Feeding animals in RimWorld is key. Not just for your survival, but also because there’s nothing worse than watching a hungry yak or cat slowly starve to death while you watch helplessly. Well, maybe not nothing worse. This is RimWorld, after all. But feeding animals is still important. Though the game doesn’t really go out of its way to explain how. Not with livestock or pets. What do you do when you finally tame some cattle? What about that poor cat at the start of your latest save? Let’s take a look at how to handle both ways of feeding animals in RimWorld.

Feeding Pets in RimWorld

Let’s start with pets, since you can quite easily find yourself starting a campaign with one in your group of survivors. The answer is actually quite simple. Though it imposes some unexpected penalties early on that you might not even notice. By default, animals will eat any applicable food within their allowed zone of movement. This is a problem for two reasons. One, it’s dangerous to let small animals wander too far. Predators can kill them, which induces a negative reaction from your colonists. Two, your pet will eat valuable meals needed for those same colonists.

The solution is, likewise, twofold. You need to set a small “allowed” area for your pet and provide it with proper food.

The former should be an indoor area with an assigned spot or bed for the pet to sleep. The latter should be kibble: a special type of food made at butcher tables and butcher spots. Kibble is great because it never spoils. You can produce it, place it next to your pet’s bed, and let them fend for themself. You can also make kibble from ingredients that humans won’t (or prefer not to) eat. Like human corpses, insect meal, and hay. You also need only one unit of vegetable matter and one unit of meat to create kibble. This means you can create the immortal food from hay and insect meal, for instance, without dipping into your more human-oriented ingredients.

RimWorld Feeding Animals

To create a pet zone simply go to 1. Architect → 2. Zone → 3. Expand allowed area → 4. Manage areas… (from the dropdown that appears) → 5. New area.

This will create a new area you can set simply called “Area 2,” or “Area 3,” and so on. You can rename it to something like “Cat,” if you prefer. Then click on “Expand allowed area” again under the Zone menu. The new area will become visible from a dropdown. Select it and draw the zone you wish for your pet to stay within during your save. Finally, go to the “Animals” menu. Your pet will already be set to one of your allowed areas, such as “Home” or “Unrestricted,” but you can click on the spot you just created instead. You can also access the “Manage areas…” menu from here if you wish. From here on out, your pet will stay within those bounds!

Feeding Animals in RimWorld

RimWorld simply refers to livestock and/or cattle as “animals.” They show up in the same menu as your pets, but actually function very differently. Namely: you can place them inside pens and allow them to graze automatically. No need to manually create food for them or set special zones! The pen itself acts as the allowed area and helps protect them from attackers.

Yet these aren’t 100 percent foolproof. Pens only dissuade predator animals from hunting your livestock — functionally making them “invisible” to hunters. Predators can still hop over or crawl under fences just like your own colonists. If they should happen to randomly wander into a pen, your animals will no longer be safe, but RimWorld will notify you of the danger with an alert.

RimWorld Nutrient Growth

To create an animal pen, select Architect → Misc → Pen marker… and place the object on the ground.

You can technically place this marker anywhere if you have the 30 Wood needed to construct one. However, you need to actually build a fenced-in or walled-off area around the marker for it to count as a pen. Make sure to add a gate, as well, so your animals can be brough inside. Once the designated area is complete, any colonist set to “Handle” in their work schedule will automatically bring tamed animals to the pen.

By default, any pen allows any type of tamed animal, but you can click on the pen marker and select its “Animals” to only allow certain species. For example, if you want a pen to only include Yaks, just uncheck every other species on the dropdown menu. This also allows you to set only male or female animals in a particular pen — cutting down on animal pregnancies. Why would you want to cut down on baby animals? Because every new creature demands more food. You can see for yourself by also clicking on the pen marker. The information window at the bottom-left of the screen will show you both “nutrient growth” and “nutrient consumption.” This is actually the chief way to feed animals in RimWorld.

Any vegetation inside your animal pen (e.g. grass) contributes to that nutrient growth. The more plants inside the pen, the more animals the area can sustain automatically. This is actually a fantastic use for dandelions in RimWorld, too. These plants don’t serve much purpose on their own. Yet they grow incredibly fast (in just 2.5 days compared to the full week required by haygrass). This contributes another perfect source of nutrient growth for feeding animals and levels up your characters’ Growing skill.

And that’s pretty much all there is to feeding animals in RimWorld! Hopefully this will help keep your pets and livestock alive longer as you tame the creatures for your benefit. Best of luck with your burgeoning ranch out there in the stars.

RimWorld Feeding Animals Guide: How to Feed Livestock & Pets

Pets, cattle, and feed! Let's look at what you need.

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