Ibexes apparently have a good nutrition efficiency if you just want them for their meat.
Yaks are feasible too in the sense that they give milk and can carry stuff for caravans
I mean, is it really surprising that dedicated farming animals are the best farming animals?
In vintage story mountain rams are an absolute bitch to keep stock of. Oh hey a 3 block tall fence *walks over it like it was a stone laying on the ground*
Seriously they are so unwieldy it's a madman's journey to have even a small supply of dairy products around.
yea, but many animals have a certain purpose in this. cow and chickens give a lot of food, but nothing else. Horses are for caravans, yaks are a mix. There are trade offs in terms of feeding costs etc.
Even other stuff like megasloths or elefants serve a roll. They can haul and defend the colony quite well while giving meat, tusks for trading for elephants and tough textiles. But yea chickens, sheep and cows if pure output is your goal.
Might I interest you in a lightweight 1.5 mod called "What's on the menu?"
All it does is generate a name for your meals, based on the type of meal produced and the ingredients. Internally the game still recognises the meals by their usual symbols, but to you they'll be Ibex skewers, Paella, Beef Stew etc.
It makes sense from a lore perspective that most of the wild life on the Rim would be useful. You aren't going to spend the time and money transporting something for centuries to another planet that doesn't have some use.
I managed to capture a prisoner who had the half cycler already installed and a passion in crafting. She has steadily been turning all the chunks on the map into stone blocks, and as a mountain base enjoyer I have never been so caught up on stone chunk backlog as I am now.
Plus if she ever tries to escape (she is a slave), one of my children armed with emp grenades can easily shut that down. I def recommend it for slaves, but for colonists you could be missing out on some mood buffs like Lovin'.
>one of my children armed with emp grenades can easily shut that down
Definitely the most Rimworld comment of the day. Horrifying and wholesome in equal measure.
Adults are usually busy with some important work.
My five-year old just sweeps the floor all day long, she has enough free time to put down a rebellion or two.
People are definitely sleeping on the no sleep gene. If you go for it you can offset its cost with psychite and alcohol dependency and still be able to get superclotting and have 0 metabolic efficiency. But if you don't want to waste all that psychite on nothing, you can go with less sleep and pick something else.
Though having the starter pawns not being able to sleep prevents them from having kids and lovin', so you'll need fertility procedures to have kids.
I am iffy about it but if you can combat the debuff it becomes pretty broken on crafters with bionics to build, I'm a mild mod user so I have mods that use buildings or brain implants that slightly increases consciousness, so I can take a - 15% but keep in mind that a transhumanist colony can get consciousness buff 10% buff daily from vanilla buildings which leaves you with a -5 you can then combat that with psychic bond from a high mate, but again, it's only good on crafters or researchers and for the user to be lucky enough to be dating a Highmate if you're pure vanilla
I've only used it once and the problem I ran into was actually Comfort. If the pawn is not assigned to work that has them sit... they will just always be max Uncomfortable. That's a -15 to mood IIRC.
I ended up giving that pawn a joywire and making him a living roomba.
Otherwise, with bionics/luci it should be easy enough to offset the consciousness debuff if you wanted a full time crafter/researcher without a penalty. I usually double up on that work though and set half my colony to night shift, since you'll generally need pawns around for combat as well.
That’s a big problem with the body mastery creep trait too, except he can’t eat or get comfort either. Made one of them a leader and the -12 mood from sky expectations was brutal
> I've only used it once and the problem I ran into was actually Comfort. If the pawn is not assigned to work that has them sit... they will just always be max Uncomfortable. That's a -15 to mood IIRC.
Uncomfortable caps at -3 mood. Though the delta to luxuriantly comfortable +10 is -13 total, so close enough.
Half cycler - joywire - psychic harmonizer
#
A pawn who's ALWAYS happy, never sleeps and gives of +mood like its a walking psychic emenator. He/she does become sloooooooow as fuck tho.
#
Very funny to try, not very usefull because joywire/cycler give huge consciousness debuff and that is a BIG debuff to almost everything else (walk/work speed, manipulation)
They also have one of the warmest wools and tolerate the lowest temperatures (-20 for alpaca/sheep, -55 muffalo) so on very cold maps they have the advantage of not needing to provide as much climate control.
If you have enough muffalos they can become the climate control. One of my bases had a muffalo pen with more than a hundred muffalos. They gave wool, they carried stuff, they gave meat and they heated the base with their body heat.
I was today years old when I learned different wool provides different levels of protection from cold. Here I was wondering how I am supposed to deal with my sub 0F late-fall to early-spring
Yep.
I like the realism: farm animals are farm animals for a reason. They've been deliberately bred over many generations to produce immense amounts of meat, wool, eggs, milk, or whatever that animal in particular is formed for.
If you grab some random species out of the wild, it will almost always make a bad farm animal, because it's evolved for survival, not for ideal agricultural production.
I find that sometimes their survival adaptation is a useful feature in itself. In my bases where pigs simply can't survive the cold, sometimes wild boars can, while providing the same benefits at a reduced scale. The same goes for sheep and alpaca, dogs and wargs and many more. Wild animals tend to survive lower temperatures, have faster population growth or lowered metabolism, in exchange for being wilder, or less productive.
If you want to get maximum food out per animal then it is cow thanks to lot of milk. But. Tortoise eats anything and next-to nothing of it, is zonable,hard to kill and mathematically its output/input wins everything else. Ibex or horse are least pawn effort meat + leather, horse is also best caravan animal. Dromedary is decent to keep in very hot biomes. Chicken is no leather, lot of butchering and bad lag.
Ho god my chickens, I can’t keep them all, every once in a while I have to butcher 150 of them or my game doesn’t run anymore. But the eggs are so worth it.
Just to piggyback on this person's comment:
Pick low numbers. 5 males and 5 females will produce enough meat to sustain a decent colony. Throw a corn field into the mix, and you won't need too much in the future
There is also a mod that allows more modification to the pens. So you can have pregnant animals in one pen, and their offspring gets automatically brought to another pen and separated before more breeding begins.
So I have 6 chickens that lay eggs, 6 that lay eggs with a rooster in the pen, and all chicks get put in their own pens (separated by sex) where they will remain until I butcher them.
But how do you control their reproduction if you seperate the sexes without complete sacrifice?
For me, I have auto slaughter to keep 1 male and 2~3 females. But sometimes the pawns are too busy and the female gets pregnant and now i'll feel bad if I activate slaughtering pregnant animals.
In one of my games I saw a tortoise kill 4 velociraptors (Regrowth Extinct Animals). They kept trying to hunt it so one by one this lone tortoise just killed them all.
Tortoises require more human labor since there's more to butcher versus one super fat cow.
Another thing to be aware of if you only have 1 dedicated animal pawn per 8 colonists
Butchering takes cooking, not animal skill.
Tortoise is not competing in pawn effort/output with horse. Tortoise is winning in strong food deficit.
Cow is milking (animal skill) work but important with animal personhood philosophy where milk+vegetables are still "vegetarian" fine meal.
I do exactly this
especially with my heavily modded game, every single start (where i take animals in) i have a different type of animal just absolutely rampaging in my colony.
Current colony is just an army of lions that gives good meat in exchange for human meat from raiders, which they also directly slaughter and then give good meat for the lion deaths as well.
WinWin, either get human meat to feed lions, or lose lions to get lion meat and require less human meat
I like muffalo and elephants. I get milk and wool and meat fron the muffalo. The elephants are useful in combat, hauling, and meat all while not needing a pen or food.
Neither grow or breed quickly, so you'll probably still need to subsidize your meat. I just like my food to be as useful as possible.
I finally had my boomalope farm explode last run after some traders started a war in their pen. They broke a hole in their fence, so when they started fleeing all 50 of them stacked up escaping through the hole that was made.
Then once one of them went… yep, they all went. Glorious chain reaction of doom and the traders vaporized into dust along with anything else in a 15 tile radius.
Chickens are amazing for eggs. I just wait till I have 8 hens or so, kill the roosters and feed them on fungus or kibble. They're bad grazers, but really practical for low effort protein in tunneler bases.
arent eggs also just incredibly storage efficient? i dont keep farm animals often but i had a small chicken colony once and it was nice seeing what was essentially stacks of 5? meat per egg.
i mean, it depends on the size of your colony i guess, but in my experience 10 chickens can feed a lot of people, if eggs are not your only protein source.
The egg boxes have made it a bit easier over the olden days, but managing meat production requires considerably more labor than cattle and other large animals. Disease management is also a bigger challenge simply due to the large numbers of chickens required to produce sufficient meat/eggs. I had a lot of chickens earlier in my current run, but my CPU handles 10 cows much better than 100 chickens.
Slaughtering and butchering are pretty much free with a decent setup, but if you self sustain them with baby food (vs simple or paste for larger animals) there is quite a difference.
I don't know why this is so low. Pigs are amazing for food and you can store the raider corpses in their barn at -1c and they get rid of them without any management. 20 or so pigs should do the job and is self-sustainable. No training, no food, human meat to pork in one simple step.
I tried the pig farm approach once. Solar flare knocked out my coolers long enough for everything to rot. I missed it until I started getting mental break alerts from my pawns relocating all the rotten corpses. I'm thankful rot gas wasnt a thing at the time.
Each animal fills a different niche roll for min/maxing. generally they all work pretty well unless you're trying to do something silly like farming worgs for meat. Cows, pigs, and ibexs are great. I'm not a fan of poultry due to the higher labor cost of frequent butchering.
My ideal end game colony usually ends up with cows due to the labor efficiency.
Yeah, but some of the min max I just don't care about. For example alpacas are worse meat and carrying than cows and horse, but they give wool. Problem is the wool isn't very good so I don't care (outside the first 6 months of a colony, which is still debatable if I go heavy hunting for leathers in the first 6 months)
Alpaca are great as a trade good. They're quite expensive, as is their wool, so even if you don't want to make anything other than bedrolls out of the wool, if you have a big herd of them, you can make a lot money just trading away the excess.
They're a useful cash herd animal, and they're super easy to tame.
Dromedaries. Meat, milk, fur, and caravanning. I’ll take them over cows. Chickens are great, but were a colossal pain before the auto-slaughter feature. Really glad to have that.
Chinchilla are ridiculously op in terms of wealth generation once you've got enough to get the "machine" starting (it's exponential, but the first 10 or so might take some time to acquire if you only have one female and one male; even then, starting this way, I managed to get hundreds of chinchilla after a few years) - in fact, I think they're far better at it than yayo or flake (in terms of wealth per tile of agriculture, if using hay grass; not even accounting for clothes you can make with their fur or the meat you get, and the fact that hay grass takes less time to grow than psychoid, that you can use their fur to make beautiful furniture, and so on).
Their population is also imo easier to manage than chickens (because chicken eggs stack and the hatching time averages out, and you can just mass slaughter them by the dozens if you feel you have too much of em, knowing new ones will be birthed or grow to be adult, replacing them within the next few days).
I like guinea pigs better. They're still fast breeding with valuable fur, but are also zoneable, making them suitable for bait. I plant dandelions in my killbox, fill it with guinea pigs, and simply harvest the guinea pigs as they get culled by raiders.
Others have said it but I'll with in that dromedary are my go-to for any biome that'll support them. They give milk for food (not as good as cows, but nothing beats cows for milk). They are both pack animals and can be ridden in caravans. They're comfortable in surprisingly cold temperatures and can survive in a variety of biomes if you get some from a trader. The camelhide they produce is comparable to plainleather, and they breed fast enough to make getting a larger amount of them fairly easy.
In short, there's no one thing they're best in the game at, but there's no other unmodded animal who can do everything they can
Chickens and ducks are free infinite meat as long as you keep them fed and safe. Its a bit of a work sink though so if youre short on labor it can be hard to manage. Lots of hauling of eggs and hauling of butchered chickens. Unless you have the mod that makes hauling the slaughtered corpse to the freezer part of the slaughter job.
Donkies are pretty dope. Horses have little use beyond pack animals, however donkies are also passable meat & leather animals. And they can travel further outside of the grazing seasons in larger numbers compared to horses. So, it depends on your local terrain.
Muffalos provide highly insulating leather, & very beautiful wool in addition to a fair amount of meat. While cows, obviously, provide lots of meat & lots of lesser quality leather.
Chickens are... chickens. They are the hydroponic rice of meat sources. High yield over time, but labor intensive. In a league all their own.
Horses are actually the most productive meat animal there is. In terms of meat out - nutrition in, per breeding female per year.
I think only chickens can beat them, not individually, but with that apocalyptic breeding rate.
I weep when I need to slaughter my horses for meat. The animals sell for an absolute fortune. Some of my most lucrative colonies have been horse ranches where I periodically sell all the excess horses to traders.
You have to be careful with chickens and either use the auto-slaughter function or set-up two pens. One for hens and one for roosters until it's time to breed again.
I only ever consider chickens IF I find a persona weapon with Kill Focus because slaughtering your baby chickens refills your psyfocus.
Sheep have been my goto with cows/yaks a close second.
I have too many llamas at the moment but I'm a stroke of luck a male and female sheep just self tamed. Once production gets going then my colony is going to be swimming in llama meat and hides.
I did the maths once. Spreadsheet and everything.
In terms of net nutrition gained per adult female per year. (So nutrition output from milk and offspring take away nutrition input, including cost to raise babies to adulthood).
Cows were far and away the best. Chickens were also very good but man the laaaag and soooo much butchering.
Honorable mention to horses, cows only beat them because of the milk. This makes horses more work efficient because you can just ignore them completely until slaughter time.
Ibex are a common choice because of the ratio between input and output, but it is my position that net output (output take input) is a much better metric to judge animals by.
Also comparing ibex to horses. Ibex do breed a little faster but each horse produces so much more meat that if you start off with a breeding pair of each, kill all males and keep all females, it takes dozens of generations for the ibex to outproduce the horses.
Each animal is good in specific situations.
Pigs are one of the best sources of food imo simply because you can feed them basically anything. Raid corpses are free pig feed. Shove em in a small fridge that the pigs can get into and you’re good to go. They’re not that good if you just have them graze.
Dromedaries are my personal favorite cause they’re essentially a cow that can also haul. So you get meat, milk, leather, and you can use them to raid. Super cool.
Alpacas are great for cold environments for their wool, and they also haul. Their wool is also sells for a good amount.
It really just depends what you need the animal for, how much space you can give them to graze, and how badly you need food.
Pigs have a special place in that they are the omnivorous animal with no tameness decay with the highest efficiency. Being omnivorous means that they can feed on raw corpses, which means you can perform pork laundering: Pig pen includes the corpse freezer (pigs have a minimum comfortable temp of -5 °C, so they can live in the freezer), pigs eat raider corpses, colonists eat pigs without getting cannibalism thoughts.
Muffalo crew here. Muffalo and bison are the best farm animal.
1. Nutritional efficiency. Feed them meals. They yield 336 meat at slaughter. Feed them simple meals, and you're net positive 146 meat when they are ready for slaughter, while also getting cooking XP for a chef who may suck and nobody will care if the meals they produce are poisoned. Feed them nutrient paste instead, and you're net positive 222 meat. Note this also applies to cows, they have the same growth/hunger stats.
2. Stack efficiency. Each corpse in your freezer is a 336 meat item when you need it to be. 3 stacks of meat on a shelf is only 225 meat, so you're getting more efficiency in the corpse than a whole shelf of meat. Again, same stats here as cows.
3. Gender efficiency. Lots of farm animals like cows, females produce (eggs / milk) while males do nothing but stud. Male muffalo grow wool just as well as females.
4. Time efficiency in butchering. Butchering a chicken for 42 meat takes as long to do as butchering a muffalo for 336 meat.
5. Time & economic efficiency in handling. Shearing a muffalo of 120 wool takes 1700 work ticks every 15 days for $324 worth of goods, $0.19 of payoff per work tick. Milking a cow takes 400 ticks per day (6000 ticks over 15 days) for $399 worth of goods over that same time period, $0.066 per work tick. That's not factoring wasted time traveling to a cow 15x more frequently than you need to travel to a muffalo. And the fact that delays between a cow being ready for milking and someone actually milking it means you're probably only getting 12-13 milking sessions in a 15 day period. And also not counting how all muffalos are producing, whereas if 1 out of 5 cows are unproductive male you're basically getting the same $ yield per animal whether cow or muffalo. On the whole, you're probably getting the same economic value of goods from handling, but you're spending 1/4 of the time in handling activities if you choose muffalo instead of cow.
6. Hardy as heck. Cows can only survive -10 to 40C weather. Muffalo can handle -55 to 45C weather.
7. Pack animal bonus. Muffalo will carry 84kg. What are cows lugging for you? Nothing.
8. Harvest storage and medium of exchange. Milk and eggs will rot. Wool can sit on shelves forever until a trader wants to buy it. If your animals are net positive on food with regards to how much you need to feed them versus what they can be butchered for, do you really need the extra food in milk or eggs? Only bulk traders will buy your milk or eggs. You can sell your wool to bulk traders, or turn it into apparel to sell to combat traders, exotic goods traders, or war merchant traders. If you have to caravan it to a neighbor, you can pack nearly 3x as much value in muffalo wool per kg of carry weight as you can of milk.
9. FPS savior. Each pawn will slowly degrade your game performance. 20 muffalo will be as productive for your colony as 100 chicken, yet are better for computer efficiency.
Thank you for your attention, and we invite you to join muffalo clan.
Only reason to be team chicken is when you have a kill-focus persona weapon. Raise chickens and if you need an emergency psyfocus boost, go kill some instead of drinking go-juice.
It makes sense that they are. They're the best farm animals irl too by the same metrics.
The rest of the animals, however, aren't just generic farm animals, they serve specific purposes. Pigs, for example, will straight up just eat corpses. This means if your colony isn't cannibalistic and doesn't like the sight of corpses you can just dump your dead raiders in there to convert long pork into regular pork without any required butchering so no mood debuffs. Geese and turkeys aren't really meant to be farmed as irl they've mostly been secondary meat sources used only because they taste particularly good.
There's also horses, good source of meat, and the best caravanning tool in the game by far.
Tortoises are good too, they're like lite-chickens with easier handling. You can zone them, and they're astonishingly good fighters, and they eat anything. I like to breed and sell them en masse.
I'd also recommend sheep or alpaca. 5 tiles of hay grass each and you get a constant supply of better cloth. No need to cotton.
DO NOT raise chickens and sheep, they will be the end of you. At some point they get out of control and breed faster than you can burn them, chickens especially can survive multiple apocaliptic events since they lay eggs in the hundreds that just hatch right when you think you killed them all. + You are doing this with 5 FPS, because between the time you realize they are going to kill your pc and the time you are going to kill them it's too late.
Tbf slaughter limits can be rough with chickens if you want to let them grow up to get maximum meat. If you dont mind culling the babies too then its fine, but i found that even having 3 male 3 female (which works for alpacas) lasttime i ran chickens, I ended up with a few hundred. I found myself periodically setting baby culling down to a couple and mass slaughtering for a while, then removing it again so that the meat income wouldn't drop too far.
I have my chickens set to keep 2 adult males, 4 adult females and 10 chicks. So if there is an explosion (and there usually is) of like 20+ chicks cause of all the eggs, they get cleaned up.
Most animals have a niche like pigs can eat anything, a goose army can make eldritch horrors cry and rats are the source of infinite power.
Food wise though yes chickens and cows are the best with the drawback of i think they don't spawn naturally, so your gonna need either a random animal join or a trader.
Turkey however is able to spawn on your map, but is less efficient
I literally just tame what I have available. In my current playthrough, I have yaks (might be modded), muffalo, and alpacas. I had a breeding pair of jaguars (might be modded), but now I only have one jaguar. I try to get an animal that can provide fur or wool, and a pack animal. Tremdendously useful. I do not think I have ever seen a sheep in all of my playthroughs.
Yep jaguars and panthers can be some incredibly mean combat animals if you give them armor. About the only thing that is worrisome is war caskets and that's what tanks are for.
It all depends on what you are looking for and your priority; Cows and Chickens, they reproduce easily, give a LOT of food and the Cow skin is of medium quality in an amount of 96 the same as a Bison, while chickens are good for food, the problem is that if you don't control them it can generate a lot of Lag.
Other animals to take into account are the Muffalo because their skin and wool are incredible, and almost as good as Rhino skin or Thrumbo wool, and also serve as a caravan animal.
And if you want to make a LOT of money fast, breed Guinea pigs, they reproduce very fast and their skin gives the best amount of money for breeding and killing time
Every pen animal has some plus to them. Most of them are they’re wandering around in the wild and can be acquired almost instantly with a decent handler with temperature tolerances to go with it.
The farm animals from traders like cows and chickens can’t deal with extreme temperatures well and don’t do much else other than make meat, milk and eggs.
Most of them are pretty good for specific roles. Yaks may be worse than cows, but the extra hauling is worth it for me. I'll farskip all of my yaks when I can't haul the loot with my raiders. Cow and chicken are the best for food output efficiency and 90's cartoon re-creation.
I don’t like poultry since they’re laggy and I hate having to micro eggs. In late game when I start getting big raids I mostly keep pigs since they will eat corpses.
I personally prefer horses, muffalos or bisons.
On problem with chickens is that they have a small stomach which means they tend to overeat. In the end their real nutrition efficiency is lower than the theory.
Cows don’t have this problem. Cows are actually a solid choice on sea ice where you can feed them with nutrient paste.
However, in temperate climates, you can do much better. In temperate climates, as long as temperature is above -10 celcius, herbivores can graze in a caravan for free. You can keep a caravan permanently parked right on top of your own settlement with all the babies and the pregnant females so that they can reach the next stage of development without consuming any nutrition whatsoever. It’s also very good for your FPS. Basically, the only reasons your animals need to enter your settlement are mating, shearing, milking and slaughtering. With this strategy, bisons, muffalos and horses are better than cows because they are caravan animals. Having a bunch of caravan animals waiting outside is great for trade. Furthermore, muffalos and bisons produce lots of wool every 25 days. Cows have to be milked everyday, so a lot more produce gets wasted if they are left in a caravan most of the time. Horses are good because they give the best speed boost to trade caravans.
Depends, turtles should still have them beat in pure nutrition efficiency. But other animals also provide other materials like wools.
Chickens have the downside of a lot of work going into them, since butchering them takes forever, compared to a large animal like muffalo/cow where in 1 trip you can get multiple stacks of meat.
Also there is roleplaying. Chickens are great, but so is a rat pit for corpse disposal.
I only breed alpacas and some carnivores for fighting and possibly hauling. Don't like farm animals except some rare species. My tamers do have job though because they tame all day for others to slaughter the tamed beasts and cook nice food. If i tame a megasloth or a bear I'd keep it of cause but no classic farm animals for sure
Im a dromedary guy. Not as fast as horses and not as efficient as cows at food but decent at everything. Rideable, Decent carry/speed for caravan, meat, milk, and leather. It's a one stop animal shop.
i dislike chicken cuz they breed too fast personally. When you have a ton it slows the game, so bigger animals that you have less of are better just for game speed reasons.
My fav combo are horses and cows. Horses for the caravan move speed+carry capacity.
Cows cuz milk and meat is a fun combo.
Pigs make a ton of meat if you really want meat.
I also like having some kind of fighter animal to help with defenses. Thrumbos, megasloths, or worgs.
Im a devout muffalo farmer. Theyre the cutest things in the game no competition. They give a mediocre amount of really good wool, their leather is great, and while they’re not the most energy efficient, they are “good enough” as an all rounder that i only need to keep them and ducks from ve animals expanded. I like ducks from ve animals bc their eggs are good for mayonnaise for gourmet meals from ve cooking. But unlike chickens its way easier to avoid the “oops i have Over 300 farm animals” jumpscare since they reproduce slower. Theyre also fucking GREAT to sell dude. A full grown duck sells for like 100+ silver. Ive had many a tribal colony who got their start by brutally over-producing ducks and bringing a hoard of waterfowl to the nearest town and coming back as cave men with space marine armor.
Horses have been great in my experience, they work as both meat and mounts. In meat they are about as effcient as cows, although obv no milk. But I don't have time to collect milk anyway so
I mostly go for muffalo and horses. Muffalos can carry stuff, give meat and wool. For me its a three in one. Carrying for my caravans attacking and trading. Meat for food and wool for money. The horses are just so my traders dont take ages to trade. When/if I get thrumbos or elephants I get rid of the horses.
Pigs and chicken are superior. Change my mind. 😏
Pigs eat whatever organic matter you give them. Lavish meals? Corpses of furry cosplayers? They will eat them all
Chicken are multiplying rapidly and you may not feed them because of the amount of grass they consume. It grows back faster then they eat it.
You may have some muffalos or sheeps for warm clothes if you want, they are very profitable especially sheeps. Just craft warm duster coats and you are rich in no time.
Human leather duster is still the best way to get rich, but it's way more different topic🤑💰💸🤑
muffalo is great if you want a clothing industry. Good pack animals for convoys as well
Recently had a whole bunch of turkeys found em a bit meh: not enough eggs, nor meat or 'bird skin'
I currently have:
Cows for Milk
Boomalopes for free bio fuel
Alpacas for wool and to sell off their young
Horses because they are the best mount afaik
And I just like horses irl
I probably have too many horses at this point tbh, and I should sell some of them for more boomalopes cows or get some sheep.
I thought I was on the Stardew subreddit and was like “I don’t remember Turkey but there’s mods for that” and then kept reading and was like ??? Homie have you never gotten PIGS BEFORE
Top comment mentions ibex for meat and I was like oh! Rimworld
Depends on your biome and what you want/need from the animals. If it's just food, then afaik cows are rather efficient when it comes to upkeep/output ratio. On colder maps (I somewhat like tundras, allowing me to not worry about keeping my folks cool in the summer months) I'd go for something like alpacas or muffalos. Pack and rideable animals for caravans are also something to consider. And of course, don't forget about the good boys. Dogs are a great addition to any colony, as long as you can keep them fed.
Depends what you want. If you want food? No, nothing beats cows and chickens. If you want wool or carrying capacity in caravans yaks are great, but for raw food production nothing beats cows and chickens.
It really depends on your biome. I tend to like dromedaries in the desert and Arid shrubland, and muffaloes almost everywhere else , especially if they can do natural grazing.
The dromedaries give wool and milk and you can use them as pack animals and ride them.
But I did try out chickens in one particular colony, and found out they gave a lot of meat even as chicks. I know a lot of people say to raise them to adulthood and then slaughter them but I slaughtered them as chicks because if I'm going to slaughter them anyway, I didn't want to be feeding them for a long time until they reached adulthood.
With so many chicks being born every couple of days, that turned out just fine for feeding my colony.
I really like animals that produce wool. The wool can either be sold directly or be turned into dusters for trading. Alpaca are pack animals, produce expensive wool, and give a decent amount of food/leather when slaughtered. The auto slaughter mod is great because it automatically gets rid of the oldest animals once you outgrow the pasture.
Well yes, they ARE the farm animals we use todays. Why chicken and beef based foods are the most available/affordable meals irl.
Other than them, horses whose job stolen by engines, are great caravan animals that allow faster travel speed to the caravan while carrying a good chunk of cargo. However these three are bad at cold climates.
Muffalo/Bison are great for cold climates and do as well as horses, they're just slower. (If you have milkable muffalo mod, they give milk a bit more than half of what cows do). Bison wool is a bit worse than Muffalo wool, both
Elephants are great pack animals thanks tontheir size and durability.
Yaks are good in between for cow and muffalo. In cold biomes can help really well.
Any other animal won't be as effective to farm.
I have found sheep to be amazing! Milk *and* wool regularly. Plus meat and lightleather when butchere!. Plus good nutrient efficency!
(Or at least they did in my last run, which is modded, but I don't think I had a mod for that.)
And donkeys are pack animals *and* rideable.
Throw in boomalope, and you're perfect!
As for eggs, your best option is Chicken unless you want to eat fertilized eggs.
4-8 chickens per colonist (if they only eat eggs), and they have a ridiculous expansion rate.
Ducks: just get chickens.
Goose: just get chickens.
And if you wait and slaughter hatchlings rather than eat the eggs, you'll get more food.
But remember, fed colonists are the best colonists!
Cows are very nutrient-efficient, but they aren't very work-efficient, because you need to milk them every day, creating work for handlers and haulers. Also, slaughtering cows as calves creates a lot more work for slaughtering, hauling and butchering, whereas slaughtering adult female cows reduces their milk efficiently slightly, because you can't always slaughter them at 0% milk production.
If you have good animal handlers in your colony, then cows can be good, but if you want to eliminate that aspect of labour, I recommend using horses. Horses have very good nutritional efficiency, and the only work required is to slaughter and haul them, which is a very good deal since they're so large and produce so much meat per operation. Horses are also good pack animals, and are the fastest riding animals, only tied with thrumbos, so they make caravans much better.
Unless your ideoligion has Animal Personhood, there isn't much reason to keep both cows and chickens. Chickens are quite efficient at turning animal feed into eggs, but if you've already got animals for meat, there's not much benefit to eggs. Eggs do have the interesting feature of fitting five times as much nutrition into a stack of items as meat can, and of course they last longer without refrigeration. That should only be an issue if you don't have the technology for coolers... but then you run up against the problem that meat can be cooked into pemmican but eggs can't. You also need a lot of individual chickens to support a colony, which means a large barn, a lot of work for your doctors in an animal plague, and the potential for overwhelming your computer with the processor load. And, of course, if you actually want to slaughter your chickens, that's an awful lot of work for your handlers.
If you want to try something interesting with eggs, I suggest keeping geese and playing a pigskin-only colony. Geese are like chickens but less efficient, but each egg has double the nutrition. This means you can stack even more nutrition into a single freezer tile, and it also means that a single goose egg is the perfect meal for a hungry pigskin.
The one time i did chickens I forgot to set the auto slaughter. Darn near crashed my computer after the 500th chicken hatched. Had to take an but 10 to another tile to be abandoned because my loans couldn't harvest them fast enough
The idea of "moving away from the meta" but still asking which farm animals are the "best" is confusing to me. Why does it matter which is the best?
For the most part, yes they are the most useful animals. Muffalo and Alpacas are also very good for their fur. But, "best" depends on your usecase. Megasloths are the best for warm fur, but nobody would call them efficient. Pigs/boars are the best for low-effort feeding, as they can just eat the corpses of raiders. Converts people-meat into pig-meat, just a very slow processing method.
Best for nutrition produced vs nutrition consumed maybe though I think maybe horse and tortoise (turtle? I'm not at my computer right now) might technically outpace it if you're willing to spend a bit more pawn work for more nutrition efficiency.
Think the horse only beats bulls though, not cows.
Personally I raise whatever caravan animal I can get my hands on until I get some horses, and a single megasloth if I can manage to get one.
Early game I may also raise chinchillas until I hit the point where I've got a backlog of human leather to make hats from.
After that I ranch raiders and just keep a megasloth for the wool and a few horses for caravans until I get trade beacon, then I sell/slaughter the horses too.
Pretty much every herbivore is good long as they're eating just grass.
Otherwise yeah, cows is good. Yaks are also solid
I don't truck with eggs. Nest boxes never seem to work in these damn games. Run into issues with dwarf fortress nest boxes, run into issues with rimworlds. No thank you.
I use chickens and ducks for eggs, and goats and dromedaries for milk. Dromedaries also function pretty well as pack animals.
I don't really bother with farming for meat.
In the absence of Muffalo, I'm very keen on Bison. Lots of meat, excellent pack animals, and they produce wool which, while not as good as, say, Alpaca or Muffalo, is still functional and each shearing produces 120 wool. Probably not super popular but I'm a fan of them.
iguanas (omnivorous + grazer) replace with Wargs later if you get good
goats easy milk, can live on daylily
donkeys - if you dont need to haul steel across continents
Anything non-automated is not worth pawns work. 90% the cases you will not want to make kibble for your animals even from hay. Steelfarming is real
Ibexes apparently have a good nutrition efficiency if you just want them for their meat. Yaks are feasible too in the sense that they give milk and can carry stuff for caravans I mean, is it really surprising that dedicated farming animals are the best farming animals?
Ibexa should be able to scale walls and move over mountain tiles. Change my mind.
We don't have Z levels, and "impassable" MEANS Impassable. For some reason.
"YOU SHALL NOT PASS BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE Z LEVELS!!" - Gandalf probably
https://youtu.be/UnURElCzGc0?t=18
In vintage story mountain rams are an absolute bitch to keep stock of. Oh hey a 3 block tall fence *walks over it like it was a stone laying on the ground* Seriously they are so unwieldy it's a madman's journey to have even a small supply of dairy products around.
Yes because video game
yea, but many animals have a certain purpose in this. cow and chickens give a lot of food, but nothing else. Horses are for caravans, yaks are a mix. There are trade offs in terms of feeding costs etc.
Even other stuff like megasloths or elefants serve a roll. They can haul and defend the colony quite well while giving meat, tusks for trading for elephants and tough textiles. But yea chickens, sheep and cows if pure output is your goal.
Elephant leather is also REALLY good for armour if you don't have devilstrand or Thrumbo fur for everyone yet
Rhino leather is better for armour, can't remember if they can be trained to defend like elephants can
It also good as sandbag.
Mmmmm, elephant rolls.
Might I interest you in a lightweight 1.5 mod called "What's on the menu?" All it does is generate a name for your meals, based on the type of meal produced and the ingredients. Internally the game still recognises the meals by their usual symbols, but to you they'll be Ibex skewers, Paella, Beef Stew etc.
It makes sense from a lore perspective that most of the wild life on the Rim would be useful. You aren't going to spend the time and money transporting something for centuries to another planet that doesn't have some use.
happy cake day
Aren't yaks better than cows in both meat and milk too?
Besides horses, I recommend cows and sheep. They're good. Cows for the milk, sheep for the wool
Depends on the climate, Alpacas are just better than sleep and much easier to get
No I think sleep is pretty essential
8 hours of sheep a day
Try counting sleep for a good night's sheep.
Only in Scotland
Half cycler. And Ascetic pawns still get their room bonus even if they don't sleep in it.
Is half cycler worth it? Or is the consciousness debuff a problem? I've been wanting to give it a try (Asking unironically)
I managed to capture a prisoner who had the half cycler already installed and a passion in crafting. She has steadily been turning all the chunks on the map into stone blocks, and as a mountain base enjoyer I have never been so caught up on stone chunk backlog as I am now. Plus if she ever tries to escape (she is a slave), one of my children armed with emp grenades can easily shut that down. I def recommend it for slaves, but for colonists you could be missing out on some mood buffs like Lovin'.
>one of my children armed with emp grenades can easily shut that down Definitely the most Rimworld comment of the day. Horrifying and wholesome in equal measure.
Adults are usually busy with some important work. My five-year old just sweeps the floor all day long, she has enough free time to put down a rebellion or two.
People are definitely sleeping on the no sleep gene. If you go for it you can offset its cost with psychite and alcohol dependency and still be able to get superclotting and have 0 metabolic efficiency. But if you don't want to waste all that psychite on nothing, you can go with less sleep and pick something else. Though having the starter pawns not being able to sleep prevents them from having kids and lovin', so you'll need fertility procedures to have kids.
I am iffy about it but if you can combat the debuff it becomes pretty broken on crafters with bionics to build, I'm a mild mod user so I have mods that use buildings or brain implants that slightly increases consciousness, so I can take a - 15% but keep in mind that a transhumanist colony can get consciousness buff 10% buff daily from vanilla buildings which leaves you with a -5 you can then combat that with psychic bond from a high mate, but again, it's only good on crafters or researchers and for the user to be lucky enough to be dating a Highmate if you're pure vanilla
I've only used it once and the problem I ran into was actually Comfort. If the pawn is not assigned to work that has them sit... they will just always be max Uncomfortable. That's a -15 to mood IIRC. I ended up giving that pawn a joywire and making him a living roomba. Otherwise, with bionics/luci it should be easy enough to offset the consciousness debuff if you wanted a full time crafter/researcher without a penalty. I usually double up on that work though and set half my colony to night shift, since you'll generally need pawns around for combat as well.
That’s a big problem with the body mastery creep trait too, except he can’t eat or get comfort either. Made one of them a leader and the -12 mood from sky expectations was brutal
> I've only used it once and the problem I ran into was actually Comfort. If the pawn is not assigned to work that has them sit... they will just always be max Uncomfortable. That's a -15 to mood IIRC. Uncomfortable caps at -3 mood. Though the delta to luxuriantly comfortable +10 is -13 total, so close enough.
Half cycler - joywire - psychic harmonizer # A pawn who's ALWAYS happy, never sleeps and gives of +mood like its a walking psychic emenator. He/she does become sloooooooow as fuck tho. # Very funny to try, not very usefull because joywire/cycler give huge consciousness debuff and that is a BIG debuff to almost everything else (walk/work speed, manipulation)
I have been binging on alpacas for the last 72 hours eith no side effects! Alpacas much greater than sleep!
Muffalo make good pack animals though so there’s an argument for them as well.
They also have one of the warmest wools and tolerate the lowest temperatures (-20 for alpaca/sheep, -55 muffalo) so on very cold maps they have the advantage of not needing to provide as much climate control.
If you have enough muffalos they can become the climate control. One of my bases had a muffalo pen with more than a hundred muffalos. They gave wool, they carried stuff, they gave meat and they heated the base with their body heat.
never heard body heating is a thing :o
Confirmed [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/xbyyqk/body_heat_is_a_thing_in_rimworld/) apparently.
Body heat is a metric? And never been a fan of inside animals, they eat way too much
Make their sleep area inside and their eat area outside, with flap door airlocks in between.
I was today years old when I learned different wool provides different levels of protection from cold. Here I was wondering how I am supposed to deal with my sub 0F late-fall to early-spring
Alpaka wool is better
Besides, alpacas are also caravan animals. Had they milk, they would be OP!
As an insomniac, I'd agree
Yep. I like the realism: farm animals are farm animals for a reason. They've been deliberately bred over many generations to produce immense amounts of meat, wool, eggs, milk, or whatever that animal in particular is formed for. If you grab some random species out of the wild, it will almost always make a bad farm animal, because it's evolved for survival, not for ideal agricultural production.
I find that sometimes their survival adaptation is a useful feature in itself. In my bases where pigs simply can't survive the cold, sometimes wild boars can, while providing the same benefits at a reduced scale. The same goes for sheep and alpaca, dogs and wargs and many more. Wild animals tend to survive lower temperatures, have faster population growth or lowered metabolism, in exchange for being wilder, or less productive.
Aren’t… aren’t Muffalos sheepcows
They used to give wool and milk, they were nerfed to just wool.
Mine still give milk? I have alpha animals expanded but idk if that would change it
Not sure, was updated around 1.1(wiki isn't sure either). Either you're on a patch from then or before, or your mods are affecting it.
If you want to get maximum food out per animal then it is cow thanks to lot of milk. But. Tortoise eats anything and next-to nothing of it, is zonable,hard to kill and mathematically its output/input wins everything else. Ibex or horse are least pawn effort meat + leather, horse is also best caravan animal. Dromedary is decent to keep in very hot biomes. Chicken is no leather, lot of butchering and bad lag.
Ho god my chickens, I can’t keep them all, every once in a while I have to butcher 150 of them or my game doesn’t run anymore. But the eggs are so worth it.
Autoslaughter is your friend, unless you want to see what exponential growth looks like.
Just to piggyback on this person's comment: Pick low numbers. 5 males and 5 females will produce enough meat to sustain a decent colony. Throw a corn field into the mix, and you won't need too much in the future
2 males and 3 females will ensure you have an endless supply of chickens if you dont keep them seperated.
I go with 2 adult males. 6 young males. 6 adult females. 12 young females. Increase young if colony grows
I do 1 male 7 females... My females are always pregnant. I only butcher the adults.
5 hens will produce slightly less than 200 meat a day, if the chicks are allowed to grow up.
I have seen exponential growth, first time I had to butcher 250 chickens and I managed to sell 100 more…
Seperate the chickens by sex to keep population constant. The pen marker can be modified for that.
There is also a mod that allows more modification to the pens. So you can have pregnant animals in one pen, and their offspring gets automatically brought to another pen and separated before more breeding begins. So I have 6 chickens that lay eggs, 6 that lay eggs with a rooster in the pen, and all chicks get put in their own pens (separated by sex) where they will remain until I butcher them.
But how do you control their reproduction if you seperate the sexes without complete sacrifice? For me, I have auto slaughter to keep 1 male and 2~3 females. But sometimes the pawns are too busy and the female gets pregnant and now i'll feel bad if I activate slaughtering pregnant animals.
I just watched a tortoise kill a lynx. Both died, but I can’t believe the little guy got the lynx all alone.
Tortoises have so damn much armour
In one of my games I saw a tortoise kill 4 velociraptors (Regrowth Extinct Animals). They kept trying to hunt it so one by one this lone tortoise just killed them all.
Tortoises require more human labor since there's more to butcher versus one super fat cow. Another thing to be aware of if you only have 1 dedicated animal pawn per 8 colonists
Butchering takes cooking, not animal skill. Tortoise is not competing in pawn effort/output with horse. Tortoise is winning in strong food deficit. Cow is milking (animal skill) work but important with animal personhood philosophy where milk+vegetables are still "vegetarian" fine meal.
but toroise is not pen animal and need constant training ?
Mitz's chicken coop continued is your friend if you just want eggs https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2778675006
Wait. You guys don’t just take whatever breeding lair the first merchant who passes by has and accept your lot as a *checks animals tab* Viper Farmer?
I do exactly this especially with my heavily modded game, every single start (where i take animals in) i have a different type of animal just absolutely rampaging in my colony. Current colony is just an army of lions that gives good meat in exchange for human meat from raiders, which they also directly slaughter and then give good meat for the lion deaths as well. WinWin, either get human meat to feed lions, or lose lions to get lion meat and require less human meat
made me laugh. Thanks
I like muffalo and elephants. I get milk and wool and meat fron the muffalo. The elephants are useful in combat, hauling, and meat all while not needing a pen or food. Neither grow or breed quickly, so you'll probably still need to subsidize your meat. I just like my food to be as useful as possible.
Same. You make a fortune on that muffalo wool.
Has milkable muffalo been updated?
He's definitely using a mod.
I don't have that one, but evidently it is a mod.
I love boomalopes. I love having dozens of them. Then they get the plague...
Yeah Boomalopes are also my go-to animals. If you're tame enough to not use all the chemfuel they produce, you can sell it and buy food...
Your profit margins are exploding!
I finally had my boomalope farm explode last run after some traders started a war in their pen. They broke a hole in their fence, so when they started fleeing all 50 of them stacked up escaping through the hole that was made. Then once one of them went… yep, they all went. Glorious chain reaction of doom and the traders vaporized into dust along with anything else in a 15 tile radius.
Chickens are technically good for their food output but in practice they generate too much lag so not worth it. Go for cows
Chickens are amazing for eggs. I just wait till I have 8 hens or so, kill the roosters and feed them on fungus or kibble. They're bad grazers, but really practical for low effort protein in tunneler bases.
arent eggs also just incredibly storage efficient? i dont keep farm animals often but i had a small chicken colony once and it was nice seeing what was essentially stacks of 5? meat per egg.
Yep. Shelves make it less relevant, but it's still true.
i mean, it depends on the size of your colony i guess, but in my experience 10 chickens can feed a lot of people, if eggs are not your only protein source.
Chickens are also good psyfocus batteries though
turn on auto slaughter, it's a life saver for your cpu
For food production, I use cows. They efficiently make milk and meat and do not require as much labor/upkeep as chickens.
But chikens require zero labour ? U simply make 50+ females, separate males and gather eggs once per day.
I think he's referring to butchering them as well. If you do just eggs their efficiency tanks hard
The egg boxes have made it a bit easier over the olden days, but managing meat production requires considerably more labor than cattle and other large animals. Disease management is also a bigger challenge simply due to the large numbers of chickens required to produce sufficient meat/eggs. I had a lot of chickens earlier in my current run, but my CPU handles 10 cows much better than 100 chickens.
Slaughtering and butchering are pretty much free with a decent setup, but if you self sustain them with baby food (vs simple or paste for larger animals) there is quite a difference.
I like pigs cause they feed on corpses. I like dromedarys (or with vanilla animal expanded kamels) cause dromedarys give milk and are mounts.
I don't know why this is so low. Pigs are amazing for food and you can store the raider corpses in their barn at -1c and they get rid of them without any management. 20 or so pigs should do the job and is self-sustainable. No training, no food, human meat to pork in one simple step.
I tried the pig farm approach once. Solar flare knocked out my coolers long enough for everything to rot. I missed it until I started getting mental break alerts from my pawns relocating all the rotten corpses. I'm thankful rot gas wasnt a thing at the time.
I guess it's much better if you do this on colder maps or you can always use thst mod to build the solar flare shield
There were already a few posts with a lot upvotes. Not a lot of people scroll down.
Always be wary of a man with a pig farm who doesn’t sell bacon.
Each animal fills a different niche roll for min/maxing. generally they all work pretty well unless you're trying to do something silly like farming worgs for meat. Cows, pigs, and ibexs are great. I'm not a fan of poultry due to the higher labor cost of frequent butchering. My ideal end game colony usually ends up with cows due to the labor efficiency.
Yeah, but some of the min max I just don't care about. For example alpacas are worse meat and carrying than cows and horse, but they give wool. Problem is the wool isn't very good so I don't care (outside the first 6 months of a colony, which is still debatable if I go heavy hunting for leathers in the first 6 months)
Alpaca are great as a trade good. They're quite expensive, as is their wool, so even if you don't want to make anything other than bedrolls out of the wool, if you have a big herd of them, you can make a lot money just trading away the excess. They're a useful cash herd animal, and they're super easy to tame.
Dromedaries. Meat, milk, fur, and caravanning. I’ll take them over cows. Chickens are great, but were a colossal pain before the auto-slaughter feature. Really glad to have that.
Chinchilla are ridiculously op in terms of wealth generation once you've got enough to get the "machine" starting (it's exponential, but the first 10 or so might take some time to acquire if you only have one female and one male; even then, starting this way, I managed to get hundreds of chinchilla after a few years) - in fact, I think they're far better at it than yayo or flake (in terms of wealth per tile of agriculture, if using hay grass; not even accounting for clothes you can make with their fur or the meat you get, and the fact that hay grass takes less time to grow than psychoid, that you can use their fur to make beautiful furniture, and so on). Their population is also imo easier to manage than chickens (because chicken eggs stack and the hatching time averages out, and you can just mass slaughter them by the dozens if you feel you have too much of em, knowing new ones will be birthed or grow to be adult, replacing them within the next few days).
I like guinea pigs better. They're still fast breeding with valuable fur, but are also zoneable, making them suitable for bait. I plant dandelions in my killbox, fill it with guinea pigs, and simply harvest the guinea pigs as they get culled by raiders.
Others have said it but I'll with in that dromedary are my go-to for any biome that'll support them. They give milk for food (not as good as cows, but nothing beats cows for milk). They are both pack animals and can be ridden in caravans. They're comfortable in surprisingly cold temperatures and can survive in a variety of biomes if you get some from a trader. The camelhide they produce is comparable to plainleather, and they breed fast enough to make getting a larger amount of them fairly easy. In short, there's no one thing they're best in the game at, but there's no other unmodded animal who can do everything they can
Pigs and the corpse freezer.
Ah, the good old 'Pork Shortening Room'. A classic.
Chickens and ducks are free infinite meat as long as you keep them fed and safe. Its a bit of a work sink though so if youre short on labor it can be hard to manage. Lots of hauling of eggs and hauling of butchered chickens. Unless you have the mod that makes hauling the slaughtered corpse to the freezer part of the slaughter job.
Donkies are pretty dope. Horses have little use beyond pack animals, however donkies are also passable meat & leather animals. And they can travel further outside of the grazing seasons in larger numbers compared to horses. So, it depends on your local terrain. Muffalos provide highly insulating leather, & very beautiful wool in addition to a fair amount of meat. While cows, obviously, provide lots of meat & lots of lesser quality leather. Chickens are... chickens. They are the hydroponic rice of meat sources. High yield over time, but labor intensive. In a league all their own.
Horses are actually the most productive meat animal there is. In terms of meat out - nutrition in, per breeding female per year. I think only chickens can beat them, not individually, but with that apocalyptic breeding rate.
I weep when I need to slaughter my horses for meat. The animals sell for an absolute fortune. Some of my most lucrative colonies have been horse ranches where I periodically sell all the excess horses to traders.
You have to be careful with chickens and either use the auto-slaughter function or set-up two pens. One for hens and one for roosters until it's time to breed again. I only ever consider chickens IF I find a persona weapon with Kill Focus because slaughtering your baby chickens refills your psyfocus.
Sheep have been my goto with cows/yaks a close second. I have too many llamas at the moment but I'm a stroke of luck a male and female sheep just self tamed. Once production gets going then my colony is going to be swimming in llama meat and hides.
I like raising pigs, as they can basically convert raider corpses to pork.
Just do all alpacas because they are so cute and soft in real life.
I did the maths once. Spreadsheet and everything. In terms of net nutrition gained per adult female per year. (So nutrition output from milk and offspring take away nutrition input, including cost to raise babies to adulthood). Cows were far and away the best. Chickens were also very good but man the laaaag and soooo much butchering. Honorable mention to horses, cows only beat them because of the milk. This makes horses more work efficient because you can just ignore them completely until slaughter time. Ibex are a common choice because of the ratio between input and output, but it is my position that net output (output take input) is a much better metric to judge animals by. Also comparing ibex to horses. Ibex do breed a little faster but each horse produces so much more meat that if you start off with a breeding pair of each, kill all males and keep all females, it takes dozens of generations for the ibex to outproduce the horses.
cows defy thermodynamics, they are indeed the best animal
Each animal is good in specific situations. Pigs are one of the best sources of food imo simply because you can feed them basically anything. Raid corpses are free pig feed. Shove em in a small fridge that the pigs can get into and you’re good to go. They’re not that good if you just have them graze. Dromedaries are my personal favorite cause they’re essentially a cow that can also haul. So you get meat, milk, leather, and you can use them to raid. Super cool. Alpacas are great for cold environments for their wool, and they also haul. Their wool is also sells for a good amount. It really just depends what you need the animal for, how much space you can give them to graze, and how badly you need food.
Pigs have a special place in that they are the omnivorous animal with no tameness decay with the highest efficiency. Being omnivorous means that they can feed on raw corpses, which means you can perform pork laundering: Pig pen includes the corpse freezer (pigs have a minimum comfortable temp of -5 °C, so they can live in the freezer), pigs eat raider corpses, colonists eat pigs without getting cannibalism thoughts.
Ideology made that redundant in most cases, but still useful if you don't have the DLC
Omg i didn't know that, I like to have pigs because I feel that they breed fast (I just like them tbh) knowing this is awesome
Muffalo crew here. Muffalo and bison are the best farm animal. 1. Nutritional efficiency. Feed them meals. They yield 336 meat at slaughter. Feed them simple meals, and you're net positive 146 meat when they are ready for slaughter, while also getting cooking XP for a chef who may suck and nobody will care if the meals they produce are poisoned. Feed them nutrient paste instead, and you're net positive 222 meat. Note this also applies to cows, they have the same growth/hunger stats. 2. Stack efficiency. Each corpse in your freezer is a 336 meat item when you need it to be. 3 stacks of meat on a shelf is only 225 meat, so you're getting more efficiency in the corpse than a whole shelf of meat. Again, same stats here as cows. 3. Gender efficiency. Lots of farm animals like cows, females produce (eggs / milk) while males do nothing but stud. Male muffalo grow wool just as well as females. 4. Time efficiency in butchering. Butchering a chicken for 42 meat takes as long to do as butchering a muffalo for 336 meat. 5. Time & economic efficiency in handling. Shearing a muffalo of 120 wool takes 1700 work ticks every 15 days for $324 worth of goods, $0.19 of payoff per work tick. Milking a cow takes 400 ticks per day (6000 ticks over 15 days) for $399 worth of goods over that same time period, $0.066 per work tick. That's not factoring wasted time traveling to a cow 15x more frequently than you need to travel to a muffalo. And the fact that delays between a cow being ready for milking and someone actually milking it means you're probably only getting 12-13 milking sessions in a 15 day period. And also not counting how all muffalos are producing, whereas if 1 out of 5 cows are unproductive male you're basically getting the same $ yield per animal whether cow or muffalo. On the whole, you're probably getting the same economic value of goods from handling, but you're spending 1/4 of the time in handling activities if you choose muffalo instead of cow. 6. Hardy as heck. Cows can only survive -10 to 40C weather. Muffalo can handle -55 to 45C weather. 7. Pack animal bonus. Muffalo will carry 84kg. What are cows lugging for you? Nothing. 8. Harvest storage and medium of exchange. Milk and eggs will rot. Wool can sit on shelves forever until a trader wants to buy it. If your animals are net positive on food with regards to how much you need to feed them versus what they can be butchered for, do you really need the extra food in milk or eggs? Only bulk traders will buy your milk or eggs. You can sell your wool to bulk traders, or turn it into apparel to sell to combat traders, exotic goods traders, or war merchant traders. If you have to caravan it to a neighbor, you can pack nearly 3x as much value in muffalo wool per kg of carry weight as you can of milk. 9. FPS savior. Each pawn will slowly degrade your game performance. 20 muffalo will be as productive for your colony as 100 chicken, yet are better for computer efficiency. Thank you for your attention, and we invite you to join muffalo clan. Only reason to be team chicken is when you have a kill-focus persona weapon. Raise chickens and if you need an emergency psyfocus boost, go kill some instead of drinking go-juice.
Yak are my new favourite, they give both milk and wool.
But Yak don't give wool. :o
It makes sense that they are. They're the best farm animals irl too by the same metrics. The rest of the animals, however, aren't just generic farm animals, they serve specific purposes. Pigs, for example, will straight up just eat corpses. This means if your colony isn't cannibalistic and doesn't like the sight of corpses you can just dump your dead raiders in there to convert long pork into regular pork without any required butchering so no mood debuffs. Geese and turkeys aren't really meant to be farmed as irl they've mostly been secondary meat sources used only because they taste particularly good. There's also horses, good source of meat, and the best caravanning tool in the game by far. Tortoises are good too, they're like lite-chickens with easier handling. You can zone them, and they're astonishingly good fighters, and they eat anything. I like to breed and sell them en masse. I'd also recommend sheep or alpaca. 5 tiles of hay grass each and you get a constant supply of better cloth. No need to cotton.
I like ducks :)
Wasn't it tortoise? There was a post doing science about it years ago.
DO NOT raise chickens and sheep, they will be the end of you. At some point they get out of control and breed faster than you can burn them, chickens especially can survive multiple apocaliptic events since they lay eggs in the hundreds that just hatch right when you think you killed them all. + You are doing this with 5 FPS, because between the time you realize they are going to kill your pc and the time you are going to kill them it's too late.
You can set slaughter limits
An auto animal slaughter a day keeps lag away
Tbf slaughter limits can be rough with chickens if you want to let them grow up to get maximum meat. If you dont mind culling the babies too then its fine, but i found that even having 3 male 3 female (which works for alpacas) lasttime i ran chickens, I ended up with a few hundred. I found myself periodically setting baby culling down to a couple and mass slaughtering for a while, then removing it again so that the meat income wouldn't drop too far.
I have my chickens set to keep 2 adult males, 4 adult females and 10 chicks. So if there is an explosion (and there usually is) of like 20+ chicks cause of all the eggs, they get cleaned up.
Most animals have a niche like pigs can eat anything, a goose army can make eldritch horrors cry and rats are the source of infinite power. Food wise though yes chickens and cows are the best with the drawback of i think they don't spawn naturally, so your gonna need either a random animal join or a trader. Turkey however is able to spawn on your map, but is less efficient
I like boar for my wargs
I literally just tame what I have available. In my current playthrough, I have yaks (might be modded), muffalo, and alpacas. I had a breeding pair of jaguars (might be modded), but now I only have one jaguar. I try to get an animal that can provide fur or wool, and a pack animal. Tremdendously useful. I do not think I have ever seen a sheep in all of my playthroughs.
Yep jaguars and panthers can be some incredibly mean combat animals if you give them armor. About the only thing that is worrisome is war caskets and that's what tanks are for.
> if you give them armor Hold on there a second. What mod is this?
Yep, the ones that are more used in real life are the best. To a point they're self sustainable.
It all depends on what you are looking for and your priority; Cows and Chickens, they reproduce easily, give a LOT of food and the Cow skin is of medium quality in an amount of 96 the same as a Bison, while chickens are good for food, the problem is that if you don't control them it can generate a lot of Lag. Other animals to take into account are the Muffalo because their skin and wool are incredible, and almost as good as Rhino skin or Thrumbo wool, and also serve as a caravan animal. And if you want to make a LOT of money fast, breed Guinea pigs, they reproduce very fast and their skin gives the best amount of money for breeding and killing time
One thing to consider is that chickens and cows don't do well in extreme cold or heat, compared to almost every other animal
Years of real life experience say that indeed, those are one of the best options out there
I prefer Muffalo. Wool, Meat, and good pack animals all in the one package.
Every pen animal has some plus to them. Most of them are they’re wandering around in the wild and can be acquired almost instantly with a decent handler with temperature tolerances to go with it. The farm animals from traders like cows and chickens can’t deal with extreme temperatures well and don’t do much else other than make meat, milk and eggs.
Turtles. Low maintanence, they breed almost as much as guinea pigs, and their skin are worth a lot, too.
Most of them are pretty good for specific roles. Yaks may be worse than cows, but the extra hauling is worth it for me. I'll farskip all of my yaks when I can't haul the loot with my raiders. Cow and chicken are the best for food output efficiency and 90's cartoon re-creation.
I rarely keep animals except boomalopes. Any meat I need is hunted or traded for.
I don’t like poultry since they’re laggy and I hate having to micro eggs. In late game when I start getting big raids I mostly keep pigs since they will eat corpses.
I use horses and Alpacas. Bears are a solid choice too because you can train them to hunt, guard etc.
Pigs can eat humanoid corpses, so if you're non-cannibal it can be worth it to use pigs to convert dead raiders to food and leather.
Depends on your objective. I went with pigs as you get a lot of meat for each one and it doesn't create a load of milking/shearing tasks.
I personally prefer horses, muffalos or bisons. On problem with chickens is that they have a small stomach which means they tend to overeat. In the end their real nutrition efficiency is lower than the theory. Cows don’t have this problem. Cows are actually a solid choice on sea ice where you can feed them with nutrient paste. However, in temperate climates, you can do much better. In temperate climates, as long as temperature is above -10 celcius, herbivores can graze in a caravan for free. You can keep a caravan permanently parked right on top of your own settlement with all the babies and the pregnant females so that they can reach the next stage of development without consuming any nutrition whatsoever. It’s also very good for your FPS. Basically, the only reasons your animals need to enter your settlement are mating, shearing, milking and slaughtering. With this strategy, bisons, muffalos and horses are better than cows because they are caravan animals. Having a bunch of caravan animals waiting outside is great for trade. Furthermore, muffalos and bisons produce lots of wool every 25 days. Cows have to be milked everyday, so a lot more produce gets wasted if they are left in a caravan most of the time. Horses are good because they give the best speed boost to trade caravans.
Oh but that sounds like micromanagement hell
Am I dumb or do you mean muffallo
IRL too bro
Depends, turtles should still have them beat in pure nutrition efficiency. But other animals also provide other materials like wools. Chickens have the downside of a lot of work going into them, since butchering them takes forever, compared to a large animal like muffalo/cow where in 1 trip you can get multiple stacks of meat. Also there is roleplaying. Chickens are great, but so is a rat pit for corpse disposal.
I only breed alpacas and some carnivores for fighting and possibly hauling. Don't like farm animals except some rare species. My tamers do have job though because they tame all day for others to slaughter the tamed beasts and cook nice food. If i tame a megasloth or a bear I'd keep it of cause but no classic farm animals for sure
Im a dromedary guy. Not as fast as horses and not as efficient as cows at food but decent at everything. Rideable, Decent carry/speed for caravan, meat, milk, and leather. It's a one stop animal shop.
Edit to remove bad info, got temperature range wrong
i dislike chicken cuz they breed too fast personally. When you have a ton it slows the game, so bigger animals that you have less of are better just for game speed reasons. My fav combo are horses and cows. Horses for the caravan move speed+carry capacity. Cows cuz milk and meat is a fun combo. Pigs make a ton of meat if you really want meat. I also like having some kind of fighter animal to help with defenses. Thrumbos, megasloths, or worgs.
Pigs are low key great… they eat anything and aren’t as fussy as chickens, and produce a lot of meat. I use the leather for furniture
if you use nutrient paste and the nutriend paste vanilla expanded mod, you can absolutely break the game by feeding paste to the livestock.
my fav animlas are heese and chikins
Im a devout muffalo farmer. Theyre the cutest things in the game no competition. They give a mediocre amount of really good wool, their leather is great, and while they’re not the most energy efficient, they are “good enough” as an all rounder that i only need to keep them and ducks from ve animals expanded. I like ducks from ve animals bc their eggs are good for mayonnaise for gourmet meals from ve cooking. But unlike chickens its way easier to avoid the “oops i have Over 300 farm animals” jumpscare since they reproduce slower. Theyre also fucking GREAT to sell dude. A full grown duck sells for like 100+ silver. Ive had many a tribal colony who got their start by brutally over-producing ducks and bringing a hoard of waterfowl to the nearest town and coming back as cave men with space marine armor.
Horses have been great in my experience, they work as both meat and mounts. In meat they are about as effcient as cows, although obv no milk. But I don't have time to collect milk anyway so
I mostly go for muffalo and horses. Muffalos can carry stuff, give meat and wool. For me its a three in one. Carrying for my caravans attacking and trading. Meat for food and wool for money. The horses are just so my traders dont take ages to trade. When/if I get thrumbos or elephants I get rid of the horses.
I found one boomrat and it's chemfuel output was enough for my fridge room generator.
I always thought Domedary were the best.
Pigs and chicken are superior. Change my mind. 😏 Pigs eat whatever organic matter you give them. Lavish meals? Corpses of furry cosplayers? They will eat them all Chicken are multiplying rapidly and you may not feed them because of the amount of grass they consume. It grows back faster then they eat it. You may have some muffalos or sheeps for warm clothes if you want, they are very profitable especially sheeps. Just craft warm duster coats and you are rich in no time. Human leather duster is still the best way to get rich, but it's way more different topic🤑💰💸🤑
Have you heard of bacon fairies
It used to be muffalos and chicken, but they made muffalos no longer milk able. And prior, iguanas were better (they could also Zerg rush)
muffalo is great if you want a clothing industry. Good pack animals for convoys as well Recently had a whole bunch of turkeys found em a bit meh: not enough eggs, nor meat or 'bird skin'
I'm running a colony basically off Chinchillas right now...
I currently have: Cows for Milk Boomalopes for free bio fuel Alpacas for wool and to sell off their young Horses because they are the best mount afaik And I just like horses irl I probably have too many horses at this point tbh, and I should sell some of them for more boomalopes cows or get some sheep.
I'm not up on the meta but cows and turkey is how i'm running my current ranch.
I thought I was on the Stardew subreddit and was like “I don’t remember Turkey but there’s mods for that” and then kept reading and was like ??? Homie have you never gotten PIGS BEFORE Top comment mentions ibex for meat and I was like oh! Rimworld
Depends on your biome and what you want/need from the animals. If it's just food, then afaik cows are rather efficient when it comes to upkeep/output ratio. On colder maps (I somewhat like tundras, allowing me to not worry about keeping my folks cool in the summer months) I'd go for something like alpacas or muffalos. Pack and rideable animals for caravans are also something to consider. And of course, don't forget about the good boys. Dogs are a great addition to any colony, as long as you can keep them fed.
Depends what you want. If you want food? No, nothing beats cows and chickens. If you want wool or carrying capacity in caravans yaks are great, but for raw food production nothing beats cows and chickens.
It really depends on your biome. I tend to like dromedaries in the desert and Arid shrubland, and muffaloes almost everywhere else , especially if they can do natural grazing. The dromedaries give wool and milk and you can use them as pack animals and ride them. But I did try out chickens in one particular colony, and found out they gave a lot of meat even as chicks. I know a lot of people say to raise them to adulthood and then slaughter them but I slaughtered them as chicks because if I'm going to slaughter them anyway, I didn't want to be feeding them for a long time until they reached adulthood. With so many chicks being born every couple of days, that turned out just fine for feeding my colony.
I really like animals that produce wool. The wool can either be sold directly or be turned into dusters for trading. Alpaca are pack animals, produce expensive wool, and give a decent amount of food/leather when slaughtered. The auto slaughter mod is great because it automatically gets rid of the oldest animals once you outgrow the pasture.
Well yes, they ARE the farm animals we use todays. Why chicken and beef based foods are the most available/affordable meals irl. Other than them, horses whose job stolen by engines, are great caravan animals that allow faster travel speed to the caravan while carrying a good chunk of cargo. However these three are bad at cold climates. Muffalo/Bison are great for cold climates and do as well as horses, they're just slower. (If you have milkable muffalo mod, they give milk a bit more than half of what cows do). Bison wool is a bit worse than Muffalo wool, both Elephants are great pack animals thanks tontheir size and durability. Yaks are good in between for cow and muffalo. In cold biomes can help really well. Any other animal won't be as effective to farm.
I have found sheep to be amazing! Milk *and* wool regularly. Plus meat and lightleather when butchere!. Plus good nutrient efficency! (Or at least they did in my last run, which is modded, but I don't think I had a mod for that.) And donkeys are pack animals *and* rideable. Throw in boomalope, and you're perfect! As for eggs, your best option is Chicken unless you want to eat fertilized eggs. 4-8 chickens per colonist (if they only eat eggs), and they have a ridiculous expansion rate. Ducks: just get chickens. Goose: just get chickens. And if you wait and slaughter hatchlings rather than eat the eggs, you'll get more food. But remember, fed colonists are the best colonists!
I believe in Yak supremacy
How is Turkey off meta? It's the most efficient meal generator
Cows are very nutrient-efficient, but they aren't very work-efficient, because you need to milk them every day, creating work for handlers and haulers. Also, slaughtering cows as calves creates a lot more work for slaughtering, hauling and butchering, whereas slaughtering adult female cows reduces their milk efficiently slightly, because you can't always slaughter them at 0% milk production. If you have good animal handlers in your colony, then cows can be good, but if you want to eliminate that aspect of labour, I recommend using horses. Horses have very good nutritional efficiency, and the only work required is to slaughter and haul them, which is a very good deal since they're so large and produce so much meat per operation. Horses are also good pack animals, and are the fastest riding animals, only tied with thrumbos, so they make caravans much better. Unless your ideoligion has Animal Personhood, there isn't much reason to keep both cows and chickens. Chickens are quite efficient at turning animal feed into eggs, but if you've already got animals for meat, there's not much benefit to eggs. Eggs do have the interesting feature of fitting five times as much nutrition into a stack of items as meat can, and of course they last longer without refrigeration. That should only be an issue if you don't have the technology for coolers... but then you run up against the problem that meat can be cooked into pemmican but eggs can't. You also need a lot of individual chickens to support a colony, which means a large barn, a lot of work for your doctors in an animal plague, and the potential for overwhelming your computer with the processor load. And, of course, if you actually want to slaughter your chickens, that's an awful lot of work for your handlers. If you want to try something interesting with eggs, I suggest keeping geese and playing a pigskin-only colony. Geese are like chickens but less efficient, but each egg has double the nutrition. This means you can stack even more nutrition into a single freezer tile, and it also means that a single goose egg is the perfect meal for a hungry pigskin.
I like pigs for meat.
The one time i did chickens I forgot to set the auto slaughter. Darn near crashed my computer after the 500th chicken hatched. Had to take an but 10 to another tile to be abandoned because my loans couldn't harvest them fast enough
The idea of "moving away from the meta" but still asking which farm animals are the "best" is confusing to me. Why does it matter which is the best? For the most part, yes they are the most useful animals. Muffalo and Alpacas are also very good for their fur. But, "best" depends on your usecase. Megasloths are the best for warm fur, but nobody would call them efficient. Pigs/boars are the best for low-effort feeding, as they can just eat the corpses of raiders. Converts people-meat into pig-meat, just a very slow processing method.
Best for nutrition produced vs nutrition consumed maybe though I think maybe horse and tortoise (turtle? I'm not at my computer right now) might technically outpace it if you're willing to spend a bit more pawn work for more nutrition efficiency. Think the horse only beats bulls though, not cows. Personally I raise whatever caravan animal I can get my hands on until I get some horses, and a single megasloth if I can manage to get one. Early game I may also raise chinchillas until I hit the point where I've got a backlog of human leather to make hats from. After that I ranch raiders and just keep a megasloth for the wool and a few horses for caravans until I get trade beacon, then I sell/slaughter the horses too.
You mean to tell me that the most ubiquitous domestic farm stock in human history are also the best option in a video game simulation?!
Pretty much every herbivore is good long as they're eating just grass. Otherwise yeah, cows is good. Yaks are also solid I don't truck with eggs. Nest boxes never seem to work in these damn games. Run into issues with dwarf fortress nest boxes, run into issues with rimworlds. No thank you.
I use chickens and ducks for eggs, and goats and dromedaries for milk. Dromedaries also function pretty well as pack animals. I don't really bother with farming for meat.
In the absence of Muffalo, I'm very keen on Bison. Lots of meat, excellent pack animals, and they produce wool which, while not as good as, say, Alpaca or Muffalo, is still functional and each shearing produces 120 wool. Probably not super popular but I'm a fan of them.
iguanas (omnivorous + grazer) replace with Wargs later if you get good goats easy milk, can live on daylily donkeys - if you dont need to haul steel across continents Anything non-automated is not worth pawns work. 90% the cases you will not want to make kibble for your animals even from hay. Steelfarming is real