In The DF2010 Little Questions Thread there was a brief discussion on the new grass requirements of domestic animals:
Apparently cows go through a lot [of grass]. Currently I have 4 goats and a few truckloads of rabbits buzzing around a roughly 20x20 pasture and they are ok, but I don't know how that translates to cows.
Question: Has genetics in 0.31.19 been coded so that an usually small animal breed requires less grass than an usually large animal breed? The BODY_APPEARANCE_MODIFIER seems to affect the quantity of products from butchering, so I wondered if it affects grazing, too.
For that matter, does genetics have any measurable influence on the rate of food consumption for civilizations?
I'm really curious to find out. And I propose that this could make the basis for an excellent !!!science!!! experiment. However, I'm too off-put by .19 to try this out myself at the moment. Maybe in .20 or later...
If it turns out that this aspect of genetics has not been implemented, I think it deserves being brought up in a .19 feedback thread (considering it might affect grazing).
31.19 does not have animal mass play any factor in how much they eat. How much they need to eat is derived from an absolute value in the [GRAZER:<integer>] tag. The integer determines how much of the hunger variable is removed per unit of grass eaten.
I think I recall the hunger variable going from 0 to 65535, with dwarves typically eating at around 45,000 or so, and eating around 10 times a year in a year with 403,200 time units. I'm guessing this means hunger iterates 1 for every time unit. Eating a unit of food instantly drops the dwarf to 0 hunger.
Now then, consider that rabbits have 120,000 as their grazer integer. This means they eat about as rarely as dwarves do, since their hunger shouldn't even be able to go as high as 120,000 in the first place, unless Toady modified something for introducing grazers.
Now consider draltha, a creature with 24 as their grazer integer. It takes an average of 10 time units just to move from one space to another, and then 10 time units to eat the grass. They must be in absolutely constant motion, vacuuming up every grass they find, and basically cannot ever stop to skip over a tile that doesn't have grass on it. Any turn they aren't either eating or moving over another grass tile to eat next turn is a turn they move closer to starvation.
In other words, kill draltha on sight, those things have so much food requirements you can functionally consider them bugged, and will destroy your ability to graze animals.
Plus keep in mind that milk production is also independent of creature size - goats produce just as much milk as cows, in spite of eating less than a tenth as much grass.
I hope that Toady will correct this, and I've already put it in a section of the Improved Farming thread how these things can be fixed.
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Topic: Making more diverse genetics (Read 12420 times)