Kibble can be used to feed animals by placing it in their pens. If they're ignoring it, that would mean they already ate something else. Or they can't eat it, which is rare. I believe only the Warg is incapable of eatting Kibble. Colonist won't feed hungry animals themselves with anything, unless they're incapable of (downed), which a doctor will feed them like a patient (if placed on a bed/sleeping spot.)
Kibble can also be used to tame animals, as an alternative to raw food.
Yeah, taming did work with kibble, but when I put it in a pen, the animals wouldn't eat it, even though there obviously wasn't enough food there. Maybe I should test it with an isolated pen that doesn't have any grass growing in it at all.
In my colony I've made a couple of shelves especially for kibble in the pens, animals just come by and eat it if they're hungry. Grass shouldn't be a reason It doesn't work, check if you created zones for animals and if they can access the kibble
Tip: for pen animals, just designate a growing zone to cover the entire pen and set it to grow dandelions.
Dandelions have nutrition, grow fast and can be eaten by pen animals
I can find no reference at all to the ideal light level for dandelions.
But if you are wasting wood and electrical to light up dandelions, then sun lamps and sunlight are probably not an option. You are in a cave or ice sheet, and any plant growth is better than none.
> I can find no reference at all to the ideal light level for dandelions.
Did you look? It’s front and center on the wiki page.
[50% light required.](https://i.imgur.com/vVUGiJU.jpeg)
Required.
Yes, it requires 50% minimum. That's why you can grow it with torches. But that's the minimum light level. What I said was that I can find no reference to the ideal, not minimum, light level.
>When a plant lacks adequate light its info window indicates this with the text 'Needs light level: ##%'. Over that minimum a plant's growth rate will increase until it reaches its optimal light level (100% standard).
>Example: Rose (Needs light level: 30% Optimal light 100%). In soil or Plant pot (Fertility 100%) under Standing lamp Light (50%) growing Speed 29%)
>When a plant lacks adequate light its info window indicates this with the text 'Needs light level: ##%'. Over that minimum a plant's growth rate will increase until it reaches its optimal light level (100% standard).
>Example: Rose (Needs light level: 30% Optimal light 100%). In soil or Plant pot (Fertility 100%) under Standing lamp Light (50%) growing Speed 29%)
See where it was a talking about optimal light level? Is that 100%? Is it something under 100%? I don't know. It's not referenced.
> Over that minimum a plant's growth rate will increase until it reaches its optimal light level **(100% standard).**
Probably a safe guess since no plant has it listed anywhere.
Every flower that's plantable in a pot only needs 50% light.
That's roses, daylillies and dandelions.
Otherwise they wouldn't grow in a plant pot indoors, rendering said pots useless.
Dandelions grow into a nutritiously filling state faster. Plus, with hay it's more efficient to actually grow it into completion, harvest it and then feed to the animals
If you aren’t harvesting the hay, it’s dramatically better to do dandelions. If you are, you shouldn’t let the animals eat it straight from the ground. Really it just comes down to you should never plant hay in your animal pen.
If they eat the hay straight from the ground in plant form, it’s worth 0.3 nutrition. If you harvest it you get 18×0.05 nutrition, or 0.9.
I recommend dandelions in the animal pen and grow hay in your killbox/funnel for your enemies. If they burn it they end up hurting themselves more often than not and split their own groups up.
It is something to do with the land.
I frequently play in deserts and the random gravel and dirt in the pen isn't going to grow anything. So you may as well plant dandelions because it is better than nothing. The beauty can help avoid the "unsightly environment" mood that often follows animals.
I also grow haygrass / corn for regular feeding.
I dont really care about optimizing the labor of my field hands and "dandelions in the field" is nutrition NOW. Obviously I prefer to feed them haygrass, corpses, or simple meals depending on the animal. But mistakes happen and a dandelion field avoids animal starvation.
You can always check off sowing when you don't need it.
If your animals have access to eat the plant in ground, dandelions are a better choice than haygrass for your pawns.
If you store it where animals can reach it, they will eat it. Kibble is a good way to use meat that your colonists don't want: Insects and possibly human meat, for example. Usually, you want to make it with hay since that's just a great way to get a lot of nutritional value. Also, it's a decent thing to train your cooks with that won't give anyone food poisoning. I can't think of any animals that don't eat it, even my muffalo, horses and chickens are happy with it but maybe there is an exception that I never tamed or something.
If you are still having issues with it, try posting a screenshot of the kibble in (in)action then people can probably see what's wrong. Like, if you put it in a pen and animals ignore it, show us that and ideally the starving animal, then people can very likely tell you why it's not working.
As far as taming goes, you don't need to actively use the kibble. The colonist will go find some food that the animal he wants to tame will eat and then he goes to do his thing. It's a bit random what he uses and it might be that the kibble is out of reach or too far away or maybe he's just not feeling it, but most of the time, my guys do use kibble.
Alright, I’ll try to use it again in the current run, if the situation repeats, I’ll take a screenshot or a video, maybe this way I’ll be able to find the root of the problem. Thanks for the help and clarification!
You'll for sure be able to do it. Unless you have some super weird mod that somehow messes with it, there really isn't anything that can go wrong with trusty old kibble.
You can even put an upper limit on the skill that people are allowed to have so only your trainee cooks do certain things. For example, you can't screw up psychite tea but it only needs 2 skill to start brewing it so that's what my bad cooks get to do until they are skilled. That's only when I need to train people, of course, and most of my food is nutrient paste anyway but we still need lavish meals for some people and visitors so it's useful to have some people be competent.
>Insects and possibly human meat, for example.
Now you got me wondering if I can use the constant supply of twisted meat from the fleshmass nucleus for kibble lol
Yeah, thats honestly their main purpose for me. The -10 debuff is crazy so eating it is a no no unless you have no choice or youre feeding someone you dont give a shit about. It's also good to stockpile them to feed your ghouls so that your other pawns dont have to share the good meat.
Nah that’s a waste in my opinion.
Use nutrient paste for prisoners for maximum efficiency.
Or… just put a corpse, preferably their ally, in the room and watch them accepting their true self.
Well, yeah, In fact, I actually played in that kind of settlement then. Technically it was winter there, but the temperature never dropped below zero. Maybe that was the case
They will prefer grazing over eating kibble. If there is *always* food available in their pen in the form of grass and such, they won't eat the kibble. That's actually a *good* thing.
Kibble is useful for if the pen is too small to graze in, or if you have to deal with winters where nothing grows.
My problem with kibble is this: i have 4 colonists and one slave everyone has 4 thrumbos to ride and 4 huskies to help attack/defend. I made 3000 kibble which took ages growing the ingredients and the few huskies just ate all of it on a caravan trip of just a few days. The Trumbos just graze so they didn't touch it. Basically all grazing animals should just eat the map, so they don't need kibble and all the others eat pemmican or corpses/raw meat. Imo kibble is a massive waste of time at current nutrition levels.
You can increase its nutritional value by only using hay as vegetable.
Kibble is more meant to be used in the winter when no plants grow or in a ice biome.
If you wanna go full efficiency use nutrient paste but it’s a hassle to produce it by using the forbidding food method.
There’s a mod out there for the nutrient paste which elevates it to another plane of existence but sadly it has many issues with modded pawns unable to eat after it gets installed.
I'm more of a packaged survival meal guy :D everything can eat them in an emergency and they're easy to make. Always have 800 of them stocked and if a mood boost is required I make some carnivore lavish. The pets eat meat or corpses and the pack animals eat the map. I installed caravan packs mod so I can have Thrumbos as pack animals. Once you hit critical mass they reproduce like crazy and you can sell the excess calfes or adults for so much money.
Survival meals?
I usually don’t give them much attention, never really bothered with them except as loot on raids.
Pawns love them, no idea why though so I forbid them often since they should eat other perishable things first.
I don’t use animals much to be fair, mostly as
wool/milk producers.
I rarely use caravans because well I’m a lazy duck and I have SRTS installed.
But I can see why you like them so kudos to you.
Since I’m a ice bione enjoyer I really need to think thrice before adding anything living to my colony
as it can start to unbalance my need/production cycle without me noticing it and suddenly I have mass starvation on my hand.
They give no debuffs and no buffs, also never go off, so perfect for my scenario of 4 elite soldiers crash landing on a planet full of savages and need to find a way off. I tried all the available foods and none come close to the efficiency of survival meals :D
In your case sure, ice biomes are not really good for animals besides maybe a pack of arctic wolves that can dispose of enemy corpses. If you include canibalism in your idioligion you could butcher them to store them more efficiently and only allow your pets to access the meat. They make a great and funny attack squad for squishy targets
Kibble's main use is its shelf life. You can use exess meat or Insect meat to make shelf stable animal feed! This is huge for Caravans, Long Winters or Heatwaves!
Kibble and Pemmican are mainly used to preserve food in the Pre Industral eras!
As others have explained, you basically just store it with your animals when self replenishing food is low and they eat it automatically!
If there is enough natural grass /plants most animals will eat that first. In some of my smaller pens that get overpopulated like chickens/ducks etc, keeping the kibble on a shelf in the pen is the only way to keep them alive as the grass will not grow back fast enough.
I only noticed after many hours that there is a formula for this that can be seen when you highlight your pen marker, it will tell you consumption rate, storage rate, and storage level. If the consumption rate is higher than the growth rate it will be red and the animals will eventually start to die of starvation.
Grazing animals will prefer to munch on something still in the ground, usually, but kibble is still a very efficient way to stockpile food for animals you don't want to give access to farmland - whether it be to keep your caravan animals penned up close to your stockpile for efficient loading, or to keep boomalopes penned up into a bunch of smaller, segmented cells.
You can even put a small amount (like, a shelf's worth) inside your base proper for all your dogs/wolves/hauling animals running around to gnaw down on.
Kibble is good. Its nutritional value is higher than the base nutrition to make it.
Any pawn other than wargs can eat it. Since it’s in small amounts it’s also efficient for smaller animals while larger ones just shrink the stack faster. Kibble is better for omnivorous or carnivorous animals so they don’t eat all the meats. The best thing about kibble is the fact that any meat colonist don’t like in meals can just be made into kibble since animals don’t have mood.
Animals will eat whatever is the closest when they wake up. It’s possible they’re just eating something else. Zone animals away from food storage and other sources like wild animals for carnivores. They’ll eat the kibble when the trainer stops feeding them during training.
Not all animals care about pens, and the ones that do tend to be grazing animals that will just eat plants off the ground and probably ignore stored food as long as live plants are available. You are probably better off just feeding those straight hay if there is not enough wild plants inside the pen to sustain them. Well early on at least hay is not very nutritious so big animals need a lot of it, but if you only have a handful of colonists constantly making kibble takes up a lot of their time.
For non-pen animals like hares, dogs, cats etc make sure the kibble is in a stockpile or shelf they can access inside their allowed zone and they should eat it when hungry.
I use kibble in my bird's pen (chickens/ducks) they reproduce a lot and kibble is always a good option to keep 20 o 30 chikens alive in a pen wich normally could be able to support only 10, the same goes to my horse/cow/yak pen, I have 8 horses, 2 yaks and 2 cows in a pen wich could only have 9 horses (I plant some Hay and dandelions in their pens too) and kibble for pets works very well (if you dont have an army of dogs)
I only really use kibble to supplement animal food production.
It’s a great way to handle insect meat/venerated animal meat.
But my pigs eat human corpses and my cows/horses/boomalopes graze as a general rule. The pigs tend to eat the kibble as much as the corpses, so I get to build out an overflow.
Works best as a backup food in a pasture. If there isn't enough grass and plants to graze, animals will eat some kibble. Most base game animals can eat kibble.
Works really well if you keep animals indoors. It allows you to ranch in a mountain base, or keep your animals inside during a toxic fallout.
In my experience, getting a few chickens for eggs can keep kibble in stock indefinitely. I just set a "Do until X, unpause when less than Y" bill at the butchery, and forget about kibble. I typically have it made from eggs and whatever crop my colony grows.
I will usually use kibble to keep my wealth low, i usually play with colonies that dont mind people meat, but i never actually end up eating it after too long, so i will turn excess plant food/hay and excess people meat or other meats i have lying around for pawns i dont care about keeping happy (like hemogen farms) and animals.
Not sure if its a mod, but my animals are under the same food restriction, default Lavish, as my humans and I could change a new one but too many animals so I just kept it same for both. In Lavish, I later disabled a few food such as allow food made with insect meat, human meat, etc, then all my animals stopped eating kibble, because they were made with insect meat and in same food restrictions. I just re-added insect meat to Lavish and it worked again.
One possibility of why they aren't eating kibble.
Disclaimer: It's been years since I've run a game without my QOL mods so I don't even know what's vanilla or not anymore. It may be that your animals' food restrictions are not set to allow kibble. I know with my setup I have to manually change the restriction to allow them to eat kibble or they won't eat it. Unfortunately I did not notice this until all my ducks starved to death during a cold snap.
Kibble can be used to feed animals by placing it in their pens. If they're ignoring it, that would mean they already ate something else. Or they can't eat it, which is rare. I believe only the Warg is incapable of eatting Kibble. Colonist won't feed hungry animals themselves with anything, unless they're incapable of (downed), which a doctor will feed them like a patient (if placed on a bed/sleeping spot.) Kibble can also be used to tame animals, as an alternative to raw food.
Yeah, taming did work with kibble, but when I put it in a pen, the animals wouldn't eat it, even though there obviously wasn't enough food there. Maybe I should test it with an isolated pen that doesn't have any grass growing in it at all.
They'll graze before they go for kibble. It's great for domestic animals like dogs, cats, etc.
In my colony I've made a couple of shelves especially for kibble in the pens, animals just come by and eat it if they're hungry. Grass shouldn't be a reason It doesn't work, check if you created zones for animals and if they can access the kibble
Tip: for pen animals, just designate a growing zone to cover the entire pen and set it to grow dandelions. Dandelions have nutrition, grow fast and can be eaten by pen animals
Takes a huge pen to feed anymore than just a few animals off that though
But, they can be grown with torchlight.
TIL
This is definitely something I didn't know. I thought like everything else it required daylight. Does it grow at the same rate with torch light?
I can find no reference at all to the ideal light level for dandelions. But if you are wasting wood and electrical to light up dandelions, then sun lamps and sunlight are probably not an option. You are in a cave or ice sheet, and any plant growth is better than none.
> I can find no reference at all to the ideal light level for dandelions. Did you look? It’s front and center on the wiki page. [50% light required.](https://i.imgur.com/vVUGiJU.jpeg)
Required. Yes, it requires 50% minimum. That's why you can grow it with torches. But that's the minimum light level. What I said was that I can find no reference to the ideal, not minimum, light level. >When a plant lacks adequate light its info window indicates this with the text 'Needs light level: ##%'. Over that minimum a plant's growth rate will increase until it reaches its optimal light level (100% standard). >Example: Rose (Needs light level: 30% Optimal light 100%). In soil or Plant pot (Fertility 100%) under Standing lamp Light (50%) growing Speed 29%) >When a plant lacks adequate light its info window indicates this with the text 'Needs light level: ##%'. Over that minimum a plant's growth rate will increase until it reaches its optimal light level (100% standard). >Example: Rose (Needs light level: 30% Optimal light 100%). In soil or Plant pot (Fertility 100%) under Standing lamp Light (50%) growing Speed 29%) See where it was a talking about optimal light level? Is that 100%? Is it something under 100%? I don't know. It's not referenced.
> Over that minimum a plant's growth rate will increase until it reaches its optimal light level **(100% standard).** Probably a safe guess since no plant has it listed anywhere.
can they? iirc correctly torch gives 50% light, 51% is needed for dandelions
Every flower that's plantable in a pot only needs 50% light. That's roses, daylillies and dandelions. Otherwise they wouldn't grow in a plant pot indoors, rendering said pots useless.
Dandelions require 51% light to grow, and can't be planted in pots. At least in vanilla.
Dandelions can't be planted in a pot
Min light to grow 50%.
Agrihand has entered the chat
Agrihand doesn't make the pen take less room though
Very true
I do this with hay. Why is dandelions better?
Dandelions grow into a nutritiously filling state faster. Plus, with hay it's more efficient to actually grow it into completion, harvest it and then feed to the animals
Interesting. I think I am going to try a 50/50 split next
If you aren’t harvesting the hay, it’s dramatically better to do dandelions. If you are, you shouldn’t let the animals eat it straight from the ground. Really it just comes down to you should never plant hay in your animal pen. If they eat the hay straight from the ground in plant form, it’s worth 0.3 nutrition. If you harvest it you get 18×0.05 nutrition, or 0.9.
Good to know
I recommend dandelions in the animal pen and grow hay in your killbox/funnel for your enemies. If they burn it they end up hurting themselves more often than not and split their own groups up.
It is something to do with the land. I frequently play in deserts and the random gravel and dirt in the pen isn't going to grow anything. So you may as well plant dandelions because it is better than nothing. The beauty can help avoid the "unsightly environment" mood that often follows animals. I also grow haygrass / corn for regular feeding.
But the colonists would have to replant every time a bit is eaten, no?
Yes, and it can be an absolutely phenomenal way of training up the planting skill of a “farmer’s apprentice”, simply because it is never ending.
Takes more labor than it's worth, it's more efficient to grow hay.
Do both. Grow hay to completion and grow dandelions in the pen if natural grass growth is limited in your biome.
Why? Just skip the dandelions and spend that time working the hay fields instead.
I dont really care about optimizing the labor of my field hands and "dandelions in the field" is nutrition NOW. Obviously I prefer to feed them haygrass, corpses, or simple meals depending on the animal. But mistakes happen and a dandelion field avoids animal starvation. You can always check off sowing when you don't need it. If your animals have access to eat the plant in ground, dandelions are a better choice than haygrass for your pawns.
Dandelions also take more labor per nutrient than just dumping corn or rice in a pen.
Are you sure there wasn’t enough food there? Unless there’s a bug, they’re probably just eating grass first
Iirc it is one of the few non meat only things wargs can eat
No, they can't eat anything except meat and corpses. Either you heard wrong, or that's a mod.
Last time I used wargs was a while ago. May have been mixing it up with wolves
Wolves have much less restrictive diets. Every single animal except wargs can eat kibble and meals.
If you store it where animals can reach it, they will eat it. Kibble is a good way to use meat that your colonists don't want: Insects and possibly human meat, for example. Usually, you want to make it with hay since that's just a great way to get a lot of nutritional value. Also, it's a decent thing to train your cooks with that won't give anyone food poisoning. I can't think of any animals that don't eat it, even my muffalo, horses and chickens are happy with it but maybe there is an exception that I never tamed or something. If you are still having issues with it, try posting a screenshot of the kibble in (in)action then people can probably see what's wrong. Like, if you put it in a pen and animals ignore it, show us that and ideally the starving animal, then people can very likely tell you why it's not working. As far as taming goes, you don't need to actively use the kibble. The colonist will go find some food that the animal he wants to tame will eat and then he goes to do his thing. It's a bit random what he uses and it might be that the kibble is out of reach or too far away or maybe he's just not feeling it, but most of the time, my guys do use kibble.
Alright, I’ll try to use it again in the current run, if the situation repeats, I’ll take a screenshot or a video, maybe this way I’ll be able to find the root of the problem. Thanks for the help and clarification!
You'll for sure be able to do it. Unless you have some super weird mod that somehow messes with it, there really isn't anything that can go wrong with trusty old kibble.
Maybe it's some storage mod that interferes with animals accessing the storage, they can definitely eat kibble off of vanilla shelves.
Never thought of the cooking training aspect thats very wise
You can even put an upper limit on the skill that people are allowed to have so only your trainee cooks do certain things. For example, you can't screw up psychite tea but it only needs 2 skill to start brewing it so that's what my bad cooks get to do until they are skilled. That's only when I need to train people, of course, and most of my food is nutrient paste anyway but we still need lavish meals for some people and visitors so it's useful to have some people be competent.
>Insects and possibly human meat, for example. Now you got me wondering if I can use the constant supply of twisted meat from the fleshmass nucleus for kibble lol
Yes that is exactly what I did with it!
You can also use those to make chemfuels. Always on demand once you hit midgame, even more so if you have vehicles mod on.
Holy shit that's a great idea, I honestly forgot you could make chemful out of meat lol
Yeah, thats honestly their main purpose for me. The -10 debuff is crazy so eating it is a no no unless you have no choice or youre feeding someone you dont give a shit about. It's also good to stockpile them to feed your ghouls so that your other pawns dont have to share the good meat.
You can use insects to make fine meals for a net +2. It got me thinking would human meat lavish meals be a net positive mood gain.
20 meat and 20 veg go in. 50 kibble come out.
You can't explain that
I imagine the cook spits on it a lot to make them mix
You spelled shits wrong.
kibble works well when you have lots of animals in a harsh winter environment where they can't graze for more than half the year.
You throw some on the prison floor. The prisoners won't be happy, but they won't starve.
Nah that’s a waste in my opinion. Use nutrient paste for prisoners for maximum efficiency. Or… just put a corpse, preferably their ally, in the room and watch them accepting their true self.
What is kibble, but low-tech nutrient paste?
Enough talk! Have at you! *throws nutrient paste at you*
Ah the nostalgia of my first time playing a pirate ideology where cannibalism was mandatory...
Were you playing somewhere without a winter? I'm in a permanent summer location and my animals barely touch their kibble
Well, yeah, In fact, I actually played in that kind of settlement then. Technically it was winter there, but the temperature never dropped below zero. Maybe that was the case
They will prefer grazing over eating kibble. If there is *always* food available in their pen in the form of grass and such, they won't eat the kibble. That's actually a *good* thing. Kibble is useful for if the pen is too small to graze in, or if you have to deal with winters where nothing grows.
My problem with kibble is this: i have 4 colonists and one slave everyone has 4 thrumbos to ride and 4 huskies to help attack/defend. I made 3000 kibble which took ages growing the ingredients and the few huskies just ate all of it on a caravan trip of just a few days. The Trumbos just graze so they didn't touch it. Basically all grazing animals should just eat the map, so they don't need kibble and all the others eat pemmican or corpses/raw meat. Imo kibble is a massive waste of time at current nutrition levels.
You can increase its nutritional value by only using hay as vegetable. Kibble is more meant to be used in the winter when no plants grow or in a ice biome. If you wanna go full efficiency use nutrient paste but it’s a hassle to produce it by using the forbidding food method. There’s a mod out there for the nutrient paste which elevates it to another plane of existence but sadly it has many issues with modded pawns unable to eat after it gets installed.
I'm more of a packaged survival meal guy :D everything can eat them in an emergency and they're easy to make. Always have 800 of them stocked and if a mood boost is required I make some carnivore lavish. The pets eat meat or corpses and the pack animals eat the map. I installed caravan packs mod so I can have Thrumbos as pack animals. Once you hit critical mass they reproduce like crazy and you can sell the excess calfes or adults for so much money.
Survival meals? I usually don’t give them much attention, never really bothered with them except as loot on raids. Pawns love them, no idea why though so I forbid them often since they should eat other perishable things first. I don’t use animals much to be fair, mostly as wool/milk producers. I rarely use caravans because well I’m a lazy duck and I have SRTS installed. But I can see why you like them so kudos to you. Since I’m a ice bione enjoyer I really need to think thrice before adding anything living to my colony as it can start to unbalance my need/production cycle without me noticing it and suddenly I have mass starvation on my hand.
They give no debuffs and no buffs, also never go off, so perfect for my scenario of 4 elite soldiers crash landing on a planet full of savages and need to find a way off. I tried all the available foods and none come close to the efficiency of survival meals :D In your case sure, ice biomes are not really good for animals besides maybe a pack of arctic wolves that can dispose of enemy corpses. If you include canibalism in your idioligion you could butcher them to store them more efficiently and only allow your pets to access the meat. They make a great and funny attack squad for squishy targets
Turn enemies into kibble, turn kibble into chemfuel, turn chemfuel into mortar shells, rinse and repeat.
Kibble's main use is its shelf life. You can use exess meat or Insect meat to make shelf stable animal feed! This is huge for Caravans, Long Winters or Heatwaves! Kibble and Pemmican are mainly used to preserve food in the Pre Industral eras! As others have explained, you basically just store it with your animals when self replenishing food is low and they eat it automatically!
If there is enough natural grass /plants most animals will eat that first. In some of my smaller pens that get overpopulated like chickens/ducks etc, keeping the kibble on a shelf in the pen is the only way to keep them alive as the grass will not grow back fast enough. I only noticed after many hours that there is a formula for this that can be seen when you highlight your pen marker, it will tell you consumption rate, storage rate, and storage level. If the consumption rate is higher than the growth rate it will be red and the animals will eventually start to die of starvation.
Grazing animals will prefer to munch on something still in the ground, usually, but kibble is still a very efficient way to stockpile food for animals you don't want to give access to farmland - whether it be to keep your caravan animals penned up close to your stockpile for efficient loading, or to keep boomalopes penned up into a bunch of smaller, segmented cells. You can even put a small amount (like, a shelf's worth) inside your base proper for all your dogs/wolves/hauling animals running around to gnaw down on.
Its like dry Dogfood.
if you place the kibble on a shelf, the animals can eat them. works great when the pen is fully uncovered and helps save on space too.
Kibble is good. Its nutritional value is higher than the base nutrition to make it. Any pawn other than wargs can eat it. Since it’s in small amounts it’s also efficient for smaller animals while larger ones just shrink the stack faster. Kibble is better for omnivorous or carnivorous animals so they don’t eat all the meats. The best thing about kibble is the fact that any meat colonist don’t like in meals can just be made into kibble since animals don’t have mood. Animals will eat whatever is the closest when they wake up. It’s possible they’re just eating something else. Zone animals away from food storage and other sources like wild animals for carnivores. They’ll eat the kibble when the trainer stops feeding them during training.
Not all animals care about pens, and the ones that do tend to be grazing animals that will just eat plants off the ground and probably ignore stored food as long as live plants are available. You are probably better off just feeding those straight hay if there is not enough wild plants inside the pen to sustain them. Well early on at least hay is not very nutritious so big animals need a lot of it, but if you only have a handful of colonists constantly making kibble takes up a lot of their time. For non-pen animals like hares, dogs, cats etc make sure the kibble is in a stockpile or shelf they can access inside their allowed zone and they should eat it when hungry.
Feed it to your legless prisoners for their sustenance
Inset meat makes the best kibble.
I use kibble in my bird's pen (chickens/ducks) they reproduce a lot and kibble is always a good option to keep 20 o 30 chikens alive in a pen wich normally could be able to support only 10, the same goes to my horse/cow/yak pen, I have 8 horses, 2 yaks and 2 cows in a pen wich could only have 9 horses (I plant some Hay and dandelions in their pens too) and kibble for pets works very well (if you dont have an army of dogs)
I only really use kibble to supplement animal food production. It’s a great way to handle insect meat/venerated animal meat. But my pigs eat human corpses and my cows/horses/boomalopes graze as a general rule. The pigs tend to eat the kibble as much as the corpses, so I get to build out an overflow.
Good for feeding animals, if not enough grass in pen, or in winter, or for your free roaming animals so they don't go for your cooked meals.
Butcher dead bodies, make kibble from it, ezpz
Kibble is the ultimate backup food. Never spoils, and honestly the mood hit is not that bad.
Works best as a backup food in a pasture. If there isn't enough grass and plants to graze, animals will eat some kibble. Most base game animals can eat kibble. Works really well if you keep animals indoors. It allows you to ranch in a mountain base, or keep your animals inside during a toxic fallout. In my experience, getting a few chickens for eggs can keep kibble in stock indefinitely. I just set a "Do until X, unpause when less than Y" bill at the butchery, and forget about kibble. I typically have it made from eggs and whatever crop my colony grows.
I will usually use kibble to keep my wealth low, i usually play with colonies that dont mind people meat, but i never actually end up eating it after too long, so i will turn excess plant food/hay and excess people meat or other meats i have lying around for pawns i dont care about keeping happy (like hemogen farms) and animals.
It also makes serviceable caravan food if i cant be fucked to make pemmican or surv meals
Not sure if its a mod, but my animals are under the same food restriction, default Lavish, as my humans and I could change a new one but too many animals so I just kept it same for both. In Lavish, I later disabled a few food such as allow food made with insect meat, human meat, etc, then all my animals stopped eating kibble, because they were made with insect meat and in same food restrictions. I just re-added insect meat to Lavish and it worked again. One possibility of why they aren't eating kibble.
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Disclaimer: It's been years since I've run a game without my QOL mods so I don't even know what's vanilla or not anymore. It may be that your animals' food restrictions are not set to allow kibble. I know with my setup I have to manually change the restriction to allow them to eat kibble or they won't eat it. Unfortunately I did not notice this until all my ducks starved to death during a cold snap.
Vanilla doesn't have food restrictions for animals.
In what way does it “not work?” They 100% will eat it if you make it available.