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[Valdrax]

I'm currently digging through the raws with plans to update the Wiki page for grazers, and I've noticed that the GIANT template doesn't seem to do anything to grazer tags.  Does this mean that, for example, a giant hare (just under the size of a muskox) grazes as much as a hare (just over the size of a groundhog)?

[Yaotzin]

AFAIK the giant versions copy the RAWs of their base, then alter a few things. If GRAZER isn't being altered, then it's the same as the original.

[Valdrax]

Oh sweet.  So until that gets fixed, giant hares are awesome.
Well, if you can find some way to tame them...

[miauw62]

Oh sweet.  So until that gets fixed, giant hares are awesome.
Well, if you can find some way to tame them...

Add this somewhere under them.
[PET]

done!
(btw, grazing is kinda buggy, you might want to remove the [GRAZER:] tag altogheter)

[Sutremaine]

Hares have a grazer value of 17143, and therefore need maybe a 1x2 pasture for their whole lifetime. Grazing in smaller pastures works okay because the top-left-preferring movement of the animal still lets it roam over the whole pasture.

[Valdrax]

I meant without modding the raws.  I mean, if I was doing that, I could just mod elephants to no longer be impossible and to lay dozens of elephant eggs.  :-)

[Valdrax]

Hares have a grazer value of 17143, and therefore need maybe a 1x2 pasture for their whole lifetime. Grazing in smaller pastures works okay because the top-left-preferring movement of the animal still lets it roam over the whole pasture.

What's the exact math on that?  I'd like to update the Wiki with more exact values rather than the guesswork I put up for now based on eyeballing nearby creatures.

[Sutremaine]

The original tests were done by observing goats or sheep in enclosures of varying sizes, and the plot sizes for various grazer values were worked out from that. Without doing the same for hares, you won't be able to get an exact value.

[miauw62]

I meant without modding the raws.  I mean, if I was doing that, I could just mod elephants to no longer be impossible and to lay dozens of elephant eggs.  :-)

Thats also true

[khearn]

Hares have a grazer value of 17143, and therefore need maybe a 1x2 pasture for their whole lifetime. Grazing in smaller pastures works okay because the top-left-preferring movement of the animal still lets it roam over the whole pasture.

What's the exact math on that?  I'd like to update the Wiki with more exact values rather than the guesswork I put up for now based on eyeballing nearby creatures.

There is no exact math. Even if we had access to the code, it would still be a matter of probabilities. I think the grazer number indicates how many ticks until it uses up some (unknown) amount of food that it has eaten. If an animal is on a tile with grass (or the equivalent), it eats the grass and adds some amount (also unknown) to its stored food counter and the grass goes away. Grass regrows at a random rate, apparently similar to rain falling from what I've seen in a comment from Toady. Spots just appear here and there as if they fell from the sky. Animals move semi-randomly.  The exact movement algorithm is unknown, but they tend to end up in the top left area of a pasture more often, which complicates things. An area might produce enough feed, but if the animal doesn't move to all the tiles, it won't get all the food. So if an animal happens to move over grass tiles often enough to keep its food stores up, and those tiles replenish often enough, then the animal survives.

A sheep in an 8x2 area (the same number of tiles as a 4x4) would probably not do as well as a 4x4, since its movement would be more constrained and it probably wouldn't cover all the tiles as often. So geometry matters as well as size.

Empirically, people have observed that a sheep does just fine in a 4x4 area, a llama in a 5x5, and so on. A sheep in a 4x3 might be ok, or it might get hungry at times and eat enough at times. Or it might starve. The only way to know is to try it. Or find someone else who has tried it.

[Kaos]

As for giant versions, eyeing the raws I remember seeing that some giant animals usually remove and add a few tags to the regular version, and modify the grazer to a smaller number...

for the hare, giant hare and hare man, seem to be [GRAZER:17143], since they don't get changed for some reason... check the panda and capybara they do get changed in their giant versions...

As for the pasture size, read this thread
That's the grazing self-sufficiency thread people are talking about here, the SCIENCE!! was made there, I even came up with a table for the recommended pasture sizes that so far has worked pretty well.
I did notice that in DF2012 the grazer numbers were increased, so we can get away with smaller pastures now...


The math is quite clear now, but based on empirical data, basically a forum member, Jurph, started experimenting with a small grazer, goats to be exact, and made several pastures of different sizes, starting from 1x1 and going up, 1x2, 1x3, 2x2, 1x5, 3x2...


Placed the goats there and waited to see if they would deplete the pasture and go hungry, if they did the size was too small, and keep experimenting with bigger pastures until finding the sweet spot.


I reproduced the experiment and arrived at the same conclusion, that a goat (grazer:1200) needs 16 tiles of grass to survive.


From that number I then extrapolated the data for the other grazers. It seems to pay of to keep the pastures as close to a square as possible, to avoid weird pathing behaviour.


I also came up with another math, based on steps, time units, pathing behaviour but didn't get very far since the grass growth was a needed but unknown variable... I still have the spreadsheet with the table and calculations if you're interested.