Along with the DLC Ideology, Rimworld’s 1.3 update has also added a bunch of new mechanics and features. One such features is the inclusion of animal pens. These self-built areas are the new zone in which certain animals will stay inside. Certain animals such as donkeys and horses will need a pen to stay in, otherwise they may try to escape the colony.
Using new structures and items, this guide will show you how to build a pen for your animals, set up food in the animal pen and show you how to use animal pen markers.
How to Build an Animal Pen in Rimworld
There isn’t a great deal of objects surrounding building an animal pen luckily in Rimworld. There are three different objects relating to animal pens in Rimworld. These are; Fences, Gates and Pen markers. All of these are pretty self-explanatory but just in case…
Animal Pen Objects:
Fences: Uses to mark the borders of an animal pen. These are unpassable fences that can be made from all of the different stones and metals in the game.
Gate: These are gates in which animals and pawns can pass through to get into animal pens. Animals won’t be able to pass through these on their own and will require a pawn with the Handling job to bring them through.
Pen markers: These signpost designate which animals are to be kept in what pens.
Building the Animal Pen
You will need all three of these in order to build an area for your animals. It doesn’t matter in what order you build the pen at all. I am going to start by laying down the general fenced area and put some gates on them. You can find fences and gates under the Structure group in the Architect menu. Place down a fenced area and don’t forget to add a gate. This is just like building a room for your pawns.
The size of the pen depends on what kind of animals you would like to have. Obviously for larger animals you will want to build a larger pen area. It may also be a good idea to build a barn inside the pen.
This can be a place for your animals to sleep and lay eggs. Once you have the pen set out you will need to build a Pen marker in order to change it from a random fenced area into an actual animal pen. You can find the Pen marker under the Misc heading.
The Pen marker also has many different variants depending on which material you choose to use. Once you have built a Pen marker you will be able to decide which animals can use the pen. Before you place one of these into the fenced area your pawns won’t use the pen for animals.
Deciding Which Animals Go in Which Pen – Pen Marker Settings
Now that you have a Pen marker inside one of your animal pens there are a bunch of different settings that you can change with the pen. To change which animals are allowed in the pen, select it and inside the pop-up menu you can see a tab called Animals.
This menu functions the same way that Zones function for items. You can allow or disallow certain animals in each pen. See the image below.
You can even separate male and female animals using this menu. This is helpful if you don’t want certain animals to breed and multiply. By selecting the Food tab you can get an idea on how much nutrition will be available in the pen. This will also give you an estimate on some animal’s food consumption per day.
This menu can tell you how many of each animal the pen can support without external food sources. Very helpful if you don’t have much food in the colony or don’t want to have a pawn hand-feed the animals.
The last tab that is available from the Pen marker menu is the Auto-cut menu. This is a very helpful menu where you can decide which plants will be cut automatically when growing in the pen.
If you don’t want any trees or bushes at all to grow, you can un-check them in this checkbox menu and your pawns will automatically cut them down if they start to grow in the pen.
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Pens can be created with a mixture of fences and fence gates, barricades, solid walls (constructed or naturally occurring) and/or doors. Animal flaps can be used to provide indoor sections to a pen that animals can move freely into and out of without leaving or compromising the pen.
Pen markers designate a zone for pen animals to be held, and one is required if you wish to "rope" a tamed animal and lead them to that pen. Pen markers determine which types of animals will be kept in each pen, and provide other utility as well. Each different pen that you wish to use needs a pen marker.
Doors and fence gates block pens. Animal flaps do not. Animal flaps are largely equivalent to doors, supporting roofs, enclosing rooms, and containing temperature. They differ primarily in that they do not enclose pens, allowing penned animals to pass through them.
In the United States, the term pen usually describes outdoor small enclosures for holding animals. These may be for encasing livestock or pets that cannot be kept indoors. Pens may be named by their purpose, such as a holding pen, used for short-term confinement.
You definitely want to keep huskies and Labrador retrievers because they are the finest Rimworld animals. After all, they can attack, protect, haul and rescue wounded colonists.
When it comes to building a base that feels more permanent, you might be looking into creating a ranch in Rimworld. Not only do animals provide a good source of food that can, well, keep you alive, but they also can give other resources and even help defend your base from any sort of invaders.
Hay is good animal feed, but inedible for humans. Hay is the fastest produced food source, acquired by growing and harvesting haygrass. It's great for efficiently feeding animals, and can be used for straw matting. It cannot, however be used for training animals.
In smaller rooms, the higher beauty per tile of roses or daylilies will be preferred. Dandelions can also be used as quick-growing feed for grazing animals.
Pemmican and kibble both have 0.05 nutrition per item, which makes them good animal feed. They both allow herbivorous animals to eat meat, and increase nutrition per work.
im asking this because i wanted to put my kibble on a shelf, instead of fully building a barn, do animals eat from there? or does it HAVE to be a stockpile inside a room? As long as it is accessible by them, then yes, they should be able to. This is very good for Hay and Kibble.
Some kinds of animals can get past fences. Predators will not hunt creatures on the other side of a fence, but may still wander inside. Fences are structures that are passable by all pawns except pen animals, and can be used in combination with walls, doors, barricades, and fence gates to enclose a pen.
In addition, elephants are the only pack animal that isn't a pen animal. For the sole purpose of packing goods, this is a downside, as elephants need to be re-trained. On the flip side, this allows elephants to be a pack animal that fights enemies and hauls goods.
Doors cannot be opened by raiders, manhunter animals, or prisoners (usually). Doors can be held open by selecting the door and toggling the gizmo marked as such. The door will not open or close automatically.
One of the best ways to control animals is to assign them an allowed area. Allowed areas are created via the Expand allowed area function in the Architect>Zone menu. Zoning prevents animals from wandering into danger and eating things they shouldn't be.
Wild animals can be tamed by a animal handler with sufficient Animal skill and available food. Tamed animals may be bred, trained, traded, slaughtered, or farmed. Wild animals may be marked for taming using the Tame order. An animal handler will attempt to tame marked animals using food fitting that animal's diet.
Animals can be marked for hunting in the Wildlife menu. Multiple animals can be selected clicking and dragging the mouse down the "Mark animals for Hunting" column. This tab also shows the revenge chance for each animal and has a special icon for predators. All wild animals on the current map are shown there.
Without Guard training, the animal does not follow pawns or guard them. In order for an animal to do the guarding work, it has to be assigned a "Master". To do that, once an animal is trained for Guard, you assign a Master under Animals tab in your main game window or directly on the Training tab of that animal.
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Introduction: My name is Roderick King, I am a cute, splendid, excited, perfect, gentle, funny, vivacious person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.
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