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[LordMogra]

I had an issue earlier in this particular game where my Water Buffalos seemed to be slowly starving while eating, so I slaughtered them all out of frustration. Now the same is happening to my Yak and Bovine cattle. Each set of animals is in their own large pasture with plenty of grass. They seem to slowly get hungry and then slowly starve, as if they aren't eating enough or if what they eat isn't satisfying them. Ideas?

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[Sphalerite]

Water Buffalo and Yaks are just barely able to keep themselves fed.  You might just not have enough grass in that patch.  Try making a new pasture somewhere else and moving them periodically, to let the grass regrow.  Or, butcher them all and raise sheep instead.

[wuphonsreach]

Stick with sheep, goats, alpacas, and maybe reindeer.

Yaks, Water Buffalo, Cows, Horses are all in the category of "probably can't survive long term" unless you move them do different pastures every year (or possibly every season).  I only keep them around long enough to be butchered.

[o_O[WTFace]]

Yaks are about the largest thing I have kept alive for any length of time, and even they seemed to spend their lives creeping toward starvation.  Try to keep them in medium sized individual pastures and rotate them periodically.  I think their problem is large creatures have to spend almost all of their moves eating, if they spend moves bumping into each other or walking on cleared tiles they will have an extremely hard time making up that lost food. 

[Dr. Melon]

I only ever managed to keep Yaks entirely happy when I had them on a pasture which was just about the lushest grass in the game.

Which is odd, because Yaks are used as mountain-travelling beasts of burden, so you'd think that they wouldn't need as much food as say, a cow.

[Saiko Kila]

I only ever managed to keep Yaks entirely happy when I had them on a pasture which was just about the lushest grass in the game.

Which is odd, because Yaks are used as mountain-travelling beasts of burden, so you'd think that they wouldn't need as much food as say, a cow.

In real life yaks eat much less than cows. 3-4 times less. In DF they are mutant lawn mowers.

[CapnUrist]

In your screenshot, you'll notice that your livestock have eaten most of the grass that are there. Move the pasture to a greener area and they'll start eating it up again.

That said, yaks aren't the most economic animals for a meat industry. Hell, ever since the [GRAZER] tag was introduced I've been using primarily birds for food production.

[Triaxx2]

I only need them to survive long enough to make little Yaks. Best way really.

[Nidokoenig]

One grazing animal per pasture so they don't waste time with pathing conflicts, and for things like yaks and water buffalo, you'll need 225 and 320 squares per animal respectively, and you might want to poke out small holes as grass seeders. If you're intent on using large beasts for food, make sure you embark in a really lush area.

You don't really need yaks or water buffalo, anyway. Water buffalo are the most efficient source of meat per animal, taking two years to mature to a ton, but if you need lots of meat, you're better off taking dogs so you get large litters. If you want milk and thus cheese, take llamas and alpacas. If you want a source of tallow for soap or cook training, camels are are better, they produce a lot more than their body weight would indicate. The only real benefit of water buffalo that can't be replaced is the fact that you don't usually need to protect them against local wildlife.

[wuphonsreach]

One grazing animal per pasture so they don't waste time with pathing conflicts, and for things like yaks and water buffalo, you'll need 225 and 320 squares per animal respectively, and you might want to poke out small holes as grass seeders. If you're intent on using large beasts for food, make sure you embark in a really lush area.
dlife.

Myth about the grass seeding tiles.

In one of the DF talks, Toady explains that re-seeding / growth of grass works just like rainfall.  Little packets of plant matter fall in a random pattern across the entire zone, and they restock the plant growth in tile that they land on.

[Dynastia]

Water buffalo are just ridiculous big. Shouldn't they be the same size as cows?

[Kaos]

check this thread


There we calculated how much grass tiles each grazer needs, water buffaloes need 320 if I recall correctly, your pasture zone was probably too small...

[Nidokoenig]

Myth about the grass seeding tiles.

In one of the DF talks, Toady explains that re-seeding / growth of grass works just like rainfall.  Little packets of plant matter fall in a random pattern across the entire zone, and they restock the plant growth in tile that they land on.

Ah, yes, I remember that. Good catch. I did notice with checkerboard pastures that squares didn't get stripped. Maybe the odd pathing environment and getting repastured from wandering outside the lines spread out wear more.

check this thread
There we calculated how much grass tiles each grazer needs, water buffaloes need 320 if I recall correctly, your pasture zone was probably too small...

Love that table. If anyone needs to get data for modded creatures, just divide 19200 by the grazer number. For example, the tanks in the MLP mod have a grazer value of 80, a little less than a yak, and dividing 19200 by 80 gets 240, 15 tiles more than a yak needs.

Just a thought, if grass replenishment is random, per tile, presumably larger animals are going to need slightly fewer tiles, just because a larger sample size of grass is going to lead to less variation in regrowth. Probably not significant, though.

[Nidokoenig]

Only rhinoceroses, elephants and dralthas are incapable of feeding themselves, water buffalo and yaks are perfectly capable of surviving for years. The issue is that at a grazer value of, IIRC, 20, an animal has to eat, move, eat, and do nothing else. This gives elephants and rhinoceroses a death sentence and dralthas have almost no wiggle room. Water buffalo and giraffes, on the other hand, have a grazer value of sixty, so they only need to spend a third of their time eating or moving to food.

As for eating snow, is the snow being depleted? I'd assume it was because grass falls from the sky like rain or snow and the game doesn't know they're different things.

[wuphonsreach]

The problem with GRAZER:60 animals is that if a large section of the pasture gets depleted, they have to spend a lot more then 2/3 of their time doing a random walk to find a new tile to eat.  Those random walks are "blind", they don't look at the map to figure out that the other end of the pasture is full of lush grass/moss, they just move 1 square in a random direction and hope for the best.

So in theory, GRAZER:60 should be fine, in reality, they can get unlucky with their random walk and end up starving.