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One of the subtle joys of living out on the rim is getting a chance to raise your own livestock. RimWorld gives you plenty of opportunities to tame, raise, and slaughter animals, but before you do any of that, you’ll have to think about how you’re going to feed them.
Once you convince an animal to join your colony, it’ll be relying on you for food, and if you don’t deliver, it could easily starve in its pen. So how do you feed your furry friends, and what’s the best strategy to make sure they get the nutrition they need? Here’s everything you need to know about feeding your animals in RimWorld.
How To Feed Tamed Animals
Animals are an essential part of any thriving RimWorld colony, and Usually, you don’t have to worry too much about feeding your animals because tamed animals will try their best to get food on their own. This means if they see a spare meal lying on the table, they won’t hesitate to eat it. They might even eat the food right out of the freezer, but there are a few things that can get in the way of this.
Animals can be assigned to specific zones (which you can find under the Architect menu and the Zone tab), and if assigned they will never leave these zones on their own, even to get food. That means if there’s no food to be had in their assigned zone, your pet will slowly starve to death.
Double-check that your animals are either left unassigned or have food within their assigned zone, but remember that there are good reasons to assign animals to zones. Small creatures, like Cats, can be killed by predators if they stray too far from the base, and you don’t always want your Labrador Retriever stealing meat out of your fridge.
Feeding Carnivores
On top of this, make sure your tamed animals can actually eat the food available. Some creatures simply can’t eat raw vegetables, like the timber wolf. You’ll have to keep a ready stock of meat available for these animals, or you could opt to feed them Kibble.
Kibble can be created at a Butcher Table or Spot and calls for equal parts meat and vegetable. Once combined, it creates a hefty stack of Kibble that any carnivorous animal can eat. If you’re low on meat or simply want to be more efficient, Kibble is a great way to stretch out your existing meat supply.
If you can’t be bothered with any of this, you can also simply let your carnivorous animals hunt. Predators, even tamed ones, will kill random wandering animals in their zone if they’re hungry enough. As long as there’s nothing that might try to hunt your tamed animal, you can always simply let them loose and have them find their own food.
Feeding Grazing Animals
Grazing animals are a bit different from most in that they have the ability to eat growing plants instead of fully harvested food. This can mean they take drastically less upkeep and actually produce more food than they eat if handled correctly, but it’s easy to go wrong with these animals.
Instead of being assigned to zones, most grazing animals will be led to a pen (which you can create by placing a Pen Marker in an enclosed space) instead. Inside this pen, they will roam around and look for any sort of plant they can eat, which usually means grass, bushes, or crops.
If the pen is large enough and on the ground where grass can grow, the natural growth rate of fauna on your map will be enough to sustain your animals. The Pen Marker even has helpful nutrition growth and consumption stats to help you gauge these numbers and ensure your pen is in perfect sync. However, this method is not perfect.
Different Strategies To Feed Grazing Animals
The normal grazing method may not work as well in the Winter when the small grasses your animals depend on die and stop growing, so, depending on your map, you may need to store food for these animals to eat. Haygrass is the perfect candidate since it is easy to grow and produces a bunch of nutrition from a single crop. On top of that, it can stack up to 200, so you can store a lot in a tiny space.
To store this Haygrass effectively, keep your grazing animals away from the Haygrass growing field and store the harvest out of their reach. Your grazing animals can eat the still-young Haygrass plants and will almost always prioritize eating harvested Haygrass overgrazing on grass. When Winter comes, you’ll want to manually move it back to a place the animals can access.
Letting your animals graze normally isn’t always the best use of your space. They don’t get as many nutrients out of the ground as they could since the grass grows back sporadically. If you find yourself wanting to stuff more grazing animals into a smaller space, try creating a growing zone inside their pen.
You can set this growing zone to all sorts of different crops, and your grazing animals will eat them as they grow. Dandelions are best for this type of field; they grow quickly, are easy to plant, and even make the area more beautiful. However, keep in mind that your Pen Marker won’t take into account a field of your own creation like this, and you’ll likely end up preventing natural grasses and bushes from growing as well.
In the end, it’s still best to simply let your grazing animals roam a wide enough area that you don’t have to worry about food. This method doesn’t take any extra effort from your Pawns, and you don’t have to micromanage it to ensure it’s working properly.
