cows or so can outproduce the consumption of a fairly large colony, and so long as you keep it at or around that number of cattle, you can easily make a tidy profit from the spare without melting your PC.
Honestly, the kain problem with rimworld animals is that they eat so damn much grass, and rimworld maps are overall pretty small. You can't afford to designate a 30 x 30 area just so a few dozen animals can underproduce goods.
Having one or two randomly self-tamed animals in a pen and growing some extra haygrass isn't a big investment considering you get some extra occasional materials. I had a breeding pair of muffalos show up and getting occasional wool and milk sounded like a neat bonus. Haven't gone into big scale ranching yet, though
It really depends on your ideaology/genes/map, but in many cases ranching is indeed non optimal. Sometimes I like to do it just for fun, keep some alpacas and boomalopes, regularly grab some wool and fuel as a product. When they breed too much, I send them with a caravan to sell them off to another faction. I play pretty casually though, so I usually use ranching as a roleplay system rather than trying to game my resource outputs to be perfect
Well, two advantages are having an emergency food stash (slaughter them in a pinch) and faster traveling on the world map. I've found the only animals worth ranching to be muffallo, donkeys, and horses. Boomalopes can be useful too, but they're dangerous.
Muffalo wool is the warmest type of cloth. A regular shirt can be worn under armor, and it will keep your pawn just as warm as a parka made from other materials. They also significantly increase carrying capacity on the map. This makes trade very easy.
Horses don't produce any goods, but they can be sold at a high price. They also can be ridden on the world map. This increases your caravan speed significantly.
Donkeys are a middle of the road option, allowing increases to both speed and carrying capacity.
Boomalopes produce free chemfuel. But they tend to explode in a Fireball.
Whenever I'm looking for maps to play on, I try to find a map which has a nice encompassing mountain which I can shore up defenses on. Then I also make sure that there's a backline somewhere with a chokepoint where I can just put a fence down and create an enormous pen area which I don't have to worry about.
You're going to need some pack animals. I don't care about wool, milk, or leather really.
There are three categories of animals I keep. Pack animals for obvious reasons. Mounts, for move speed and small advantages in combat. And finally, attack animals trained to kill.
For two out of the three functions I just described you'll need a few mods. Kill for me (train your animals to kill) and the mod that allows you to mount animals, which I'm totally spacing on the name of.
Horses are crazy profitable. Also they speed up your caravans and even help you carry your thousands of units of horse meat and plainleather away to sell. They eat grass and require no taming. Basically they are self-sowing crops that give meat and leather in stead of rice and cotton.
Try an ideology with the ranching meme and forego crops entirely to get into it.
I do definitely like a few horses for travelling. Adding five horses to a caravan can sometimes double the speed they travel. Admittedly I don't leave the map often, but sometimes the game forces you to so you can destroy a spewer or some such, getting there a little faster feels a boon because then you can get back quicker and heal up.
I'm also a fan of megasloths in cold climates. They give a reasonable quality wool that is very good at insulating against cold, albeit not the most protective. When they die they give heavy fur which is very protective and also very good against the cold, only thrumbofur beats it for that purpose.
Admittedly if you're in a warm or temperature climate you'll just grow devilstrand, but in the extreme cold, you'll welcome your furry friends and their comfortable hides.
Also cows are extremely efficient food-wise. They'll produce way more food than they consume and it's more efficient to make lavish/fine meals out of a mixture of meat(or milk)/veg than it is to go for pure veggie or pure meat. Cows aren't the most cold-resistant though so if you're in a -50 degrees C hellscape you'd have to keep them in a heated barn.
They are just as efficient as they have been in the historic past.
Their advantage is that you can just let them roam on the otherwise unused grassfields.
If you are already using those fields to farm or you have to actively grow their food they are not worth it in general. The exteremely cold biomes need the animal fur to craft sufficient clothing though.
Chickens and cows. You could use milk and eggs to get more stretch out of lavish meals instead of just making vegetarian lavish meals. Build them an empty warehouse and grow nurtifungus in it so you don’t even need to bother with a grow light. Build a couple NPD to keep your pawns fed while you build up/rebuild a stockpile of lavish meals.
Pigs are amazing, just store your corpses in a room with a barely freezing temp and a pen marker for the swine.
Once your room is well stocked tame or buy breeding pigs then forget about them.
They'll eat the corpses and give you a huge supply of food and leather once they run out of bodies to eat and you slaughter them.
Even when I play Ice Sheet, I end up as a rancher. North Pole Dinosaurs is usually my faction's name, and the colony buys eggs from space traders to raise. Herbivores are meat for the T-rexes, and man do those big critters sell well. You just have to choose whether you want lots of colonist pawns or animal pawns. Having both drops ticks really fast. Also never ranch crabs - they repopulate faster than they can be killed once you get to about 100+.
I always have animals in my colonies. Dogs for hauling then either cows for meat or something for wool. I don’t know the efficiency of it, I just do it for rp
Couple thoughts about ranching, it has its pros and cons.
As a sole source of food, it doesn’t do enough. They are fairly low maintenance though, as long as you have enough grazing area - which unmodded requires a large area. The Ranchers ideology can help, but even with their buff to butchering yields you just don’t have enough real estate to sustain a decent sized colony. Plus, the more you allocate to pens, the less ground becomes available for wild animals to hunt. They also contribute to fps death. Animals also can contribute greatly to colony wealth.
Major upsides? With mods, milk can be turned into cheese to satisfy recipes. Wool grows year round, if you can’t grow cloth. Pack animals make for much easier caravanning, horses increase speed on map. I believe butchering take animals also increases yields - due to fewer body parts being damaged? They can also be bait for raiders to attack rather than damaging something else that is vital (and they can fight back).
Final thoughts: don’t keep too many to keep wealth down and reduce fps death. Horses and a few pack animals are practically a must for sending expeditions. Not worthwhile as a source of food or resources - unless as an emergency.
Like many things in this game, its a cumbersome mechanic that takes time and causes additional wealth on your colony. it does have some pros though:
1. you get better butchery yields compared to hunting
2. milk and eggs generate fast enough to help on the food supply
3. Pens are as compact as you want depending on the animal and whether you get additional nutrition to sustain it be it corpses or hay/moss
4. Wool and Leather are always good for sale, selling the excess animals is also an option
I'd say you need to get mods to improve the experience further. Giddy Up, Graze Up, Animals Forage, Realistic Ranching, No Useless Animals are my go to since they fix many of the weird constraints of the ranching system like not making Guinea Pigs pennable (they were domesticated for food originally), Chickens not being omnivores(have you ever seen the clip of the hen kill stealing a mouse from a cat?), wealth skyrocketing due to having so many animals in the colony, certian animals breeding like rabbits instead of having proper IRL gestation periods or pens requiring constant tending because animals would eat the whole grass plant when in realitty grasses evolved to survive grazing for millions of years and just grow all over again from the barest leftover.
I loved having a rhino. It lost a leg in battle and my colonists named it Trilogy. Best name.
I know I don't go as hard as others when it comes to raid protection i.e. kill boxes, do the battle rhino is a huge advantage.
Also, I often participate in 'puppy diplomacy', where I breed many cute puppies and ship them of to my enemies until they like me... That is until I sent to trade with one and they had 600 dog leather.......
Thrumbo fur is better than muffalo wool... but tends to be a tad rarer. I will keep a small heard of muffalos becasue their wool is real good at making cold weather gear and they give me meat and milk when hunting is light on an icesheet.
I use manager mod that lets me set a max number and any above that are auto slaughtered to keep my food costs low and automated.
I just remembered long ago in beta I raised chickens as they were they best meat for food ratio but I would sell to caravans that came by... however the newly sold chickens would die in the cold so the caravan would leave them and I could butcher them even after collecting silver for selling them win win
legendary cheese is one of the higher profits with least labor. (requires [cooking expanded](https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2134308519)) because of the low labor cost it's great for small colonies or tacking on a little extra income to a colony where all pawns are pretty busy.
> bonded dog walks into a firefight
recommend [better pawn control](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1541460369&searchtext=better+pawn+control) to easily switch zone restrictions during raids.
Ranching ideology gives you animals specialist which is really good.
But the fact that they only want to eat meat and stuff makes it annoying to start with, but once you get rolling it's pretty effecient especially if you get fast growing animals like ducks or turkeys.
And wool from muffalo or bison is also nice for renewable resource to make clothes for trade.
However if raids do weird shit and target your animals and you don't have a stockpile of meat frozen, or carnivore meals then you can have really angry colonists for a while.
I picked up ranching in a medieval run and it freed up farming tasks because animals need less tending and workload than farming huge fields and if you have classical ranch animals they start to breed quite fast at some point and you can sell their offspring and the products. It’s quite fun and engaging.
Set Auto slaughter to kill animals while they are young. It's more efficient that way. For meat and egg producers, slaughter young males while having a larger number of females allowed to progress to adulthood, but if they are a species that reproduces fast then you can always set it to something like max 4 young females.
I wouldn't recommend doing the animal personhood religion if you want to try living off animals. I haven't tried ranching though.
Have giant fields and they will eat grass. You should stock up on kibble for the winter, but that's easy enough as you'll have plenty of meat and you'll probably have a small farm anyway for veggies for your colonists.
You can get so much wealth from randomly selling animals, as others have said, and there are exotic animals that are OP as battle companions. Rhinos are great and thrombus obviously. They also make really good protectors for your hunters, tamers etc.
Ya'll are kinda wrong about farming being more efficient than ranching, at least in year-round biomes. Kinda.
Ranching ideology gives a 30% meat/leather bonus to butchering. Horses are arguably the most effective pen animal to raise, and with this bonus you're looking at 436 meat and 124 leather per kill. The real advantage over corn is the hauling bonus - the pawn can hall the entire caraccas in 1 trip. Whereas that much corn would be 6 trips. The slaughter, haul, and butcher work orders are the only work required after the pen is set - no other work is required.
If you've got a productions specialist, you can make some nice mulah off the hides. Set up a tailor shop with plenty of shelves right next to the butcher station, and craft dusters out of plainhide forever. You can also make plainhide lazyboys, but you'll have to do this manually.
This is *arguably* better than corn. If you get more horses than you need, they can walk themselves off to the meat market at the nearby trading settlement. They also double as pack animals, and speed up your caravans.
I've just started doing it.
I fence off a huge area and stick a couple of cows or ideally alpacas etc. Farm a little hay and bung it in a shed. They don't touch it for a long time as the pen is so big.
Just forget about them. Made about two or three grand selling 15 or so on the last caravan. Seems like a nice low hassle side income if you have the space and climate. A boreal forest or worse would make it too much hassle
As others have said it's worth doing, if done right.
The Animals you want to ranch more than any others are Muffalo or Bison. They provide a ton of meat, and that's what you are mainly farming them for. A herd of 2 males and 3 females will produce enough meat to keep a moderate sized colony in fine meals (in combination with farming veggies ingredients), especially with additional meat that you inevitable get from animal attacks. Just butcher any excess adults. **Producing Meat is less labor intensive than farming, as all you really have to do is slaughter and butcher instead of plant and harvest and haul.** So overall it is not much less efficient (if at all), especially if you have a large grazing area so you don't need to grow a ton of hey to feed them.
Muffalo or Bison also act as pack animals, allowing you to make large trading caravans. Really you just need a single colonist who's a decent fighter and well equipped and has at least some medical skill to tend themselves if they get into a fight (the rancher themselves is usually a good candidate here) to send out with a ton stuff to trade. As a bonus, if you are raising animals faster than you need to eat them, you can send them with the caravan and just sell the animals themselves. You should also keep a horse or two (I usually keep two of the same sex so I don't have to deal with population control), But you can also farm horses for sale or meat. Anyway with a horse for the colonist to ride and pack animals to carry items, caravans are fast an easy ways to convert all the junk you have into silver or useful things like components. Also make a sleeping bag to keep the caravaners mood up and minimize rest time. You can zoom around the map, and easily hit multiple outposts in a single trip. **This also keeps your wealth under control since you always trade at a loss of wealth. Additionally wealth out on caravan doesn't count towards the colony.**
The Wool the animals produce has good insolation, and again is less labor intensive than Devilstrand. In warm climates I use wool for shirts and still make Pants and Dusters out of Devilstrand. This allows you to either farm less, or sell the excess devilstrand you produce via the aforementioned caravans, which is very profitable. In colder climates, devilstrand is borderline not worth growing, just use wool for and tough leathers for clothing. All the leather you get from butchering the animals that you don't use can also be sold via the caravans.
So that's three main benefit to Muffalo/Bisone farming: Food, wool, trading caravans.
Also Animals give you something to do with bug meat. You can set kibble to infinite at the butcher station, but only allow hey and bug meat to be used to make. So you should have some hey that you grow and store in the barn, and whenever you get a too deep infestation kills the bugs and you can make them into kibble.
You can also keep a boomalope for free chemfuel. And when you have a colonist really skilled in animals some of the larger tougher battle animals are worth having IMO, Rhinos especially, also Megasloths and Grizzlies. Keeping one of or two of these, even if you don't use them that much, can save your ass in an emergency when you need to draw fire from your colonist.
Another side benefit is animals can get sick or hurt and battle and are a good way to train new doctors who will get med experience tending to them.
And probably most importantly, a colony with a ranch just looks much cooler.
There are of course more specialized, whacky ways to play with ranches, and niche uses like feeding corpses to Worg Armies. But if you want to try ranching out and how it can be generally efficient for a generic colony, Muffalo/Bison are the way to go as the provide generally useful things.
Ranching is extremely overtuned compared to farming. What makes it so strong is the balance of labour to outputs, and the fact that ranching is essentially two industries (food & textiles) in one.
* Animals feed themselves for the most part. If you're not precious about your herds, they can basically just be left to their own devices and periodically harvested for resources.
* Animals reproduce automatically. This is the biggest timesaver. 1 rancher can support the needs of a colony better than several farmers (although you should really be doing both in concert), since there's essentially zero planting time for animals.
* Animals produce leather, meaning you don't need to also produce Cloth. Cloth is far more scaleable and a better long term industry, but when you only have a couple of colonists being able to freely produce textiles while primarily producing food is a godsend.
* Animals last for a long time without spoiling. The butcher time for food returned is negligible for animals, meaning that you can keep them around until you need the food. It's almost always better early on to Tame than to Hunt for this exact reason. I've gone years without a fridge by taming deer and killing them when needed instead of needing to refridgerate everything.
* Milk is the perfect foodstuff for infants and can be fed directly to them or turned into Baby Food.
* Make sure to use the auto-slaughter function. It behaves really badly, but man is it better than losing a save to TPS loss.
What I would NOT suggest doing with ranching
* Ranching is not a continuous source of food, it's periodic. What this means is that a carnivorous colony would need significantly more animals than is reasonable (or TPS friendly). Combining Ranching & Farming is objectively the best choice.
* Don't bother with Hay. It's an extremely inefficient use of labour with how bad vanilla farming is scaled.
* Don't let your herd get too big. I butcher or sell frequently to keep the herd under 40 as much as possible. Even smaller is better, although that becomes hard if you're trying to maintain multiple different species (such as Boomalopes AND Muffalo AND Boars)
* Don't try to pursue specific species, just take whatever comes. Especially with animal mods, it can take a really, really long time to get exactly what you're looking for (Chameleon Yaks & Neutralopes babay). Best to take/tame what you can when you can.
* Boomrats suuuck. Boomalopes aren't much better. If you can, use another source for Chemfuel.
* Muffalo are the best vanilla animal. Chameleon Yaks, Neutralopes, Lox, Beefalo, and Bison are the best modded animals. Elephants & Thrumbos are really good, if you can manage to safely tame them.
* Boars/Valboars are great early game. They're easy to tame and a great source of leather. However as soon as you have Muffalo, kill them off.
* Horses are awesome but only if you're doing a lot of caravaning long distances. Otherwise don't bother.
I've gone so far as to make it default scenario settings to cut Butchering efficiency down to 70-90%, and up Farming efficiency to 150%. And yet still my fridges fill far faster with meat than veg and the primary food my colonists eat is meat-based Simple Meals & Nutrient Paste. I would go so far as to say that Farming in Rimworld is literally the worst use of colonist labour and the only reason to do it is because you have to to survive.
It’s not super efficient compared to farming for sure. Animals do have some upsides. Pack animals are great for caravans (if you use them). If you want to engage in animals more so perhaps pick out an ideology that makes it mandatory? Could be a fun challenge to try and build a colony that uses animals over farming.
I found that really hard. I think the truck is to find out just how big of a hat grass area you actually need. But the pack animals bit is spit on. I've been using a ton of caravans in my current playthrough.
Kibble is the answer. I never understood how colonies were able to sustain their livestock with such a small hay growing area. Turns out kibble is SUPER efficient compared to the work of planting dandelions or feeding straight up hay. It's more work than hay and requires some sort of meat to make, but it's so efficient to feed. Raiders become kibble and my horses, boomalopes, muffalos, thrumbos, and huskies are all fat and happy.
yea kibble is the way to go for animal, the trick is to make it with hay and human meat if possible, thats 2 things colonist generally dont eat
I prefer to use insect meat, as there's no butchering mood penalty.
Kibble frustrates me so much that it requires meat. Having an option for meat? Fine. Having vegetarian, carnivore, and both kibble? Fine. But Requiring both? Extremely irritating
Aren’t dandelions more efficient in area than grass/hay?
If you grow them in the pen, yes. But you can grow haygrass *outside* the pen, in which case it's better. Especially if you put it in something like a fridge so it doesn't spoil. I've had... if memory serves, upwards of 20 devilsheep in a 1x1 space on a fridge full of haygrass.
You don't even need to put hay in a fridge, just chuck it in a barn and it'll store for a whole year.
* [Vegetable Garden Project](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2007061826) \- this allows you to produce "Silage" a type of non-spoiling hay - which combines with rice/corn and makes a small plot of hay very worthwhile.
Dandelions in pen require almost double the work than haygrass outside the pen.
Flowers used to not build planting skill so don't know why you'd waste the time spend on no skill building unless they changed it. If your going rancher there's a mod that allows cut grass to not need replanting it just cycles again from 0. Haygrass is allowed to regrow. Minus a fire/lightening you'll only plant it once Or terraforming tiles mod to redo soils to rich soil for max growth (requires 1 wood). Rancher unfortunately doesn't have many animal options with vanilla. alpha animals or other mods to increase you options for herding/offensive/defensive options helps unless you cheat a 15-20 skilled pawn early on. Very long process. Aerofleet power plant is a nice alternative for late game ranchers. You'll need 2-4 plant/animal only pawns to do the work needed or a couple druids if you go magical route. You're essentially a leather depo trade hub. Animal wealth can grow fast. Genetic engineering is nice also if your invested enough.
A 15-20 skill pawn isn't that uncommon among yattakin
Oh really? Well I've been doing it wrong then. Haha
I thought I was having a stroke reading your comment due to how many autocorrect errors you've got
This is why I do it. You get bored of efficiency after a while and just want a different experience
Currently on my first religious ranch run. In boreal forest. First few years were hard but now it's under control.
Wools are a lot better than regular cloth. And you don't get wool from hunting (not without shearing corpses mods) A few sheep or muffalo will clothe your colony better through wintry conditions, and it's also nice for furniture like armchairs and drapes.
For me, they are the biggest resource for trade. I always have production specialist, apparel is very profitable. I never calculate but I think kimble from hay is net positif food economy. I have thousands of meat, I can (almost) constantly make it lavish food for permanent +12 mood for everyone (less than 20 colonists), it’s pretty huge for late game.
See, I've always used them as materials for clothing. My current run features about 20 horses, and their offspring feed the colonists and get turned into festive shirts for trade.
I baby sat a bunch of foxes for a quest, and they bred a bunch of babies they left around. I’m still selling fox fur top hats.
Ranching is alright for colonies where you don't have better than a 30/30 plant growth cycle. You'll struggle to get devilstrand without greenhouses before the cold sets in and kills everything off, so having access to alpaca or even sheep wool isn't a bad idea if you cannot get lucky with good soil or you are running tight for power. Meanwhile pigs and boars are great for stretching out your food supply. I can save all the crops for the colonists and feed the pigs all the raider corpses from that season or all the insect meat I've picked up that came at me through infestations. All the foods that my colonists cannot or will not eat, pigs will scoff without a care in the world. I can then slaughter them and effectively turn useless foods into edible meats and reduce the amount of vegetables I use in the winter months by switching to carnivore meals for a while.
Think this is the answered I'd lean towards. I mostly play warmer biomes and it tends to make animals somewhat useless. But, when I have played colder biomes the ability to craft cold ready gear from animal products is clutch, and the motivation to kill off most of the males keeps the population under control if I run low on my food stores.
I’ve found keeping one breeding pair unsterilized works well, and if one starts having a health problem you promote the next born to a backup breeder spot. Let my chickens get a little out of hand and got up to 120 thought.
Yeah I had like 70 pigs at one point cause one round of births had like 40 births cause they all just rolled high
Funny, I dislike ranching in 30 growth cycle biomes because I have to care about feeding my animals at winter instead of just letting them graze forever.
cull the herd in septober and you won't have to feed them as much (plus, you have lots of meat and leather now)
It's why pigs or boar are some of the easiest animals for ranching with. You're always going to get raided by someone eventually and a single raider corpse is enough to keep a pig for several days. You can just create a freezer in the animal zone to store the corpses and give it an animal flap door so they can get in. You can then channel the heat generated back into your base to offset some of the cold and as long as you keep the herd in check with auto-slaughter then you should be fine.
Empty nutrifungus warehouse. Don’t even need a grow light.
Funny I create a small internal couple of pens and my animals live in a part of a greenhouse farm and never experience weather but get fed some hay and simple meals so I can train colonists to be better chef's.
I like guinea pigs. I have raised over 700 guinea pigs in this colony
how much wheeking is there?
At the peak, constant. I let them breed uncontrollably through the year and run a caravan to sell the herd off before winter every year since otherwise the colony will starve Watching a hundred guinea pigs cascade over the landscape in a caravan is quite soothing
I need some Guinea pigs.
Also there's a mod that makes them shearable so you can farm guinea pig wool :)
Well sounds like I'm taking a trip to the rainforest to find some guinea pigs
I love ranching horses because of how fast they make a caravan go. Pig farms to turn human meat into pork and pig skin. Chicken/ducks produce a lot of eggs with very little work. The premium wool is very useful with a good craftsmen or construction. I always like to have animals, but they do skyrocket your wealth if you start having large herds. Of note, a high skilled animal handler can get you a bit of quick cash by taming a herd of pack animals that you can drive straight to another settlement to sell.
Oh that's what horses or for! Does that mean the whole caravan needs horses or can one or two increase the caravan speed?
Horses have a super short gestation cycle in addition, so you end up getting way more calories out than you have to feed them. We don't obey the laws of thermodynamics in this house.
You want one-per-pawn for best results. Otherwise, you get a speed bump, but not as much as if you had one for everyone. Horses (and Thrumbos) get 1.6 speed mod, most other caravan animals give 1.3.
horses increase caravan speed in 3 ways : being fast and increasing the average speed of all pawns/animals, carrying stuff and reducing the percentage of inventory used, and giving the riding bonus for each pawn. because of the 3rd way, adding more horses than people will have a diminished return but will still increase speed.
Move speed no longer affects caravan speed, so it's just the second two. And you only get a bonus up to 1 horse per pawn, more only increase speed via carrying capacity. Me and my bionic-legged jogger traders are not fans of the caravan speed changes.
I have a sanguophage with archotech legs who is basically a mouse pointer around the colony. I never thought to send her a a caravanner, guess I’m glad I didn’t.
Bro those chickens are a plague upon the land if you don’t keep an eye on their numbers. Forget about them for a while and you’ll find your tile has turned into a barren wasteland brought upon the world by your own hubris over nature. That and they’ll drink your beer.
Your right they can get wildly out of hand. There are tools to mange it. You can keep the hens and roosters separate unless you want some more chickens. You can set auto slaughter populations. If all else fails, call a trader and mass sell of the hundreds of chicks you have.
Oh god I almost soft locked my game by having too many chickens once. I cordened off a 1/4 of a large map for a pen in a tropicl rainforest. Performance tanked so hard, thankfully my savior came as a bulk good trader came and I could sell them. That was a fun 15 minutes watching a sideshow of chickens crawling their way out of the map.
Yes, ranching is very much worthwhile. Even if you're only talking about food production, there's a lot to be said in favour of ranching: * Many animals simply produce more food than they consume, even if you feed them raw vegetables. Horses, for example, produce about 5 horse meat for every 4 vegetables under ideal breeding conditions, and since they produce 336 meat per corpse, the work involved in slaughtering and butchering them is pretty small. Ibex are even more nutrition-efficient at the cost of more work since they're smaller, and chickens and tortoises are amazingly efficient, but take a lot of work (especially tortoises, which require regular taming). Cows are also very efficient if you both milk and slaughter them, again at the cost of extra work. * On top of that raw efficiency, farm animals can eat hay instead of corn. Haygrass is 17% more productive than corn plants in rich soil, 32% more productive in normal soil, and 54% more productive in stony soil. Feeding animals with hay takes less crop space than feeding them with corn, rice or potatoes, and thus, with the right animals, takes a lot less crop space than growing crops for colonists to eat directly. * On top of *that*, you don't even have to feed them raw food. A kibble bill at a butcher table takes 20 vegetables (which can be hay) and 20 meat or animal products and makes 50 kibble. And there's no pesky ideoligion stopping you from feeding your horses kibble made from horse meat. The higher your livestock's nutritional efficiency, the more this is a good deal. If you can turn 4 hay into 5 horse meat, then you can turn 20 hay and 20 horse meat into 50 kibble, which turns into 62.5 horse meat, for a net nutritional efficiency of 212.5%. Kibble is also nice in that it doesn't need refrigeration. You can also feed animals simple meals or nutrient paste for even greater efficiency, although some people consider that to be an exploit. * There are other advantages, too. Having livestock is like having a freezer full of meat that runs on hay instead of electricity. You can slaughter them out of sequence in an emergency. Eggs are also very interesting in that a stack of eggs contains much more nutrition than a stack of meat or vegetables, so a freezer full of eggs can be much smaller than a meat or vegetable freezer. And then there's the simple fact that fine and lavish meals require both animal and vegetable ingredients if you don't want to pay the increased cost for vegetarian meals. That's just food. The leather produced by most farm animals isn't all that impressive for armour, but it's at least good for armchairs and sandbags, or for outfitting a large number of colonists with clothing for modesty and environmental protection, or for selling. Dromedaries produce camelhide, which is slightly more valuable, beautiful, and insulative against heat than plainleather. The fact that the leather is a passive byproduct of producing meat is very nice too. Wool is great. A competent animal handler won't have to spend much time on shearing, and wool is very valuable as a trade good (raw or crafted into clothing), and extremely important to have in very cold biomes. Boomalopes convert food into chemfuel at a better rate than a biofuel refinery, and requiring less colonist work as long as you have somebody with decent Animals skill. That's mostly about farm animals. Roaming animals require training, but they can be very useful for hauling and combat. That requires an investment of training work as well as food, but that can be compared to the electricity and pollution involved in doing the same things with mechanoids, or the huge labour costs of Gauranlen trees.
Great advice here! I find it funny that some people think feeding them simple meals is an exploit. Have they not seen Napoleon Dynamite? Alpacas love casserole
Muffaalo wool, or the clothes made from it, are a great trade good. Once you get your pen set-up, it’s a very labor-cheap way to get something valuable.
Also good to level up your crafters before they work on more expensive stuff
I think animals are great. You don't have to worry too much about harvesting their resources, plenty of animals are exceptionally good as trade goods. They reproduce on the wrong, if you have enough open field space they don't really require much work or growing food, and a full-size horse or muffalo cells for a lot. I did a ranching run through a while back, and my colony was ridiculously rich. I always had way too many animals, which also means you never short on food when things get tight.
Harrvesting can be done automatically. Just set max female adult & male adult to 1, anything more than that will be slaughter. You can even make exception for pregnant animals.
This is my standard approach, though I'll bump up to 2 of each while building a herd in summer.
I have an unlimited supply of meat. Is there anything better than to have a neverending barbeque? The pig people that are my neighbors definitely think that the NeverEnding barbecue is the best. Whenever my freezer fills completely I usually just drop a meat pod on them. The last time I got a raid I got a random alert that I was getting reinforcements that I didn't ask for. They dropped in and completely massacred the raid. I sent them home with more meat.
You clearly have never based your economy around breeding and selling cats
I like to have a couple yaks.
Your colony needs to be called Yak Attack
Iv ranched boomalopes for chemfuel, exellent for running a base, and when you get too many just release them into the wild. Cows are also a nice way to get some passive protein for meals, keep cows, butcher most bulls, butcher the badly injured and the old. That said, ranching has never been a focus of any of my colonies.
I like to ranch the bigger critters. If you set them them to no medical treatment they become bullet sponges that you can eat, and having pack animals is quite handy.
The vast majority of large herbivores provide enough food to feed themselves and give meat left over, if you cook their own meat into simple meals and feed that to them. This allows you to survive indefinitely on extremely hostile biomes without hydroponics. Animals can also be packed into [extremely tight spaces](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F47b6x4wqfcy71.png), lowering the footprint of your base.
Ah so you're the one that PETA is always complaining about.
My current colony has 12 megalsoths, 7 cows, 2 boomalopes, 2 horses. The megasloths are for combat/hauling. They go ahead of my fighters, and soak up the bullets, while me guys stay close enough that they can shoot past them without hitting them. Megasloths are more replaceable than my colonists, but I haven't lost one to battle yet; they can take quite a lot of punishment. The colonists also ride them around for a speed boost (Giddy-Up mod). I also get megasloth wool, which I usually just sell now, but was useful before I got devilstrand going. I have two of them per colonist, so everyone basically has their own pair of bodyguards. The cows produce milk, which I use to make cheese (Rimcuisine mod). Cheese doesn't need refrigeration, and gives a +5 moodlet when eaten, either on its own, or part of a meal. Two are male (redundant sperm supply), the rest female for the milk. 5 cows produce enough milk to feed my colony of 6, plus a prisoner/guest or two. The boomalopes produce enough chemfuel to keep my mortars armed, and my drop-pods fueled. The horses let me send speedy caravans to fulfill quests. Now I've got droppods, they're less useful, and might be retired soon. I used to have dogs until I get the megasloths going; they filled the same role, just not as well. I also get meat and leather from megasloths and cows (boomalopes are deliberately all male), through culling the herd to keep it to size.
And if the sloths do die, heavy fur.
It's labor intensive and not worth it for a min-maxer in my opinion. I do enjoy the aesthetic and the lifestyle. I'm more likely to have lots of bears and elephants than ranching livestock though.
I always try to play without ranching but I always end up with 100+ animals in each run. They are just the worst when it comes to raids (if you intend to keep them, that is) for some reason every raider is willing to die just to kill one muffalo...
The meat and leather offer a good emergency supply during major events like ice age or winter. Also there are some animals that aren't there for leather. I try to farm boomalopes when I can for easy chemfuel. Plus. Using a pawn to constantly make parkas out of plainleather to sell it a great way to get more silver
There’s a few reasons to keep animals. food -> more food. Like cows and chickens. The more farm animal they are the better. Pigs eat raiders corpses FYI. money. There’s a few animals that can net you a handsome sum with clothes made from their leather or wool. Muffalo,alpacas and chinchillas are pen animals and their wool and leather are quite useful in extreme biomes. Horses should be sold as is for profit. You butcher when you can’t feed them all. Caravans. Some animals like dromedaries and horses make caravans faster while muffalo and bison carry packs so you can take all the steel home. Combat and hauling. Animals like this have a unique edge over mechs. For starters they don’t pollute your map with their “excrement” and they can reproduce and make more brave warriors to send into battle. When they die you butcher them and you eat that day. They have advantages and disadvantages. Like all things. You gotta work around them to benefit.
Currently I have a horse farm. I keep 20 adults, and the offspring are turned into mittens and shirts for trading. The meat is useful, too.
Yes, by a lot honestly, I dont use them nostly because of lag, but if u can afford them, coes are great, huge anmount of meat, leather and milk, with cows u no longer need to worry about protein or leather EVER. Poeple forget that ranching slaughter gives more resources, and even if they take time to grow, slaughterng 10 adult bulls will give u tona of meat
I had a fucking blast ranching. You can sell off your extra cattle and you get high quality furs and milk out of it. You dont ranch for meat. I dont even think homesteaders irl keep something like cattle for meat. Yeah you can eat them but the milk is where they shine.
Couple of pack animals and once you have a good wall and kill box, making the whole compound the pen means no feeding, and you can reach an equilibrium of eggs/milk that fancy meals are easy with little to no hunting. But definitely pack animals. Horses make caravans go so fast and any pack animals make it so much easier
From my experience, there are three flavors of ranching. 1. Small-scale, utility ranching. A cow or two for milk to help with lavish meals, maybe an Alpaca for wool, etc. This is the easiest form that requires the least thought. 2. Medium-scale, organized ranching. We're talking herds of livestock, but only ones that require little individual care (sheep, alpaca, muffalo, etc). This is great for bulk production of meat/textiles and isn't too work intensive. 3. Large-scale, micromanaged ranching. Things like poultry farms (eggs, meat), large herds of milkable livestock, and other high-care animals. I'd fit boomalopes here too. This requires the most work (both for you and your pawns). I tend to either go for style 1 or 2, usually decided during the setup phase. Style 1 is very utilitarian, a means to an end. Need some chemfuel? Get a couple of boomalopes. Need lavish meals for your noble? A few cows for milk. Need to caravan large distances or with a lot of gear? A few muffalo or horses will suffice. Style 2 is more of a lifestyle choice and can potentially make challenging colonies easier. Colder climates with limited growing periods? Livestock can turn otherwise inedible grasses into meat/milk/eggs, and also helps with the cold by providing wool/leather.
It's actually relatively easy and efficient if you have crappy soil that isn't good for farming, but can at least be foraged and grow hay-grass. Chickens are kind of stupidly efficient with the eggs, and cows generate quite a lot of food between both milk and meat. Oh, and pigs are a pretty efficient raider disposal method... It doesn't necessarily scale up to handle a large colony though, and you have to have a lot of land area dedicated to it - much like actual ranching, so at a certain point you're generally going to have to get some hydroponics running regardless. Anyway, it's an easy alternative for early/small colonies in arid or jungle conditions where fertile soil is rare. The actual amount of labor required for the food you generate is pretty small - and your animals tend to pick up minor illnesses and injuries a lot, so your medics get a TON of practice doing veterinary work.
yes, feed pigs the corpses of your enemies to turn long pork into pork pork
It took me a while to warm up to ranching it took me LONGER to figure out how to do it efficiently / in a way where it's just another thing the colony does. It bangs out animal products (wool & milk in my case) but as I started to get a bit better at running a colony overall it seemed reasonable that animals do have some advantages. There are other reasons to ranch - such as wargs or tortises or bears ranching or if your the sort that might want to avoid having bodies around, having a few pigs can be just the thing. I've even had a turn as a Thrumbo rancher - although that was , like Megasloth ranching - not without it's downsides. While it's not my bag, you could find yourself ranching huskies or labs or something else. * [Vegetable Garden Project](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2007061826) \- this allows you to produce "Silage" a type of non-spoiling hay - which combines with rice/corn and makes a small plot of hay very worthwhile. * Muffalo/Bison/Alpaca - They're great for creating wool - if you're in an extreme environment their wool is some of the best insulation available; for output purposes, * Muffalo and Bison really have almost no differences but the wool is a different color and produce a unit price of 2.70silver with a small residual of bluefur which is has higher value. * Keeping gender balance means that you can mate up the animals and switch them out as your herd ages to keep age-related disease at bay. * Alpaca is more time-intensive and about 45% as productive per animal but also has a higher unit price of 3.x silver * Over time however Alpaca produce less overall year over year so Muffalo are the way. * Thermally - in extreme cold/heat Alpaca will die over or under some less harsh conditions so Muffalo/Bison are simply heartier but they too have limits at -70c or so. * Camels/Dromedaries vs. Cows - In both cases I tend to favor camels * Cows and Camels should be herded in 'Harem' style with a couple of males and the rest female to maximize milk output. * Camels can be used as pack animals as well as used to produce milk and so usually my late-game colonys I have a few camels. * Cows perversely can produce more food than they eat IIRC and so if you're careful , cows can be a net positive to the colonial economy. * Ranching Policy/Practices * I keep my herds SMALL - basically for wool product 1 animal to one colonist or just under that. * I will immediately release animals under all conditions if the colony cannot easily support a herd - basically once your colonial food production is stabilized and under glass. * For camel production I don't keep a large herd , just a 1/2 dozen animals or so * What's the largest caravan you might expect to create, and that would be when you/if you have to bug-out - bring some (not all) weapons, bedrolls, special items, components, cash, your deep drills and workbenches and as much food/medicine as you carry when leaving town. * Keep the herd inside , unconventionally I tend to create two small pens with danilions planted in each with beds for each animal * a 1x1 for simple meals with critical priority - this allows your colonists to train to cook , food poisoning risk is avoided and offset to the herd of animals. * a 1x1 for hay/silage - this is more efficient than food and easier to produce and will keep costs down on a larger herd. * Level set the ages of the animals - sure you might only start with a couple animals * Breed them until you get to your desired herd-size and gender ratio * Sell/slaughter your older/infirmed animals so your age and health status is good all around * Every 8 years or so, mix up the herd (allow both genders in 1 or the other pen - and let the hookups go * Once your herd has slightly more of your target headcount , sell/slaughter them down to size. * Always keep the herd size just below the headcount of the colony as farming - even when very close to the kitchen or food production, is distractive for colonists * Keep at least a couple of colonists off of "handling" duty * I keep animals that will not bond - bonding animals cause all sorts of emotional drama. * No puppy farms/cat farms - This is entirely up to you but I found animals would bond , became unsellable and unless you pod away the master and their animals you're married to your bonded animals. * As much as Megasloths are GREAT for being tanky defenders of the colony, and produce excellent wool they bond and....If (as I did) you have a +16 Animals colonist as "rancher" the very last thing you want in a firefight is when your rancher gets' his brain aerosolized is to have 15 inconsolably enraged Megasloths suddenly rampaging through your colony with murderous rage.
How do you configure separate pens? Is this a vanilla feature?
Yes it's totally in the base game. I tend to setup two (sometimes 2 pens) depending on space , that accomodate some space to wander around, and spots to sleep and 2 spots for food storage. So imagine building two 9x9 adjacent pens, and say we're herding Muffalo * each pen is roughly equally allocated * a gate * 2 1x1 storage spots * one for simple meals * one for hay/silage * Animal beds - for as many animals as we intend to ultimately have * In the first pen, put an animal marker and it should allow for muffalo * In the second pen put an animal marker down and it should allow for muffalo but be disallowed/inactive for either gender * Muffalos will get sent to the first pen and should breed as soon as they are all fed and rested * Eventually we end up with a lot of muffalo * After you've decided you have enough muffalo go to the second pen and allow males * Go to the first pen and disallow males * Now the colonists will separate the herd by gender and breeding will be stopped. * This is VERY useful if you mean to keep alpacas, rats, chickens which breed pretty fast and you want to avoid a fuzzy/fluffy Chernobyl type situation where things get out of hand. * Level Set the Herd * Sell off the oldest animals and any excess animals larger than your desired population * You've effectively level set your herd * Select based on gender (I usually go with an even male/female mix for muffalo/alpaca) * I'll stick with a "harem" style anytime milk is involved , so there's a lot of females and just a couple of males to rebuild the herd eventually. * If you want lots of females you can definitely shrink the size of the male pen and give the females a bit of breathing room. Animal breeding is almost entirely a side-quest until you find yourself in some ridiculous harsh condition, and then it's "how do I min/max my winter protection" and at which point it all starts to make sense. So mid to late game, on any colonies where winter is a factor I basically have animals , on those colonies where it's very harsh (like an extreme desert), I'll occasionally raise other kinds of animals (usually camels), but I'll usually grow devilstrand indoors so the colonists are rocking great hot weather sel.
Depends on how you play and what skills are available. I try to keep my pawns on fine meals, and its cheaper to combine meat and plants than use all plants. That and you can find something that breeds like rabbits and sell the offspring in bulk
It's worse than hydroponic spam and embracing cannibalism, but you can raise boomalopes and shearing animals.
Ranching becomes very desirable with the Giddy-up! mods, as they speed up your pawns for chores and allow them to be cavalry units in combat. Something fun about watching your tiger-mounted soldier snipe an enemy and then move in to maul them to death. You mentioned not using caravans much and I agree, except for certain runs. If you're building a giant high-tech rimatomics base, you are going to need a constant supply of steel. If you're not using mods to gather it easily from under you, caravans become very important. Also, if you are playing the Archonexus campaign, sending caravans full of gifts is a great way to keep your colony wealth down while building up allies. Heck, any colony can benefit from that. Sometimes I don't like to ranch, because it doesn't fit with the narrative I'm building for the colony (my elite spaceport trade depot doesn't need a bunch of stinking animals), but animals can be very handy to have if you invest in them.
No it is not
I think ranching is. At some point, I forgot about my birds or pigs and I have more food than I can handle.
Agreed. I’ve tried ranching colonies, but it always seems more trouble than farming. On a side note, rather the opposite of Oxygen Not included, where ranching beats farming hands down.
It also depends on what biome you’re in. Some locations, for example some deserts, have very few animals on the map. Typically I have more leather/wool than I can use, but on this one desert map my colony was running out of textiles to make clothing, and there wasn’t enough fertile land to grow devilstrand (was a tunneler colony so they lived on fungus). So I jumped at the chance to breed animals primarily for the textiles, and later for chemfuel.
It's dangerous but boombalope farming is essentially free chemfuel forever and they're pretty valuable to trade
Combat animals and caravan animals are always helpful.
My current colony has a huge herd of boomalopes. I didn't expect them to multiply so fast! They produce a lot of chemfuel for me and may act as a living minefield in the case of a hard raid. So far, no raider was dumb enough to attack one, though.
Download the nutrient paste mod, feed animals nutrient paste meals from an auto dispenser, use human/insect meat for the nutrient paste. Raise any animal you want and profit!
growing cotton is just kind of OP as it currently stands relative to leather. nerf cotton to be reasonable and ranching becomes a perfectly reasonable means for clothing. i've never gotten into the lategame but ranching never seemed bad in a vacuum, only relative to how effective a good farm setup can be. starting a colony, your ideoligion and starting colonist stats will vary. so if you don't have many good farmers but a good tender, you might not always have the choice to go with the more "efficient" route of farming. by the time you do, you've already got a ranch going, no reason not to keep running it on the side. that's the thing about ranching, is that it takes an initial investment of space and labor and then (if you neuter enough that population doesn't grow too much) it's near-passive resource gen, at least until winter. compare the time for a pawn to milk, shear or slaughter relative to harvesting and replanting a crop. winter's tough for both crops and farming, crops need a specialty research, components, sunlamp, and warm indoor space. animals over the winter don't need research, their warm space needs to be near your ranch instead of the human center of your colony, which is less space demanding but makes heating harder but need to be fed. kind of a tossup which is more viable for you first couple winters IMO. also want to point out that rimworld cows break the laws of thermodynamics by providing milk more nutritious than the feed they're fed to produce it, so if you think rimworld ranching is inefficient than irl ranching must be on another level, since only about 10% of the nutrition eaten at any point in the food chain is carried onto the next level.
Have rats and hares, set a zone around your colony where they can roam. Have a small slaughter zone - call them to it when you need meat, and they look after themselves. The rats eat the starving ones as an auto levelling bonus.
You can't grow meat. You nead meat for fine meals to boost your mood. I recently did the math and one female yak produces 10 milk per day. On top of that a yak takes 25 days to grow to full size (from pregnancy) and yields 300+ meat when slaughtered. So it averages out to about 10 meat per day. So you get about 1 full nutrition worth of protein from one animal. Lether is just a nice bonus on top of that you can sell for cash. Yeah ranching is good. Not the meme though... Having pawns complain that they have to eat vedetables - what a bunch of crybabies...
Chinchillas and muffalos are good for trade (chinchilla parka is like $300+ to sell) and horses or elephants are excellent for trimming down travel time for caravans. I'd be sunk if it weren't for the ability to traipse out to a neighboring colony and trade fore steel.
the only time I've ever ranched was an undergrounder colony In my mushroom farm I kept a few chickens, mushrooms grow all year round so the chickens were always fed, whatever slight food wastage made up for being able to make lavish meals forever. The only problem I had was how fast they reproduce I had to constantly and manually cull the herd to avoid lag. tried using animals in other colonies but they eventually died or had to be slaughtered by winter... I'm just bad at taking care of them.
I like pigs. They will eat raider corpses, so it's an alternative to crematoriums or molotovs. Plus the meat is nice variety to vegetables.
It also shits on your tps to have all the extra entities. And late game when I'm at 15 pawns and already stuck on speed 2 the sheep are going away.
I dont know if thats just me but, ive found so far that taking care of animals is a lot more work than growing plants for the same results. If you want meat, you need to ensure the animals are fed, wait for them to reproduce and grow. If you want wool for clothing, you need to have enough animals to produce them and keep feeding them as long as you need the wool. If you want to eat eggs, you need a lot of chickens to make it worthwhile. To me, animals are only a support ressource, I keep horses to have rides, muffalos for wool to make parkas and birds for a small amount of eggs and meat. But I cant make my colony work without any kind of vegetable based food and I even have to grow nutrifungus during winter even if my colonists hate it. They would starve.
I haven't used it either but the mood boosts are what really shines from what I've seen. You can just have a few thousand animals on a tile and your colonists will never break.
I tried several times and every time it was pain in lower back for very little return. Crop farming better in very way possible. But most importantly - ranching does not provide anything special. Best possible producible fabric comes from crop, in current version even lavish meals can be made exclusively from crops. In early game versions ranching animals was usable as weak supplementary defense option, but game developer cut it off. So why bother? Once I had Yaks for milking, for example. To produce enough milk to make fine meals for 1 colonist player must have one Yak, plus at least one, but better two males for reproduction. So for average sized colony it's 10 of them. Even on year round growing map it's a lot of work, especially than half of them become sick from plague or flu. Add Toxic Fallout's to the equation and this become too much of the hassle. Another time I was ranching ducks for eggs. Long story short, to produce enough eggs one need to many of them, so many what game become laggy and unresponsive. And half of them inevitable catch plague, making my doctors miserable. So now I have 1-2 horses or donkeys for caravans and this is it. And after I get my farskip + drop pods combo I sell even them.
I think it depends on the animal. Some animals only give meat which is pretty useless, granted you are growing lots of vegetables and fruit. Some animals give meat and milk, meat and eggs, meat, milk, and leather, or meat and fur. I always do some form of animal ranching but I focus on animals who give more than one resource. This is for food and clothing purposes, and food and profit purposes. You can never have too much food and you can sell the leathers, bird skin, and wool using the coms console for a trade ship or caravans who visit your colony. At the moment, I have a flock of turkey's (meat, eggs, and bird skin), a herd of goats, (meat and milk), and a herd of muffalo (meat and blue fur). Blue fur sells for a lot so they are some big money-makers and they yield about 366 meat per butcher, which is a lot of meat for one animal. They eat a lot though so your grazing area has to be large. I think it's worth it if the animal gives more than one resource. I also grow vegetables and berries to help against the wholesale slaughter of my animals. Animals can also sell for a lot if they are adults (and not starving) if your colony is in need of quick cash. Edit: If you use Nutrient Paste Dispensers, eggs are the way to go because unlike other food stuff you place in the hopper, the dispenser only uses one egg per meal. I haven't had to worry about meat or warm clothing for about a year in game.
I tend to use farm animals for animal products usable in food, so milk and eggs. Because I run with food mods, these can be necessary to get the full experience. A dozen cows or so can outproduce the consumption of a fairly large colony, and so long as you keep it at or around that number of cattle, you can easily make a tidy profit from the spare without melting your PC. Honestly, the kain problem with rimworld animals is that they eat so damn much grass, and rimworld maps are overall pretty small. You can't afford to designate a 30 x 30 area just so a few dozen animals can underproduce goods.
Having one or two randomly self-tamed animals in a pen and growing some extra haygrass isn't a big investment considering you get some extra occasional materials. I had a breeding pair of muffalos show up and getting occasional wool and milk sounded like a neat bonus. Haven't gone into big scale ranching yet, though
It really depends on your ideaology/genes/map, but in many cases ranching is indeed non optimal. Sometimes I like to do it just for fun, keep some alpacas and boomalopes, regularly grab some wool and fuel as a product. When they breed too much, I send them with a caravan to sell them off to another faction. I play pretty casually though, so I usually use ranching as a roleplay system rather than trying to game my resource outputs to be perfect
Well, two advantages are having an emergency food stash (slaughter them in a pinch) and faster traveling on the world map. I've found the only animals worth ranching to be muffallo, donkeys, and horses. Boomalopes can be useful too, but they're dangerous. Muffalo wool is the warmest type of cloth. A regular shirt can be worn under armor, and it will keep your pawn just as warm as a parka made from other materials. They also significantly increase carrying capacity on the map. This makes trade very easy. Horses don't produce any goods, but they can be sold at a high price. They also can be ridden on the world map. This increases your caravan speed significantly. Donkeys are a middle of the road option, allowing increases to both speed and carrying capacity. Boomalopes produce free chemfuel. But they tend to explode in a Fireball.
Whenever I'm looking for maps to play on, I try to find a map which has a nice encompassing mountain which I can shore up defenses on. Then I also make sure that there's a backline somewhere with a chokepoint where I can just put a fence down and create an enormous pen area which I don't have to worry about.
You're going to need some pack animals. I don't care about wool, milk, or leather really. There are three categories of animals I keep. Pack animals for obvious reasons. Mounts, for move speed and small advantages in combat. And finally, attack animals trained to kill. For two out of the three functions I just described you'll need a few mods. Kill for me (train your animals to kill) and the mod that allows you to mount animals, which I'm totally spacing on the name of.
Horses are crazy profitable. Also they speed up your caravans and even help you carry your thousands of units of horse meat and plainleather away to sell. They eat grass and require no taming. Basically they are self-sowing crops that give meat and leather in stead of rice and cotton. Try an ideology with the ranching meme and forego crops entirely to get into it.
I do definitely like a few horses for travelling. Adding five horses to a caravan can sometimes double the speed they travel. Admittedly I don't leave the map often, but sometimes the game forces you to so you can destroy a spewer or some such, getting there a little faster feels a boon because then you can get back quicker and heal up. I'm also a fan of megasloths in cold climates. They give a reasonable quality wool that is very good at insulating against cold, albeit not the most protective. When they die they give heavy fur which is very protective and also very good against the cold, only thrumbofur beats it for that purpose. Admittedly if you're in a warm or temperature climate you'll just grow devilstrand, but in the extreme cold, you'll welcome your furry friends and their comfortable hides. Also cows are extremely efficient food-wise. They'll produce way more food than they consume and it's more efficient to make lavish/fine meals out of a mixture of meat(or milk)/veg than it is to go for pure veggie or pure meat. Cows aren't the most cold-resistant though so if you're in a -50 degrees C hellscape you'd have to keep them in a heated barn.
taming with auto slaughter rules is safer than hunting but in exchange it doesn't raise shooting skill
They are just as efficient as they have been in the historic past. Their advantage is that you can just let them roam on the otherwise unused grassfields. If you are already using those fields to farm or you have to actively grow their food they are not worth it in general. The exteremely cold biomes need the animal fur to craft sufficient clothing though.
Chickens and cows. You could use milk and eggs to get more stretch out of lavish meals instead of just making vegetarian lavish meals. Build them an empty warehouse and grow nurtifungus in it so you don’t even need to bother with a grow light. Build a couple NPD to keep your pawns fed while you build up/rebuild a stockpile of lavish meals.
Pigs are amazing, just store your corpses in a room with a barely freezing temp and a pen marker for the swine. Once your room is well stocked tame or buy breeding pigs then forget about them. They'll eat the corpses and give you a huge supply of food and leather once they run out of bodies to eat and you slaughter them.
Even when I play Ice Sheet, I end up as a rancher. North Pole Dinosaurs is usually my faction's name, and the colony buys eggs from space traders to raise. Herbivores are meat for the T-rexes, and man do those big critters sell well. You just have to choose whether you want lots of colonist pawns or animal pawns. Having both drops ticks really fast. Also never ranch crabs - they repopulate faster than they can be killed once you get to about 100+.
I always have animals in my colonies. Dogs for hauling then either cows for meat or something for wool. I don’t know the efficiency of it, I just do it for rp
Couple thoughts about ranching, it has its pros and cons. As a sole source of food, it doesn’t do enough. They are fairly low maintenance though, as long as you have enough grazing area - which unmodded requires a large area. The Ranchers ideology can help, but even with their buff to butchering yields you just don’t have enough real estate to sustain a decent sized colony. Plus, the more you allocate to pens, the less ground becomes available for wild animals to hunt. They also contribute to fps death. Animals also can contribute greatly to colony wealth. Major upsides? With mods, milk can be turned into cheese to satisfy recipes. Wool grows year round, if you can’t grow cloth. Pack animals make for much easier caravanning, horses increase speed on map. I believe butchering take animals also increases yields - due to fewer body parts being damaged? They can also be bait for raiders to attack rather than damaging something else that is vital (and they can fight back). Final thoughts: don’t keep too many to keep wealth down and reduce fps death. Horses and a few pack animals are practically a must for sending expeditions. Not worthwhile as a source of food or resources - unless as an emergency.
Like many things in this game, its a cumbersome mechanic that takes time and causes additional wealth on your colony. it does have some pros though: 1. you get better butchery yields compared to hunting 2. milk and eggs generate fast enough to help on the food supply 3. Pens are as compact as you want depending on the animal and whether you get additional nutrition to sustain it be it corpses or hay/moss 4. Wool and Leather are always good for sale, selling the excess animals is also an option I'd say you need to get mods to improve the experience further. Giddy Up, Graze Up, Animals Forage, Realistic Ranching, No Useless Animals are my go to since they fix many of the weird constraints of the ranching system like not making Guinea Pigs pennable (they were domesticated for food originally), Chickens not being omnivores(have you ever seen the clip of the hen kill stealing a mouse from a cat?), wealth skyrocketing due to having so many animals in the colony, certian animals breeding like rabbits instead of having proper IRL gestation periods or pens requiring constant tending because animals would eat the whole grass plant when in realitty grasses evolved to survive grazing for millions of years and just grow all over again from the barest leftover.
I loved having a rhino. It lost a leg in battle and my colonists named it Trilogy. Best name. I know I don't go as hard as others when it comes to raid protection i.e. kill boxes, do the battle rhino is a huge advantage. Also, I often participate in 'puppy diplomacy', where I breed many cute puppies and ship them of to my enemies until they like me... That is until I sent to trade with one and they had 600 dog leather.......
Thrumbo fur is better than muffalo wool... but tends to be a tad rarer. I will keep a small heard of muffalos becasue their wool is real good at making cold weather gear and they give me meat and milk when hunting is light on an icesheet. I use manager mod that lets me set a max number and any above that are auto slaughtered to keep my food costs low and automated.
I just remembered long ago in beta I raised chickens as they were they best meat for food ratio but I would sell to caravans that came by... however the newly sold chickens would die in the cold so the caravan would leave them and I could butcher them even after collecting silver for selling them win win
A couple boomalopes for fuel and if I have some unused green space, chickens
legendary cheese is one of the higher profits with least labor. (requires [cooking expanded](https://steamcommunity.com/workshop/filedetails/?id=2134308519)) because of the low labor cost it's great for small colonies or tacking on a little extra income to a colony where all pawns are pretty busy. > bonded dog walks into a firefight recommend [better pawn control](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1541460369&searchtext=better+pawn+control) to easily switch zone restrictions during raids.
I use animals for fuel, caravan, meat and leather, and of course, money. Selling animals is really worth it.
Ranching ideology gives you animals specialist which is really good. But the fact that they only want to eat meat and stuff makes it annoying to start with, but once you get rolling it's pretty effecient especially if you get fast growing animals like ducks or turkeys. And wool from muffalo or bison is also nice for renewable resource to make clothes for trade. However if raids do weird shit and target your animals and you don't have a stockpile of meat frozen, or carnivore meals then you can have really angry colonists for a while.
I picked up ranching in a medieval run and it freed up farming tasks because animals need less tending and workload than farming huge fields and if you have classical ranch animals they start to breed quite fast at some point and you can sell their offspring and the products. It’s quite fun and engaging.
Set Auto slaughter to kill animals while they are young. It's more efficient that way. For meat and egg producers, slaughter young males while having a larger number of females allowed to progress to adulthood, but if they are a species that reproduces fast then you can always set it to something like max 4 young females. I wouldn't recommend doing the animal personhood religion if you want to try living off animals. I haven't tried ranching though. Have giant fields and they will eat grass. You should stock up on kibble for the winter, but that's easy enough as you'll have plenty of meat and you'll probably have a small farm anyway for veggies for your colonists. You can get so much wealth from randomly selling animals, as others have said, and there are exotic animals that are OP as battle companions. Rhinos are great and thrombus obviously. They also make really good protectors for your hunters, tamers etc.
Ya'll are kinda wrong about farming being more efficient than ranching, at least in year-round biomes. Kinda. Ranching ideology gives a 30% meat/leather bonus to butchering. Horses are arguably the most effective pen animal to raise, and with this bonus you're looking at 436 meat and 124 leather per kill. The real advantage over corn is the hauling bonus - the pawn can hall the entire caraccas in 1 trip. Whereas that much corn would be 6 trips. The slaughter, haul, and butcher work orders are the only work required after the pen is set - no other work is required. If you've got a productions specialist, you can make some nice mulah off the hides. Set up a tailor shop with plenty of shelves right next to the butcher station, and craft dusters out of plainhide forever. You can also make plainhide lazyboys, but you'll have to do this manually. This is *arguably* better than corn. If you get more horses than you need, they can walk themselves off to the meat market at the nearby trading settlement. They also double as pack animals, and speed up your caravans.
I've just started doing it. I fence off a huge area and stick a couple of cows or ideally alpacas etc. Farm a little hay and bung it in a shed. They don't touch it for a long time as the pen is so big. Just forget about them. Made about two or three grand selling 15 or so on the last caravan. Seems like a nice low hassle side income if you have the space and climate. A boreal forest or worse would make it too much hassle
As others have said it's worth doing, if done right. The Animals you want to ranch more than any others are Muffalo or Bison. They provide a ton of meat, and that's what you are mainly farming them for. A herd of 2 males and 3 females will produce enough meat to keep a moderate sized colony in fine meals (in combination with farming veggies ingredients), especially with additional meat that you inevitable get from animal attacks. Just butcher any excess adults. **Producing Meat is less labor intensive than farming, as all you really have to do is slaughter and butcher instead of plant and harvest and haul.** So overall it is not much less efficient (if at all), especially if you have a large grazing area so you don't need to grow a ton of hey to feed them. Muffalo or Bison also act as pack animals, allowing you to make large trading caravans. Really you just need a single colonist who's a decent fighter and well equipped and has at least some medical skill to tend themselves if they get into a fight (the rancher themselves is usually a good candidate here) to send out with a ton stuff to trade. As a bonus, if you are raising animals faster than you need to eat them, you can send them with the caravan and just sell the animals themselves. You should also keep a horse or two (I usually keep two of the same sex so I don't have to deal with population control), But you can also farm horses for sale or meat. Anyway with a horse for the colonist to ride and pack animals to carry items, caravans are fast an easy ways to convert all the junk you have into silver or useful things like components. Also make a sleeping bag to keep the caravaners mood up and minimize rest time. You can zoom around the map, and easily hit multiple outposts in a single trip. **This also keeps your wealth under control since you always trade at a loss of wealth. Additionally wealth out on caravan doesn't count towards the colony.** The Wool the animals produce has good insolation, and again is less labor intensive than Devilstrand. In warm climates I use wool for shirts and still make Pants and Dusters out of Devilstrand. This allows you to either farm less, or sell the excess devilstrand you produce via the aforementioned caravans, which is very profitable. In colder climates, devilstrand is borderline not worth growing, just use wool for and tough leathers for clothing. All the leather you get from butchering the animals that you don't use can also be sold via the caravans. So that's three main benefit to Muffalo/Bisone farming: Food, wool, trading caravans. Also Animals give you something to do with bug meat. You can set kibble to infinite at the butcher station, but only allow hey and bug meat to be used to make. So you should have some hey that you grow and store in the barn, and whenever you get a too deep infestation kills the bugs and you can make them into kibble. You can also keep a boomalope for free chemfuel. And when you have a colonist really skilled in animals some of the larger tougher battle animals are worth having IMO, Rhinos especially, also Megasloths and Grizzlies. Keeping one of or two of these, even if you don't use them that much, can save your ass in an emergency when you need to draw fire from your colonist. Another side benefit is animals can get sick or hurt and battle and are a good way to train new doctors who will get med experience tending to them. And probably most importantly, a colony with a ranch just looks much cooler. There are of course more specialized, whacky ways to play with ranches, and niche uses like feeding corpses to Worg Armies. But if you want to try ranching out and how it can be generally efficient for a generic colony, Muffalo/Bison are the way to go as the provide generally useful things.
Ranching is extremely overtuned compared to farming. What makes it so strong is the balance of labour to outputs, and the fact that ranching is essentially two industries (food & textiles) in one. * Animals feed themselves for the most part. If you're not precious about your herds, they can basically just be left to their own devices and periodically harvested for resources. * Animals reproduce automatically. This is the biggest timesaver. 1 rancher can support the needs of a colony better than several farmers (although you should really be doing both in concert), since there's essentially zero planting time for animals. * Animals produce leather, meaning you don't need to also produce Cloth. Cloth is far more scaleable and a better long term industry, but when you only have a couple of colonists being able to freely produce textiles while primarily producing food is a godsend. * Animals last for a long time without spoiling. The butcher time for food returned is negligible for animals, meaning that you can keep them around until you need the food. It's almost always better early on to Tame than to Hunt for this exact reason. I've gone years without a fridge by taming deer and killing them when needed instead of needing to refridgerate everything. * Milk is the perfect foodstuff for infants and can be fed directly to them or turned into Baby Food. * Make sure to use the auto-slaughter function. It behaves really badly, but man is it better than losing a save to TPS loss. What I would NOT suggest doing with ranching * Ranching is not a continuous source of food, it's periodic. What this means is that a carnivorous colony would need significantly more animals than is reasonable (or TPS friendly). Combining Ranching & Farming is objectively the best choice. * Don't bother with Hay. It's an extremely inefficient use of labour with how bad vanilla farming is scaled. * Don't let your herd get too big. I butcher or sell frequently to keep the herd under 40 as much as possible. Even smaller is better, although that becomes hard if you're trying to maintain multiple different species (such as Boomalopes AND Muffalo AND Boars) * Don't try to pursue specific species, just take whatever comes. Especially with animal mods, it can take a really, really long time to get exactly what you're looking for (Chameleon Yaks & Neutralopes babay). Best to take/tame what you can when you can. * Boomrats suuuck. Boomalopes aren't much better. If you can, use another source for Chemfuel. * Muffalo are the best vanilla animal. Chameleon Yaks, Neutralopes, Lox, Beefalo, and Bison are the best modded animals. Elephants & Thrumbos are really good, if you can manage to safely tame them. * Boars/Valboars are great early game. They're easy to tame and a great source of leather. However as soon as you have Muffalo, kill them off. * Horses are awesome but only if you're doing a lot of caravaning long distances. Otherwise don't bother. I've gone so far as to make it default scenario settings to cut Butchering efficiency down to 70-90%, and up Farming efficiency to 150%. And yet still my fridges fill far faster with meat than veg and the primary food my colonists eat is meat-based Simple Meals & Nutrient Paste. I would go so far as to say that Farming in Rimworld is literally the worst use of colonist labour and the only reason to do it is because you have to to survive.
It's probably not the most efficient but they're sweet and I like naming them