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[Pinstar]

A constructed furniture item that could be made from just about any material.

It would act like a one tile food storage container set to only accept raw eatable plants.

Dwarves with the food hauling labor would fill the bin with raw plants if there are any available.

If an animal with the grazer tag becomes hungry and they are near a food bin, they will walk over to it and eat one unit of food on their own, refilling their hunger to max. Unlike dwarves eating food raw, this would not produce seeds when an animal eats the food. If an animal has access to grazing tiles, they will prefer to graze rather than seek out a food bin.

The idea is that if you can't/don't want to provide grazing areas for your livestock, you can keep them alive with a feed bin. It would also allow you to keep animals like elephants alive who normally can't graze fast enough to survive at the moment.

A food bin will be refilled as it is emptied. It can also be forbidden which will not stop animals eating from it, but will stop the haulers from refilling it with more food.

Non-grazers will not consume food from feed bins.

Food inside feed bins will not be visible to dwarves who are seeking either food or plants for brewing/cooking. Deconstructing the feed bin will deposit any contained food onto the floor, making it usable again for dwarves.

Animals will NOT eat food stored in normal dwarven food stockpiles or mature crops sitting on fields.

[Maklak]

Interesting idea, just put a few feed bins inside a pasture. A couple more things:

Feed bins should be able to take from stockpiles.

Feed bins should have settings to only accept certain types of plants.

[Waparius]

This is a good idea.

I'm not sure how realistic it is compared to proper haymaking, but maybe having some kind of designation to mow pasture and place it in feed bins would also be useful. Add "Use farm crops in feed bins" to the general orders section to make it easier to manage.

This would open up the ability to drastically reduce pasture availability in winter for temperate and cold regions, meaning you have to either slaughter most of your herd, breach the caverns or remember to make hay every autumn. (Perhaps allow a Haymaking Zone to make it a bit easier).

Certain grazers - yaks or whatever - would do better in the cold. Some animals may prefer (Grow and perhaps breed faster) or even require farm crops rather than hay/pasture.

Depending on how cooking and eating eventually evolve, food-scraps may become a thing, and feed-bins could be used to get rid of some of your refuse as well. Goats and pigs suddenly become extremely useful.

[Deimos56]

Maybe have an additional bit in the Kitchens tab for whether or not an item is acceptable to be added to the feed bins instead of setting up the bins for what they can and cannot use. That said, I like it.

[Manveru Taurënér]

I think I recall some mention from Toady in either FotF or DFtalk before the last release on the subject, and he was most certainly planning to add both haymaking and feeding of plant material to grazers. (I believe it was on the topic of adding functionality to use animals to pull minecarts etc, and thus needing feeding stations of some sort by the rail) Back then though (iirc) the main stopper to implementing this at the time was how he wanted to wait until he was more done with tree coding and subsequently tree grazing, so we might very well be drawing closer to this going in hopefully.

All this is pretty much required for elephants and some other large grazers to survive, and as this is borderline bug material, maybe we'll see something being done in the post-release fix period *crosses fingers*

[Dovale]

Depending on how cooking and eating eventually evolve, food-scraps may become a thing, and feed-bins could be used to get rid of some of your refuse as well. Goats and pigs suddenly become extremely useful.

Cold blooded killers could dispose of corpses by feeding them to pigs or other such critters (presuming there are no witnesses or that these witnesses are being munched on right now). Some critters could develop a taste for dwarven flesh; man-eater could be a form of insanity in animals.

Sorry for changing the subject.

[Boea]

Depending on how cooking and eating eventually evolve, food-scraps may become a thing, and feed-bins could be used to get rid of some of your refuse as well. Goats and pigs suddenly become extremely useful.

Cold blooded killers could dispose of corpses by feeding them to pigs or other such critters (presuming there are no witnesses or that these witnesses are being munched on right now). Some critters could develop a taste for dwarven flesh; man-eater could be a form of insanity in animals.

Sorry for changing the subject.

That would be a very interesting take on how we train animals into war animals... or add a new use for animals, anti-species berserkery units.

[squishynoob]

...
Animals will NOT eat food stored in normal dwarven food stockpiles or mature crops sitting on fields.

Heh, I don't see why they shouldn't, if nothing stops them from doing it. Of course it would be very inconvenient to a player, but eventually...

[Dovale]

Depending on how cooking and eating eventually evolve, food-scraps may become a thing, and feed-bins could be used to get rid of some of your refuse as well. Goats and pigs suddenly become extremely useful.

Cold blooded killers could dispose of corpses by feeding them to pigs or other such critters (presuming there are no witnesses or that these witnesses are being munched on right now). Some critters could develop a taste for dwarven flesh; man-eater could be a form of insanity in animals.

Sorry for changing the subject.

That would be a very interesting take on how we train animals into war animals... or add a new use for animals, anti-species berserkery units.

I was actually thinking of a way for criminals to evade  justice; right now they don't take much safety measures other than pinning blame on someone else.

But training animals to hunt some kind of unit by feeding it that kind of unit sounds right. You could have a pit of wolves starving for invading goblins.

[Manveru Taurënér]

...
Animals will NOT eat food stored in normal dwarven food stockpiles or mature crops sitting on fields.

Heh, I don't see why they shouldn't, if nothing stops them from doing it. Of course it would be very inconvenient to a player, but eventually...

It would open for a lot of new interesting mechanics to animal handling if they did, as long as we get the option to build fences around our pastures as well. We could then have certain animals try to escape every now and then, and if successful possibly ruin your crops or stores, thus adding more FUN to the game. It's a bit boring currently how tamed animals just stay put wherever you pasture them. Anyone who's had livestock knows quite well how much mischief the little buggers usually are up to ^^

[King Mir]

...
Animals will NOT eat food stored in normal dwarven food stockpiles or mature crops sitting on fields.

Heh, I don't see why they shouldn't, if nothing stops them from doing it. Of course it would be very inconvenient to a player, but eventually...

On the contrary, it would be more convenient, because it's easy to keep grazers away from your crops. If you actually let them graze on your crops then presumably you want them to eat your crops to save you the trouble of harvesting them.

[iridian]

Necro-thread:

I was thinking of making a new thread for supplementing/replacing a pasture, but I remembered to search the forum first.

Except for what was already suggested (a constructed item to providing food for grazers/... ) I would like to also suggest the following:


- Dwarves with "animal care" should be the ones who do the filling of the bins. Think of them as caretakers in a zoo
- The item (trough/feedingbin) should be similar to an animal trap (you should be able to choose what you feed them - gem/fish/meat -> seeds/meat/fish/...)

eg. chickens should be fed seeds, giant tigers could eat meat, panda's eat bushes of whatever they eat.. etc etc