How to feed your animals
Since the 31.19 update, a lot of new stuff was added. Including clay, beekeeping, wool, more animals... Etc. But another feature/tweak was added too. Animals now need to eat since this version.
After seeing that too many people are creating unecessary topics about "my animals are starving, help", I decided to make a topic, trying to help these people.
If you are not really new, you probably played before the 31.19, so that is new for you.
OK, but how do I keep my animals well feed?Some animals need to eat
grass. But they seen to not like destroying your precious grass, unless you have told them to do it.
They will need a
pasture zone/pen. And the pasture zones/pens themselves will need grass.
Setting up a pasture zone/penPasture zones are an type of
activity zone. Activity zones are place where your dwarves do something, like idle, collect clay, collect water, etc. Should
not be confunded with
Designations. Please note that the keys
are case sensitive.
To set up an activity zone, you need to press the '
i' key. After pressing that, you will see a bunch of activity zones. Select the Pasture zone/pen zone with the '
n', after you have selected an rectangle.
The animals will graze in that 'rectangle'. Sometimes they will go off it(if that's possible), and your dwarves will haul them back.
After this, assign your animals to it. To do this, press the '
N[/b]' key. Again, note that the keys are case senstive. Select the animals you want to graze there.
Try to select an large area.
What?! My animals are fighting with themselves!Animals need a LOT of space. Yes, you can stack mil colossi in a single tile, and that applies for any creature in DF2010(aka 31.x)
You
can stack your cows in a single tile, but that would result in them fighting with themselves(don't ask, thats Dwarf Fortress).To prevent this, they will need a LOT of space. Yes, space thats larger than 15x15 tiles. The same rule don't apply to dwarves and other intelligent sentient creatures(currently dwarves,humans,goblins,kobolds,etc). Please remember that if you dwarves get low happiness they may tantrum.
I lost my elephant,my tigerman,and my giant panda. He/they didn't graze?Elephants and other large creatures(such as rhinos) are currently bugged. We hope Toady One fixes this. The problem is, elephants need to eat so much grass that they can't eat enough in time to save themselves.
There could maybe exist an workaround with modding, but I don't know Here's a workaround with modding, thanks to Lav for it:
There is a workaround with modding - you just have to change the numeric value of the [GRAZER:X] tag in the raws for that creature.
However doing this only for two or three animals feels a bit unbalanced, so I designed a rebalancing formula and changed all grazers in the game raws, using goats and sheep as the base point. So all creatures larger than goat and sheep started grazing less (elephants in particular became [GRAZER:26] which is still an extremely low value but at least they will not surely die out in a single season) while smaller animals started grazing more.
Your Tigerman though, has a reason to not eat grass. Tigermans are
carnivore setient creatures. That means they need to eat meat. Just keep the stockpiles acessible to him(and your dwarves?) and him will be fine. Remember to not leave him jailed too much in a cave, or him will starve to death, since dwarves won't feed him.
Giant pandas(and some other animals) need special types of grass. Panda(either giant or not) won't eat your common grass, him needs bamboo.
That's it. I hope this topic has been helpful to you and/or other people. Please consider bumping it sometimes so other people can see.
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Topic: How to feed your animals. (Read 3219 times)