How to Feed Animals in RimWorld (1.6) | Animal Feeding Planner + Winter Reserve Tool

Why are your animals starving when you have food?

A horse can collapse from malnutrition while the warehouse holds 900 hay, because the hay is nowhere the horse looks. These are the rules an animal follows when it looks for food in 1.6.

• An animal eats the closest legal food it can reach. It does not compare kibble with meals or pick the best option. Diet, reachability, forbidden status and freshness are checked first, and food that another animal beside it is already eating is skipped. After that, distance decides.
• The search has a range. A colony animal checks up to 100 map regions around itself, and a penned animal only checks the regions of its pen. Food on the far side of a big map can be out of reach.
• Livestock stays in its pen: cows, chickens, goats, pigs, alpacas and the like. Food outside the fence does not exist for them.
• Forbidden food is never eaten, even by a starving animal. Rotting food is passed over unless nothing fresh is in range, and rotting corpses are never eaten. Animals cannot use a nutrient paste dispenser.
• Colonists do not feed healthy animals. They only haul. The one feeding job belongs to doctors and covers animals lying in an animal bed.

The 60-second haul check

1. Click the barn shelf or stockpile and compare its priority with the warehouse. Set it to Important or Critical.
2. Check that its filter allows Hay and Kibble. If Fresh is unticked under the item-status options, nothing fresh can go there.
3. Look for a forbidden stack and unforbid it.
4. Confirm that a hauler can reach the barn through a door outside the fence, and that someone has Hauling turned on.
5. Check whether the shelf is full. A 2×1 shelf holds 6 stacks: 1,200 hay or 450 kibble.

If all five checks pass and the animals still starve, the cause is diet or herd size. Compare the herd with what each species eats, then read the pen marker's Food tab.

How to feed penned livestock

Pens arrived in 1.3 and work the same way in 1.6. Fence an area, place a pen marker inside it and rope the animals in. The food route comes next.

1. Open the pen marker's Food tab. It compares the pen's estimated natural growth with what the herd eats per day, and lists the hay and kibble already stockpiled inside.
2. Let the herd graze while growth beats consumption. On temperate soil a decent pen feeds a small herd for most of the year with no hauling.
3. Build a roofed barn on the fence line. Animals enter it through an animal flap, which pen animals can pass, so the barn becomes part of the pen. A normal door is a barrier to them, so the colonist door goes outside the fence.
4. Add a hay and kibble shelf in the barn, with the high priority from the haul check above.
5. Control the herd size. Set slaughter targets in the Animals tab, or keep males and females apart, so breeding does not outgrow the land. The marker's Auto-cut tab is a different tool: it marks plants inside the pen for cutting.

The Food tab's natural growth figure is an estimate from the pen's soil and the biome's wild plants. It does not count what is actually growing, so dandelions or haygrass you sow inside the pen are left out, and so are tiles under buildings. Stockpiled hay and kibble inside the pen show up on a separate line.

Fence types, flying birds and pen sizes are covered in how to make an animal pen.

What each animal can eat: the vanilla feed matrix

Each species has a fixed diet. Dogs, cats and wolves skip hay, and wargs skip kibble.

• Hay counts as plant food, and only animals that eat rough plants take it: grazers (cows, muffalo, goats, chickens, alpacas, horses) and rough omnivores such as pigs. Dogs, cats and wolves cannot eat hay or grass, so a husky in a hay barn starves.
• Kibble does not feed everyone. Older guides say "all animals except wargs." In 1.6 the strict carnivores are the warg, the Odyssey vulture and wolverine, and the Anomaly ghoul, a mutated human on the same diet. They take raw meat and corpses and nothing else.
• Grazers also eat raw crops and meals, so a cow that reaches your rice or your freezer will eat it. Keep the pen fence between them.
• Eggs and milk go to dogs, bears and cats. Grazers, pigs and wolves do not eat them.

Thrumbos also eat trees. Tamed predators hunt only when no legal food is in range, which is no basis for a herd. Feed them raw meat or kibble.

Hay vs kibble vs grazing vs meals

Feed	Nutrition	Stack	Spoils?	Best for
Hay	0.05 each	200	Rots after 60 days at full rot speed. Deteriorates on unroofed ground; a shelf prevents that.	Grazers and pigs. Cheapest winter feed.
Kibble	0.05 each	75	Never rots. Deteriorates on unroofed ground; a shelf prevents that.	Mixed herds, dogs and cats. Turns spare meat and eggs into feed.
Live grass	Up to 0.5 per plant	None	Goes leafless in hard cold	Free food in the growing season
Raw meat and corpses	0.05 per meat	75	Rots fast unless frozen	Wargs, vultures, wolverines, ghouls
Meals	0.9 (simple)	10	Rots unless frozen	Colonists. Small animals waste most of a meal.

Kibble is cooked at a butcher table from 1 nutrition of raw meat or animal product plus 1 nutrition of plants or hay, and one batch gives 50 kibble (2.5 nutrition). That returns 125% of what goes in. A butcher spot gives 35 kibble per batch (87.5%). Fish counts as meat in Odyssey. The 125% holds for any meat, but kibble is best spent on protein you would otherwise waste, such as eggs, spare meat or human meat nobody will eat, and not on meat your colonists need. Animals take no mood penalty from what is inside it. The recipe and bill setup are in how to make kibble.

Meals are a poor animal feed because an animal eats until it is full and its stomach scales with body size. A chicken holds 0.3 nutrition, so a 0.9 simple meal is gone in one sitting and most of it is wasted. Hay and kibble come in 0.05 bites, so the loss shrinks to at most part of one bite.

Keep storage haygrass out of the pen

Grass and haygrass become edible at 65% growth. Each plant type has its own threshold, and trees work differently. A half-grown plant gives much less than its listed nutrition, and sown plants like haygrass lose the most: about 0.13 at 65% growth and 0.3 at full growth. Wild grass gives about 0.27 at 65% and 0.5 at full growth. Harvested, the same haygrass gives 18 hay, or 0.9 nutrition, before skill and difficulty yield modifiers. Grow haygrass in a field outside the fence and haul the hay in. Inside the pen, plain wild grass at 0.5 per plant is the better grazing crop.

Winter reserve: how much hay or kibble per animal

An adult animal eats its hunger rate × 1.6 in nutrition per day while fed. Babies and juveniles eat less. Pregnancy does not raise an animal's hunger, but every birth adds a new mouth. Divide the daily nutrition by 0.05 to get hay or kibble per day.

Plan from the nutrition per day column. A cow eats 0.86 nutrition a day, so a pile sized from its 0.535 hunger rate comes up more than a third short.

Each outdoor plant picks its own leafless point between 10 and 18 °C below its minimum growing temperature, which puts grass at −10 °C to −18 °C. Leafless plants are still alive, but animals cannot eat them, and a plant stays inedible for at least a day after it goes leafless. Snow deeper than 0.5 also hides grass. In a cold biome the herd lives off the shelf from the first real frost.

Animal feeding planner and winter reserve calculator

Enter your adult herd and the number of days it has to live off stored feed. The planner splits the herd by diet, so dogs and wargs do not end up on the hay pile.

Adult, fed rates. Round up, keep a margin, and count births as extra mouths in the middle of winter.

Pets, dogs and small pet bases

Pets are not penned. They follow their allowed area, so the freezer is fair game if it sits inside that area. Animals take the closest legal food, so a dog that naps beside the kitchen eats your meals before it walks to a kibble pile across the base.

• Make an allowed area for animals that leaves out the freezer, kitchen and dining room.
• Put a small kibble shelf next to their beds. One shelf tile holds 3 stacks of 75.
• Dogs cannot use hay, so a shared hay barn does not feed them.
• On a large base, pets that work far from their beds (hauling, following a master) need a second kibble spot near that work, so the food stays inside their search range.

Downed animals and doctor feeding

A starving or injured animal that cannot walk is fed by a doctor, but only while it lies in a colony animal bed or animal sleeping spot and needs medical rest. Carry it to one (rescue works on animals), keep diet-legal food reachable and leave Doctor work enabled. An animal lying on the floor is skipped.

Emergency feed tool: fix a starving herd

Pick the symptom and work through the list in order.

Cold biomes, mountain bases, caravans and DLC

Cold biomes and toxic fallout

Ice sheet and sea ice have no real grazing, so plan stored feed from day one. During toxic fallout, lock the herd in a roofed flap barn with a full shelf. Unroofed plants die off, and animals outside take the toxic buildup.

Mountain bases and gravships

Without soil there is no grazing. Feed comes from hydroponic crops turned into kibble, imported hay, or meat. Rice and other raw crops also feed grazers directly.

Caravans

Grazers forage along the route in most biomes, but not in hard winter or on barren terrain. Pack hay or kibble for those legs, and raw meat or fresh corpses for wargs.

Ideology

Animals take no mood penalty from kibble ingredients. Human meat or venerated-animal meat in kibble only matters to your colonists, and how much depends on your precepts.

Console and mods

The numbers on this page come from the PC version, 1.6.4871. Console builds can differ, so check values in game. Animals that use nutrient paste dispensers, hay that never rots and "feed animal" jobs come from mods and are not part of vanilla.

Taming bait follows its own food rules. See cannot tame: not enough food and how to tame animals.

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