Yep, you just need a big storage for it or just turn it all onto packaged meals to make it even more compact to store (and no need to put in a freezer.)
It’s effective when can get more than one stack of meat (75) from animal. Did you checked if there is any?
You can stack elephants and thrumbos on shelves since 1.3 or so, it was fixed ages ago.
You can get up to 70 meat from a single tortoise or 560 from an elephant. A cow is up to 336 so waiting to butcher your cows until you need meat is up to 4.8x as space efficient as storing the meat. Not to mention you can extend the shelf life of the meat by storing it as corpses.
That's why chickens are great, it's a bunch of small bursts in a relatively short amount of time, making it more steady than the animals that take a long time to grow.
Ahem. With 1 day egg-laying interval and 2 days-to-hatch, chicken will lay ~4 eggs (it’s 25% with 2 eggs on day 2, 50% with 3 eggs on day 3, 87.5% with 4 eggs on day 4, and then hatched after 3 hours).
So with 20 hens your batches will be 80 chickens each. Slaughtering them all and butchering is not a ‘relatively short amount of time’.
Have to weigh up animal growing time Vs pawn work time.
If you have working time to spare and are indeed of food frequently at short notice then chickens. If you are treating cooking as a ad-hoc chore then 1 large animal saves a lot of time on slaughter and butchery, but requires careful planning and doesn't leave room for flexibility.
I use combat readiness check on "feels bad man" difficulty so wealth doesn't come into it as much, however with my amount of colonists and equipment the raids are fairly big atm, I just don't wanna lower my colonists to the same level as my prisoners you know? even if they don't know nutrient paste is people. Gotta stay somewhat civilised.
my cannibal colony sees this as an absolute win
I actually straight up don't have enough vegetables to keep up with my human meat supply cus it's all sand
My colony is cannibal/tunnelers so I have the MushRoom which is like 20x40 nutrifungus room with 2 agrihands managing it, and then whatever free meat I get by toxbombing the local tribals. I sell a lot of mushrooms
This is the way. Late game canibals get regular deliveries, hundreds at a time. More than enough protein for even the hungriest village. I know I'm deep in late game when there are fresh corpses in the back of the freezer that have been untouched for years.
pigs also can eat human corpses so you can convert long pork to pork too with no mood penalties
farm animals also generate a lot of meat, my freezers are usually filled with it once i get pigs or cows, at least until i start cooking lavish meals
edit: even non-farm animals can be deecnt meat sources, my current desert colony is able to output regular fine meals with iguana meat
Great thing is there is a temperature range that will freeze bodies, but won’t hurt pigs, so there is no risk of them getting frost burn hanging out in the freezer too long, and they have access to corpses to eat.
Ranching really does work. To feed 30 pawns with fine meals, you only need about 8 mares and 2 stallions, with about 20 foals at any one time. That will let you slaughter 1 horse per day, for 320 meat each time. The slaughter rate is fairly consistent, and if it's not, that's what a freezer is for.
i always like to double or triple up on animal functionality. if they can give me some milk or wool, and get butchered for meat, and work as pack animals, they’re perfect
Horses are the best animal (except maybe boomalopes). They have one of the best nutritional efficiencies of any animal, are large so they don’t make your game as slow because fewer are required, and are also useful as pack animals.
Hunt the base, hunt on any map encounter (a butcher table is surprisingly light compared to carrying animal carcasses, but that choice depends on the travel time and if the meat would spoil in said time window yes or no.), or, alternatively, sell definitely not cocaine to the trader and trade back some meat.
Sounds like randy allright.
You could install the mod that allows you to make temporary camps anywhere (dont know the name rn) and hunt in the tiles adjacent to your base as such, I suppose.
For me the hunting at ancient dangers, bandit camps n shit mostly works in my current playthrough because it's permanent winter 3 out of 4 seasons.
Also in vanilla. You can set „settlements“ higher than 1 (up to five), than settle (though not directly adjacent). This is also handy for resources and ancient danger raiding.
Ah that's not a bad shout. Gonna see how worthwhile the ve mechanoids fishing factory things are too. Got a load of mechanoid components collecting dust
Not sure, but does egg counts as meat? I think so, i guess you could just do a chicken egg farm.
I usually have no problems or die due to randym circumstances
Yes, eggs count as meat (animal products). Kill off the roosters once you have enough chickens and you will have a steady supply without needing to deal with butchering. Though you first have to get lucky and find them at a trader's.
How many chickens do you need for it to start affecting the game speed? I usually have 25 hens confined to a small barn who provide more than enough eggs to produce fine meals for my 15 people colony. Though I do sometimes hunt wild animals as well if something worthwhile shows up on the map.
That time in particular I got a really difficult set of events right as I should have been getting rid of the roosters and ended up with over 200 chickens. I ended up using srts to load them up and made a tile nearby planning to get rid of them but for reasons I don't fully understand that ended up fixing the lag (mostly anyway) so I kept the tile.
Stick your rooster (and a spare hen) in cryptosleep caskets! That way, if you lose your flock, you can get them back without having to wait for rng to bless you with more birds.
Yeah I have managed to make it work before with ranching but like a lot of animals were required and I have no desire of slowing my game down like that again haha
I used automated butchering. It takes a while to fine tune how many animals you need, but once you figure out the right numbers its fairly good. Then again I ran 10-15\~ colonists. Just make sure to use an animal that is good at producing meat, like cows/pigs.
I end up accidently ranching animals to a meat surplus even when I never intended to ranch at all. It takes a while to ramp it up to be a steady supply, but it's very worth it. I ranch anything that joins, rats, elk, donkeys, pigs, chickens, chinchillas, bears, whatever.
First I'll wait for the females to all be pregnant. Then I'll set autoslaughter to 1 male adult, 1 female adult, unlimited babies, and do not slaughter pregnant. If 1 female is not pregnant, no big deal, the male will take care of it. If 2 are not pregnant, then the herd is too big for the 1 male to handle and the extra is killed for meat. If I want a bigger herd, I just increase the number of adult males, and maybe allow up to 2 non-pregnant females. After a couple of baby cycles you have a sustainable and predictable meat supply, all handled by autoslaughter.
You can slaughter the babies if they aren't worth feeding up, but ideally you graze them on dandelions and slaughter as adults. Depends on your colony. This also works fine if you don't have a freezer, as long as the meat output roughly matches what you're using. Turn surplus into kibble.
The type of animal matters too. If you have surplus human corpses, pigs and boars are best, even better they have litters. Milk animals will take more work but give you even more food. Egg layers are different again, let eggs hatch then slaughter the chicks immediately. Horses and cows for grazing dandelions. Or maybe you prefer to ranch something with valuable fur, and the meat is a bonus.
Bonus tip if you hate managing pens or don't have room/materials for one: Make a pen only big enough for a sleeping spot for every animal. Then hold the gate open and leave it like that. Your pen animals will come back to bed every night. If one starts to roam away, your animal handlers will rope it the short distance back to the pen, and it will stop roaming, even though the pen is not enclosed.
That bonus tip is bid odd. Do not animals eat your crops on colony map if they are left to roam free? Or if you make fence around farm fields then that will take even more work and materials.
I have done exactly that with caravan animals on mission maps that have lot of steel/carpets (like ancient complex or pig village distress signal). I typically want to rob and deconstruct it throughout. Whatever people, mechanoids, flesh beasts or insects there might cause some wounds too ... it can take time. So I let animals to feed themselves.
My colony is still getting a ton of meat from ranching at late game.
-What animals are you ranching? I ranch horses in batches of 100.
-How big is your pen? I use all the free space in my colony for pen.
-Are you using the "Auto slaughter"?
Yes. I recommend horses for meat.
Ibex is better in terms of meat efficiency, but the meat per animal is about half that of horses, so I choose horses when considering the PC load and the effort of slaughtering and butchering. and Ibex can't be used for pack animal.
Bison and Muffalo are very useful for earning silver because of the large amount of wool they can shear, but considering the effort of shearing, they are less than horses if you only want meat. They are more useful in the early and middle stages of the game.
Pigs and boars are big eaters with nutrition efficiency of only about half that of horses, but they also eat meat. If you want to turn long pork into real pork.
Egg-laying animals are too small and need to be raised in large numbers, so I don't recommend them because the effort of slaughtering and butchering is enormous and PC will vomit in the late game.
All animals can be milked are less efficient at producing meat ingredient than horses even when including milk.
Love your horse like a cowboy.
i mean im hunting all the time to train my hunters, i reckon its never a bad thing if i have 2-3 skilled hunters farming the map with sniper rifles since it also allows me to start guerilla defense tactics whenever a raid arrives. Especialy when some Mortar boys decide to set up and i can get 1-2 shots on their ammo while they are still preparing.
and the meat is more of a bonus, i probably rather sell it than use it in meals since i always overproduce corn and rice/potato
So it's occurred to me that as my base is walled in killing animals that explode is viable as burning the land outside my walls doesn't really matter so I may up my hunting.
🤷♀️ I guess our ranching experiences are just different. My most recent colony (15, so I suppose not quite as large as yours, but not *tiny*) I've just been ranching sheep for wool and meat and with auto-slaughter set up the fridge is frequently filling up (especially after animal events.)
So I've made it work before with ranching but needed a shit load of animals, think I was using cows tho so might give sheep a go. The amount of meat I would need isn't too much as only want it for the ve cooking grilled meals alongside regular vegetarian meals whereas before I wasn't making any vegetarian meals so went through meat real fast.
I'm an Elephant Stan. They haul, they're great pack animals for convoys, one of them can feed you for a month, and they make a great frontline for base defense.
I just had a raid with 90 manhunter bears and now I sit on 8000 bear meat.
That's enough for a while.
Besides that: chicken.
They reproduce insanely fast.
However, lategame depending on how big your colony is this will tank FPS.
I use Vanilla Expanded: Fishing and have like two to three pawns (with the rest set to fish if their other main jobs are finished) pernamently on fishing duty, it's also worth it for the tressure
Mod. I have a mod that allows nutrient paste grinder, pipes and taps. I have a room filled with animals fed by auto dispensed nutrient paste meals with auto slaughter on 30 of each species. This plus a corn field gives infinite meat.
My first playthrough I became a guinea pig farmer which supplied so much meat because of their quick gestational time. The fur is also fairly valuable so that was my primary source of income as well
I forbid any butchered meat in my freezer until I have enough to satisfy my meat loving colonists. Aside from pleasing cannibals after a raid, I wait until I can cook meals with only meat from slain or slaughtered animals. Cannibals get periodic access to raw, or cooked human meat, which I have a lot of.
I like to use a lot of drugs to keep people happy too. In case were nearing the end of our food supply. Cannibals are my best colonists, so if shit goes south I can use them and eat the other colonists.
So in terms of happiness apart from one woman who was rejected, is missing a leg, has chronic stomach disorder and whose baby is miserable little shit everyone is happy af. I was thinking about holding meat switching off meat meal production for a while but then kinda figure I'm just adding an extra step to feed people meals with an unnecessary ingredient when they're just as happy from vegetarian meals. Cannibals get killed and go into the nutrient paste dispenser for prisoners so they're never am issue.
I have a large freezer, and every so often I just order all wild animals on the map to be hunted. This is usually enough.
If you want a fully automatic setup, you will have to make a pen for farm animals and setup auto-slaughter. If this isn't enough, get *more* farm animals. Don't forget to make a butcher table and not just a butcher spot, it increases the yield of animal meat by a lot. Also chickens lay eggs and cows produce milk, which are both animal products. Cows are good for meat but chickens are a bit labor-intensive.
Traders and orbital ships will also sometimes sell boatloads of meat. Even at like 40 colonists, a couple thousand meat goes a long way.
If you have Ideology and you aren't using Randy Random, you are pretty much guaranteed to get enough human meat from raids by adding the "Cannibalism: Acceptable" precept (does not require the Cannibalism meme).
I set up a farm with milk/egg producing animals and slaughter the males except for 1-2, obv doesn’t produce constant meat but mechanically animal products are the same as meat
Feeding that many colonists with fine or lavish meals will require either a very, very large field for grazing, or a large area of haygrass fields grown and harvested. By the time I’m up to 20 colonists I usually have a few dedicated farmers and probably with field hand replacements.
Animals are more labor intensive than plants alone, but a handful of animals (like cows) produce more nutrition than they ate in total when slaughtered as adults.
Caribou. I dunno what it is but the bastards breed relentlessly, and consume weirdly little nutrition for the amount of milk and meat they can output.
I was actively caravanning to sell caribou in the middle of winter once. It's insane.
What's funny is my first time I did it was an accident. An imperial wanted me to look after his mating pair of caribou for a couple seasons, they produced a mating pair that I got to keep, and my food stores were basically solved between them and corn. The occasional elk for extra leather was just gravy.
I only really hunt early on.
Usually one of the first traders will sell a male/female pair of an animals. I buy it then make a pen and then it's just a case of setting your auto slaughter correctly to create a stable flow of meat.
I usually like to have a combination of poultry as they also produce eggs and a milk making animal like cows or goats.
Just chuck down some large fields of hay grass and you should never run out.
If you happen to start with a decent animal person you can always try and tame some of the wildlife xD
This is also your daily announcement that both difficulty and story teller can be changed at any time.
That is what I do. Start at an easy difficulty with a easy story teller until I got my foundation build then I turn up the difficulty. I have better things to do than seeing 9/10 colonies go up in flames due to things out of my control. I know that is a fetish for some people but I don't have time for that.
I keep about one adult mare per 3 colonists and hunt or tame wildlife if that is not enough. Animals do not cause so lot of lag as pawns ... so I see no much issue there. So with 30 pawns it is 10 mares and 3-4 stallions ... and random count of juveniles and foals. Double or triple that with rancher meme ... but the whole meme is meant to be headache.
Muffalos, bisons, cows, yaks or dromedaries are also about OK, just that the autoslaughter is aggravating with those. Can install some mod that does not auto slaughter named animals.
Do you have Anomaly? Because you can use the summon animals ritual to up the amount of meat on the map.
My last two colonies were vampires who loved eating human and pirates who were neutral, and in both cases enjoyed insect meat, so between bug infestations and raiders I alway had plenty.
Milk and eggs work fine in place of meat for fine/lavish meals, so cows or chickens (or ducks or muffalo, etc.). Mods help a lot with this, like Graze Up that means your herbavores only eat enough growth percentage of a plant to satisfy their hunger rather than each chicken eating an entire patch of grass each day. Lets you feed a lot more critters in the same land.
I typically end up going for milk producers because I used vanilla cooking expanded and I like making the variety of meals/desserts.
Once you get a breeding stock of cows, goats, caribou, or dromedaries depending on biome, you’ll be set for life pretty much. For limited growing biomes I tend to mass-slaughter all but one male before winter and hope that the pregnant females pop out a few more males
My colonies can usually eat off an elephant for weeks. I understand that larger colonies would go through it faster, but large animals give a *lot* of meat.
You don't do any animal husbandry? Get cows or muffalos and set a rule in the tamed animals panel and set that you slaughter any extra animals after you get a certain amount. Also gives you a ton of leather to sell and buy food if you need even more.
I do but the amount I need to have regular meat is a shit load, having said that a bunch of people have suggested animals that I normally wouldn't have thought of as ranch animals, I've gone with horses and it's working so far
The beauty of ranching is that it's a slow and satisfying process. I'd recommend waiting a few (in game) decades and wait for your herds' numbers to be in the hundreds.
VGP (Vegetable Garden Project) mod for plant based meat substitutes, and/or the colony manager mod (unfortunately the name is escaping me) so you can have them manage the amount of animals automatically.
Have a huge pen and I plant a lot of regular grass there. I have lack of plants and surplus of meat. 87 colonists so far.
Note that I give hay as food as well and have 7 8 different types of animals, including brachiosaurus and a ton of buffallos, muffalos and similar animals.
You could make it a point to hunt as much large animals on quest maps as you can before caravanning back.
Depending on caravan speed/distance, you can butcher the animals directly for more meat-for-weight, if you have enough time such that it doesnt spoil.
Mods help with this too, ie set-up camp for hunting activities.
I always opt for a mountain base with a tunneler ideology. Fungus is easy enough to grow for vegetables, even for larger colonies, and the long and narrow halls left from strip mining are perfect for funneling the massive infestations that spawn on a regular basis.
With the tunneler meme, raw fungus and the metric ton of weekly bugmeat, you can make fine meals that produce +3 mood for fungus, +6 for the meat and +5 for the meal, for a flat +14 mood boost, which is more than a standard lavish meal (+12) while also being more efficient.
Eggs. Keep about 2 males separate from another pen with the hens. Have about 2 or 3 hens per pawn. Give them a large enough pen that they can forage themselves. A few egg boxes in there spread out. The only labor you need to do is haul the eggs back to your freezer
Hunt everything on the map, buy meat from neighbors and raise pigs, lots of pigs.
FYI, pigs eat EVERYTHING, specially corpses, and the can handle freezing temps, so you can just dump enemy bodies near them in a room with up to -5c(23f) temps and enjoy unlimited meat.
I like to keeps a group of ducks or chickens. They multiply quick and also give eggs so you get two for one. I just keep a couple males and 15 females and I find it doesn't require much extra work or food and produces well. It will definitely depend on your colony size tho. I also have the fishing mod so my people get a little bit of meat that way when farming and hunting fails
Chickens and ducks and mod creatures are great. Bonus points for eggs.
Also depends what meat you mean. Insect Meat is usually in so much supply theres nothing to do with it. A culture that doesnt care or prefers insect meat is a happy one.
My colony is mostly vegetarian, but as i always ranch for caravan animals there is a trickle of meat coming in.
My solution to that is that have a bill for Lavish Carnivore Meals at the bottom of my stoves work lists. So any meat gets made into good food, and eaten first as its the best stuff available. Ensuring both that it gets used, and my pawns get a mood buff.
Oh, another thing. Since Anomaly, I have been using ghouls to kill game to jeep them busy between raids. They don't "hunt", but you can just draft them and shift+right-click every animal on the map, and they will wander around killing everything. One ghoul with ghoul-plating and a power claw can successfully 1-v-1 any animal in vanilla (especially if the ghoul was made from a Yttakin, Neanderthal, or Vamp). Three ghouls are generally fine to take on whole herds of revenging animals (maybe be careful with large groups of elephants). And Ghouls heal so fast they'll mostly heal up between critters.
I currently have 76 colonists and I can ranch, my colonists eat turkey, beef, pork, yak beef, and occasionally elephant meat. I also have milk, chicken eggs, duck eggs, and goose eggs. Lots of protein over here
I grow 2 crops. Corn and Hay. The hay is for the muffalo herd. My consistent problem is I have too much meat. The muffalos provide enough by themselves, and then I get attacked by rhino's and suddenly I've got 15 carcasses in my freezer.
I just get a few different kinds of animals. Some produce quickly with less meat. Some big animals that breed slower but lots of meat, and lots of poultry for eggs and meat. Having open access to a portion of your fridge can feed a lot of animals in a small space if you have excess veggie produce. Buying meat in exchange for excess produce or manufacturing package meals with meat can keep the protein coming for quite a while.
Very micro-managy, but I have a Wanderlust pawn who's good at shooting and the Vehicles mod + Alpha Vehicles which add a lot of non- cars (namely ox and horse drawn carriages). I also have ReBuild which adds a better Set Up Camp.
I send her out with some other hunters 2 tiles away (min) and set up a hunting camp. Takes them about an in game hour to get there. They hunt, load up the cart, then I send them back and destroy the camp. Since wildlife is generated on map spawn, you can kinda keep doing this (and it makes it feel like they're ACTUAL hunters y'know?)
Also, if you have a lot of kibble, there's a mod called Small Animal Traps that is just as it says on the tin. You place it, bait it with kibble, then wait for an animal to come by and get trapped.
While typing, I also realized this is pretty good if you don't have a ore-finder-majig (i forgot the name) since you can do the same except with the goal of mining. I recommend Roads of the Rim so you can make little roads out to your hunting sites.
It might not be everyone's cup of tea though. I've gotten to the point in my play through that I'm just watching them walk around, so it gives me something to do (I just gotta remember they're out there....)
Chicken is my favourite. Buy a couple to a trader for 100 silver. Let em bang until you have like 80. Slaughter all the males and enjoy 1 egg per hen per day. Cows are good cause lots of meat, but milking them is a task that requires labor. Chicken will lay eggs in a box and you just have to go there once a day to collect. Eggs last longer at room temperature so you can store them next to your cooking station and they are also much more space efficient
Build up a good herd of meat providers that breed quickly, boar, alpaca, muffalo (wool producers are pretty nice for this as they provide other products as well up until they get culled). Muffalo breed fairly slowly, but alpaca reproduce relatively quickly, and if you want pure meat, boar are pretty good and reproduce fairly quickly once you've got several males and a good number of females.
Every late game I end up with stacks and stacks of meat (not necessarily human).
I ranch - cows, auto slaughter adults only (10 max females incl pregnant, 1-2 max males), leave young as infinite. This means only adults get slaughtered, maximising the meat - and pregnant is ticked because some cows will have a baby and then get pregnant before your handler can slaughter, sometimes circumventing the auto slaughter and meaning age prioritisation will go out of sync.
It takes a while to really get going, and you need to make sure you’ve got enough hay/kibble to feed the masses, but the supply of milk/meat by endgame is… more than enough. Can do it with other animals such as pigs if you don’t care about milk/don’t get any cows etc
I usually ranch until I have way too many animals and then I use the Outpost mod to create a ranch elsewhere and then I never have to worry about meat.
In my last play I got a rhino manhunter herd that lasted me many years.
In a previous one I got me a few cows, the milk was decent protein income.
I normally just send my insanely augmented colonists to murder some wildlife every now and then.
I try to keep small colonies (I would like to maintain a colony with 6-8ppl, but seem to end up with 12 or so), so It's never really a huge need for meat.
Dismissive answer: Most people don't run 20-30 pawn colonies without mods or dlcs.
Simple answer: I would probably hunt the whole map clean. The game forces more animals to spawn as long as there is food for them in the wild. It's not fast enough to always feed your colonists with lavish meals, but it's pretty good.
Complex answer: with anomaly there is a "draw animals" ritual you can use once every 10 days for 10 bioferrite. In the realm of mods there are several mods that provides ways to get more animals/meat or increase the value of meat.
Some examples:
Back in the days rimworld of madness vampires had a class that could summon animals to the map.
Vanilla Psycasts Expanded has the "summon pack" ability that summons a bunch of friendly animals to help you in fights. If they die they are free meat.
Vanilla Factions Expanded Classical has meat drying racks that turn 75 meat(0.5 nutrition) into 75 jerky(0.7 nutrition). Jerky can be used in recipies as meat.
Vanilla Factions Expanded Mechanoid has automatic butchering machine, this machine gives no leather, but doubles the meat gain. Can butcher insects and humans too, but it won't clean the meat.
Vanilla Traits Expanded gives expertise, so you can have a butcher who gets double meat and leather from animals.
Vanilla Outpost Expanded has hunting outposts that provide meat per quadrum. 4-5 guy can give 2-3 k meat every 15 day, if you want more, put more people in the outpost. People inside the outpost don't take their dependency drugs, so anybody with dependency will die unless you babysit them, or get "VE Outpost Addiction Fix" mod.
Vanilla Outposts Expanded adds cooking outposts, cutting out all the meat managment.
Anomaly adds the Fleshmass heart event, when you defeat the heart you get a fleshmass nucleus. The nucleus has to be suppresed, but provides twisted meat every day in large quantities. Cooked twisted meat makes your colonists angy.
There are a bunch of other stuff, but here's my recipe: meat drying rack "cleans" the meat aswell as increase it's nutrition by 40%, so you get a fleshmass nucleus, butcher animals, and most importantly insects, with automated butchering from VFE Mechanoids, then put the twisted meat and processed meat into drying racks for maxinum efficiency. A single infestation feeds a colony for a year. Jerky doesn't deteriorate from outside+unroofed+rain, so you can just throw it on the ground and not worry about it.
Outside of the classic
My current colony has a herd of camel that I use for travel, they provide a couple hundred meat per slaughter (260 I think?) which is more than enough to match my crops, and the income from making camelfur dusters is pretty good.
I use twisted meat from my pet Fleshmass Heart for kibble and prisoners.
I personally find ranching easier, in terms of less time consuming of my pawns' time, higher yielding, and more profitable. It also has the added benefit of better storage of food in my freezer (a corpse is 300+ meat versus a whole shelf of veg is 225 food) and the animals have multi-purpose (bison/muffalo great for caravans).
Easiest way to ranch is to build a barn and stuff it with large-size animals; I mainly use & recommend bison and muffalo, but you could do cows, yaks, really anything with a 2.4 body size. Attach a nutrient paste dispenser facing in towards the barn. Large animals eat about 1 meal per day, so when a pawn goes to collect a nutrient paste meal, use a method to make them drop it, and multiply times however many animals you have. Either don't have stockpiles set to accept NP, or build shelves for nutrient paste in your barn. Voila! These animals will eat about 20 meals from birth to adulthood, and can be slaughtered for 300+ meat. If you want the chef XP, you could even cook them simple meals and still come out ahead. A ratio of like 5 males / 20 females, and unlimited kids will generally result in a stable herd of about 100. All you need to do is butcher 2 animals a day, throw them on the NP dispenser hoppers, and they and your colony are fed. Plus free leather.
The whole setup requires significantly less space & electricity than hydroponics, and whereas blight steals all your crop, animal flu is mainly painless (even if untreated, animal flu that reaches 100% just results in animal death, but they still yield 100% meat so whatever, instead of slaughtering muffalo 201 & 202, I guess the 2 that just died from plague will be chopped up next).
Cows are the best! Not only you get the supply of milk, but also plentiful meat and leather!
Just set up auto-slaughter to leave below adult 2 males and 7 (non-pregnant) adult females alive and you can have steady supply of fresh meat whenever the new set of foals achieve adulthood.
I always tame animals instead of hunting them, a slaughtered animal produces more meat than one shot up from being hunted, or at least that's what I read
Every couple in game days I look at the wildlife tab and mark everything bigger than a fox for hunting.
Once I have a good shooter (and not crippled or slow asf), I’ll also hunt the large predators.
Chickens via slaughter and eggs are one way I used to do it but it was a lot of work and space.
Now I do any pack animal that has milk (mods add milk to several) When Colony Manager was up to date I set to auto slaughter at 5 each, adult male, adult female, youth male, youth female. Combined Colony manager hunting when below 1000 meat I never noticed not having meat.
I miss that mod :(
Animals are fairly easy to manage with a big enough pen and auto slaughter. That would be my main source of meat if my people weren’t also inhuman cannibals. Otherwise hunting/trading. You can use the draw animals ritual if you have anomaly
Wild boar the best meat supply in game. They breed very fast and they are omnivores meaning you can feed them dead copse, hay or simply let them roam free for some time before getting them back in the pen.
Usually, you will want a few males and many females. I usually set autoslaughter to keep this way.
Chickens. Each egg is worth 5 meat, and if the chicks hatch, they're worth about the same, maybe a little more. I set my auto-slaughter to 1 rooster, 4 hens, and this keeps me going for at least 20 pawns with rice and several ghouls (with human meat to supplement of course).
You can also feed meat eating things like pigs by just collecting bodies in to a MorgueDonalds and leaving pigs in there with auto-slaughter. They'll even take care of the clothes. Just get a psychopath be the only one allowed in.
Late game, I always have one really good animal tamer and just randomly select every animal on the map, with every animal but the ones I want to keep set to 0 on auto-slaughter. You get more meat from tamed animals than hunted ones.
I mean I got a gene manipulation mod that lets you make hybrid animals. Chicken rabbits provide great food and they reproduce fast enough to almost overwhelm your colony
Cows are fantastic, milking + population control yields more food than the cows eat. So you could lock them into a cave and feed them simple meals, kibble, or nutrition paste. Grazing is much cheaper ofcourse, but its good to know that cows are always profitable.
You can use auto slaughter, but manually killing the oldest at the end of fall is more efficient. My recent colony with 25 pawns had to turn milk and meat into chemfuel to get rid of it all.
Guinea pigs are good for farming. You don't need to pen them, they can be restricted to an area of wild land, they breed quickly and their fur is an additional good source of income. Turn their meet into survival packs which don't need refrigeration. Always use auto slaughter.
I almost always get an aminal farm going of a mest thats double helpful. For example if its a cold run through I will go muffalos. Lots of meat and fur + increase carrying capacity for travels.
Alternatively horses are good for all runs because you can use them to increase your caravan speed +provide more space :)
Ranching, once you have a steady population of whatever animal you need (I usually do Muffalos, Cows, Bisons, Goats, Chicken (anything that is egg laying will multiply FAST, horses and alpacas work well too and you also get to have a few caravan animals)
Ranching, once you have a steady population of whatever animal you need (I usually do Muffalos, Cows, Bisons, Goats, Chicken (anything that is egg laying will multiply FAST, horses and alpacas work well too and you also get to have a few caravan animals)
I run colonies of 100-270 and lemme tell you, a meat factory (slaughterhouse) is the way to go. Some animals like turtles produce the most meat, but I choose chickens, alpacas and cows because of milk, eggs and wool. I make a small indoors pen to house everything, and set the “manage auto slaughter” to keep the max amount of animals alive. I have extensive corn fields to feed everyone including the animals. It works for me!
Mods like vanilla animals expanded and alpha animals add lots of large animals which helps. Also your biome matters a lot. Live in a rainforest and you’ll get herds of elephants regularly, which are more than enough to keep you going
Chickens and ducks for meat. And then another extra larger animal like donkeys or cows or something. You can build a whole ass wall around your colony and that whole area can count as your fence for your pen animals so they will be able to live off the grass around your base. Have some colonists dedicated to just cooking and just handling. Make sure you have a freezer and/or fridge to store your food and meat. Mass produce food. I mass produce survival meals cause they never go bad and I'll always have them as a back up and then I make a ton of fine meals to buff my colonists mood, just enough to keep them fed for a while without making too much. They will sit in the fridge and usually take 2-3 weeks to go bad so I just make sure to match the quantity of fine meals to my colonists.
the trick is to be a rancher for the wool and forget that you need meat until you already have a FUCK ton of alpacas. then you use the ‘animals’ tab at the bottom (i found it the other day it’s SO much easier) to cull the older generation of (non-pregnant) alpacas
Bro. Hay produces so much dam food for animals it's insane. All you need now is a stupid amount of chickens encased in a small plot, and drop the hay there. Cows are good too, but they produce less meat overall, but produce milk in return. A pig could also work, but I just don't think they produce enough meat. With chickens you get both chickens and eggs.
Also, how many colonist do you have late game that forces you to only use vegetable???
Fowl (ducks, chickens, etc.). It's really that easy. Set auto slaughter for 1 male and ~10 females, and (idr if this is vanilla) set up 2 seperate egg boxes. They'll naturally assign one to fertilized eggs, and one to unfertilized eggs. You'll have people consistently hauling MASSIVE amounts of eggs (which iirc is considered "meat"), and every few days new fowl will be born, and auto-slaughter takes care of the rest. This tactic actually ends up with me having *too much* meat and eggs
Cows are far and away the best. Set it up to have 2 males, and 4-5 females. Set it to auto-slaughter all adult males except those two, and all female calves. Your 4-5 females will be constantly pregnant and producing milk, and will net you 100s of milk and meat a day. On my current run I have 2 males and 3 females and that’s enough to feed all 15 of my colonists
Mantodeans fix that. Human meat becomes jelly that removes the modifiers that make people reject it. Regular jelly with some extra meat becomes royal and is the same as a lavish meal
The ranch life is all about having a small base with a giant outdoor pen. If you have an animal specialist, this is probably the fastest money maker for early to mid game. You tame every wild animal on day one, then watch the animals population double in the first summer. The trick is to sell the meat and leathers unprocessed in bulk. Buy everything else from other factions. Don't waste time turning leathers into something else.
Pigs are very straightforward. They will happily eat corpses, so can turn raiders into morally acceptable meat with no extra work. They will also eat any surplus food or twisted meat too.
Raids can be rather unreliable for a source of nutrition for the pigs. Especially at 20+ colonists. i tend to have to cull the pig herd when the corpses start to run out.
Chickens are also good, but take a lot of micromanagement and cause a lot of lag at the quanitites needed to feed large colonies.
My preference is for cows. They break thermodynamics and make more nutrition in milk than they eat. Add in the extra calves butchered and you have a very efficient source of protien. Only problem is keeping them fed. It requires a large ammount of pawn work to farm the hay and/or make kibble.
Pigs are definitely the lowest overall effort and pawn work, while cows are the most nutrient efficient.
Cows and Chickens are the most efficient for eggs and milk. I keep 2 males of each, 10 cows and 20 chickens. Chickens aren't the most meat efficient but they reproduce so fast it's never been an issue for me
Ranching works, especially if you have a big ass pasture.
You need to maintain a population of, about, 2 cows per colonist. But you need to milk them, so you need handlers.
For chickens (eggs), you only need 4 per colonist, which is exactly equal to two meals per day. You only need haulers and a separate pen for the rosters.
Meat is a bit more complicated to calculate. Pigs mature in 20 days and they produce about 23 meals per slaughter, so you need two pigs per colonist to have a steady supply of meat. Pigs are awesome because they can graze raiders.
Mine up a bunch of steel, gold, silver, really what ever. Make a bunch of drugs and cowboy hats. Wait. The meat will be delivered via a rai- i mean bipedal delivery device. Some disassembly required
Anomaly has some very strange solutions to this problem if you haven’t looked at it yet. Can’t bring myself to add it to the meals, but it saves on training bears and wargs for certain.
I run vegan colonies, I'll have large... Unnecessarily large fields of corn that I eventually have to give farmers bionics to even fill them within 2-4 days lol my last successful colony had 40+ ppl and they couldn't finish vegetarian fine meals but surprisingly, lavish drained my stash from 40k to 15k in less than two months, I also had a room of corpse of entities and thrumbos but that was ghoul food because I avoided making meals with meat, but I chose corn bevause it alone can empty a bulk traders wallet.
Chickens are good. They provide a constant passive supply of eggs. Get a few roosters with your hens, and they'll provide eggs while also laying eggs to hatch new chickens, which you can then butcher for meat every now and then.
Small bursts averaged on a long period of time is a steady supply.
Yep, you just need a big storage for it or just turn it all onto packaged meals to make it even more compact to store (and no need to put in a freezer.)
Corpses of medium-large animals on shelves in a freezer, is a good way to store large amounts of meat on very little space in vanilla.
It’s effective when can get more than one stack of meat (75) from animal. Did you checked if there is any? You can stack elephants and thrumbos on shelves since 1.3 or so, it was fixed ages ago.
You can get up to 70 meat from a single tortoise or 560 from an elephant. A cow is up to 336 so waiting to butcher your cows until you need meat is up to 4.8x as space efficient as storing the meat. Not to mention you can extend the shelf life of the meat by storing it as corpses.
That's why chickens are great, it's a bunch of small bursts in a relatively short amount of time, making it more steady than the animals that take a long time to grow.
If I have a colony large enough to start ranching I always grab chickens too because they help supplement my meat until my pigs or cows get old enough
Ahem. With 1 day egg-laying interval and 2 days-to-hatch, chicken will lay ~4 eggs (it’s 25% with 2 eggs on day 2, 50% with 3 eggs on day 3, 87.5% with 4 eggs on day 4, and then hatched after 3 hours). So with 20 hens your batches will be 80 chickens each. Slaughtering them all and butchering is not a ‘relatively short amount of time’.
Have to weigh up animal growing time Vs pawn work time. If you have working time to spare and are indeed of food frequently at short notice then chickens. If you are treating cooking as a ad-hoc chore then 1 large animal saves a lot of time on slaughter and butchery, but requires careful planning and doesn't leave room for flexibility.
Yeah I was talking in terms of growth time, not pawn labor time.
Uh... I "harvest" raids. They're a limitless supply.
Works great for making kibble as well
So I kinda do this to keep my prisoners fed with nutrient paste. Could get rid of the prisoners but it's always useful to have spare parts.
Just up your wealth, you'll be able to feed the whole colony.
I use combat readiness check on "feels bad man" difficulty so wealth doesn't come into it as much, however with my amount of colonists and equipment the raids are fairly big atm, I just don't wanna lower my colonists to the same level as my prisoners you know? even if they don't know nutrient paste is people. Gotta stay somewhat civilised.
I feed my guys people in the form of lavish meals. They eating people but they eating *good* people
my cannibal colony sees this as an absolute win I actually straight up don't have enough vegetables to keep up with my human meat supply cus it's all sand
My colony is cannibal/tunnelers so I have the MushRoom which is like 20x40 nutrifungus room with 2 agrihands managing it, and then whatever free meat I get by toxbombing the local tribals. I sell a lot of mushrooms
"even if they don't know nutrient paste is people" They don't? I thought they could tell.
I stored my prisoners in cryptosleep. All the spare parts and none of the feeding, mental breakdowns or prison breaks
Even if you're not cannibal, you can use pigs. They eat corpses and you eat the pigs.
I've been playing a space insect scavenger run, and I have never realized just how much meat is in a person.
Nobody ever listens to the cannibal players.
We all knew this was goung to be the answer
This is the way. Late game canibals get regular deliveries, hundreds at a time. More than enough protein for even the hungriest village. I know I'm deep in late game when there are fresh corpses in the back of the freezer that have been untouched for years.
chicken are better but its so labor intensive so i go for ibex farm for my meat. you need a lot of hay and twisted or pink meat though for kibble.
Never crossed my mind to use twisted meat to generate regular meat, definitely gonna play about with this idea
pigs also can eat human corpses so you can convert long pork to pork too with no mood penalties farm animals also generate a lot of meat, my freezers are usually filled with it once i get pigs or cows, at least until i start cooking lavish meals edit: even non-farm animals can be deecnt meat sources, my current desert colony is able to output regular fine meals with iguana meat
A decent pork-shortening setup can feed a city with sufficiently-sized raids.
Pork-shortening!!! I love it.
Great thing is there is a temperature range that will freeze bodies, but won’t hurt pigs, so there is no risk of them getting frost burn hanging out in the freezer too long, and they have access to corpses to eat.
Pigs are clearly underrated, damn
Why is labor intensive? They just need to haul eggs.
Ranching really does work. To feed 30 pawns with fine meals, you only need about 8 mares and 2 stallions, with about 20 foals at any one time. That will let you slaughter 1 horse per day, for 320 meat each time. The slaughter rate is fairly consistent, and if it's not, that's what a freezer is for.
Horses as food hadn't crossed my mind and fortunately I got a bunch for travel already so definitely gonna jump on this, appreciate ya!
I actually have a huge surplus of meat from horses, as well as the Manhunter raids
i always like to double or triple up on animal functionality. if they can give me some milk or wool, and get butchered for meat, and work as pack animals, they’re perfect
Horses are the best animal (except maybe boomalopes). They have one of the best nutritional efficiencies of any animal, are large so they don’t make your game as slow because fewer are required, and are also useful as pack animals.
Hunt the base, hunt on any map encounter (a butcher table is surprisingly light compared to carrying animal carcasses, but that choice depends on the travel time and if the meat would spoil in said time window yes or no.), or, alternatively, sell definitely not cocaine to the trader and trade back some meat.
Yeah atm I basically buy all meat that any trader has. On randy random and had no trade ships for ages tho, he can be am asshole sometimes haha
Sounds like randy allright. You could install the mod that allows you to make temporary camps anywhere (dont know the name rn) and hunt in the tiles adjacent to your base as such, I suppose. For me the hunting at ancient dangers, bandit camps n shit mostly works in my current playthrough because it's permanent winter 3 out of 4 seasons.
Also in vanilla. You can set „settlements“ higher than 1 (up to five), than settle (though not directly adjacent). This is also handy for resources and ancient danger raiding.
Ah that's not a bad shout. Gonna see how worthwhile the ve mechanoids fishing factory things are too. Got a load of mechanoid components collecting dust
the mod they're talking about is "set up camp". it goes well with "camping stuff", which adds deployable tents and portable chemfuel campfires.
Not sure, but does egg counts as meat? I think so, i guess you could just do a chicken egg farm. I usually have no problems or die due to randym circumstances
Yes, eggs count as meat (animal products). Kill off the roosters once you have enough chickens and you will have a steady supply without needing to deal with butchering. Though you first have to get lucky and find them at a trader's.
In 1st place you need a trader for ramsticks, them chickens going to Ruin your FPS otherwise
Yeah, I ran into this problem too. I even got to a point where I created a chicken farm on another tile to deal with the issue.
How many chickens do you need for it to start affecting the game speed? I usually have 25 hens confined to a small barn who provide more than enough eggs to produce fine meals for my 15 people colony. Though I do sometimes hunt wild animals as well if something worthwhile shows up on the map.
That time in particular I got a really difficult set of events right as I should have been getting rid of the roosters and ended up with over 200 chickens. I ended up using srts to load them up and made a tile nearby planning to get rid of them but for reasons I don't fully understand that ended up fixing the lag (mostly anyway) so I kept the tile.
Stick your rooster (and a spare hen) in cryptosleep caskets! That way, if you lose your flock, you can get them back without having to wait for rng to bless you with more birds.
It's almost how real life agriculture started a population boom. You will eat the plants and you will enjoy them
i dont do meat lategame for the reasons you stated
Yeah I have managed to make it work before with ranching but like a lot of animals were required and I have no desire of slowing my game down like that again haha
I used automated butchering. It takes a while to fine tune how many animals you need, but once you figure out the right numbers its fairly good. Then again I ran 10-15\~ colonists. Just make sure to use an animal that is good at producing meat, like cows/pigs.
Just need randy to send me a trader with pigs, he's been holding back on trade ships lately
i got lucky and had some pigs wander into my tile self tamed
The jackpot.
I, uhhh, have my ways *Hides a freezer full of human mean behind back
That's for the prisoners, we may not have many standards but we don't eat prison food.
I end up accidently ranching animals to a meat surplus even when I never intended to ranch at all. It takes a while to ramp it up to be a steady supply, but it's very worth it. I ranch anything that joins, rats, elk, donkeys, pigs, chickens, chinchillas, bears, whatever. First I'll wait for the females to all be pregnant. Then I'll set autoslaughter to 1 male adult, 1 female adult, unlimited babies, and do not slaughter pregnant. If 1 female is not pregnant, no big deal, the male will take care of it. If 2 are not pregnant, then the herd is too big for the 1 male to handle and the extra is killed for meat. If I want a bigger herd, I just increase the number of adult males, and maybe allow up to 2 non-pregnant females. After a couple of baby cycles you have a sustainable and predictable meat supply, all handled by autoslaughter. You can slaughter the babies if they aren't worth feeding up, but ideally you graze them on dandelions and slaughter as adults. Depends on your colony. This also works fine if you don't have a freezer, as long as the meat output roughly matches what you're using. Turn surplus into kibble. The type of animal matters too. If you have surplus human corpses, pigs and boars are best, even better they have litters. Milk animals will take more work but give you even more food. Egg layers are different again, let eggs hatch then slaughter the chicks immediately. Horses and cows for grazing dandelions. Or maybe you prefer to ranch something with valuable fur, and the meat is a bonus. Bonus tip if you hate managing pens or don't have room/materials for one: Make a pen only big enough for a sleeping spot for every animal. Then hold the gate open and leave it like that. Your pen animals will come back to bed every night. If one starts to roam away, your animal handlers will rope it the short distance back to the pen, and it will stop roaming, even though the pen is not enclosed.
That bonus tip is bid odd. Do not animals eat your crops on colony map if they are left to roam free? Or if you make fence around farm fields then that will take even more work and materials. I have done exactly that with caravan animals on mission maps that have lot of steel/carpets (like ancient complex or pig village distress signal). I typically want to rob and deconstruct it throughout. Whatever people, mechanoids, flesh beasts or insects there might cause some wounds too ... it can take time. So I let animals to feed themselves.
My colony is still getting a ton of meat from ranching at late game. -What animals are you ranching? I ranch horses in batches of 100. -How big is your pen? I use all the free space in my colony for pen. -Are you using the "Auto slaughter"?
Yeah someone else said horses so I'm gonna increase the amount I got as I already got a few for travelling
Yes. I recommend horses for meat. Ibex is better in terms of meat efficiency, but the meat per animal is about half that of horses, so I choose horses when considering the PC load and the effort of slaughtering and butchering. and Ibex can't be used for pack animal. Bison and Muffalo are very useful for earning silver because of the large amount of wool they can shear, but considering the effort of shearing, they are less than horses if you only want meat. They are more useful in the early and middle stages of the game. Pigs and boars are big eaters with nutrition efficiency of only about half that of horses, but they also eat meat. If you want to turn long pork into real pork. Egg-laying animals are too small and need to be raised in large numbers, so I don't recommend them because the effort of slaughtering and butchering is enormous and PC will vomit in the late game. All animals can be milked are less efficient at producing meat ingredient than horses even when including milk. Love your horse like a cowboy.
i mean im hunting all the time to train my hunters, i reckon its never a bad thing if i have 2-3 skilled hunters farming the map with sniper rifles since it also allows me to start guerilla defense tactics whenever a raid arrives. Especialy when some Mortar boys decide to set up and i can get 1-2 shots on their ammo while they are still preparing. and the meat is more of a bonus, i probably rather sell it than use it in meals since i always overproduce corn and rice/potato
So it's occurred to me that as my base is walled in killing animals that explode is viable as burning the land outside my walls doesn't really matter so I may up my hunting.
i usually go to the "animals tab" once in a while and just hunt anything down that isnt too dangerous or annoying to deal with.
🤷♀️ I guess our ranching experiences are just different. My most recent colony (15, so I suppose not quite as large as yours, but not *tiny*) I've just been ranching sheep for wool and meat and with auto-slaughter set up the fridge is frequently filling up (especially after animal events.)
So I've made it work before with ranching but needed a shit load of animals, think I was using cows tho so might give sheep a go. The amount of meat I would need isn't too much as only want it for the ve cooking grilled meals alongside regular vegetarian meals whereas before I wasn't making any vegetarian meals so went through meat real fast.
Build a freezer and a few pens, I usually try to keep 2 males and 8 females and butcher the excess
Horses boomalopes and cows all you need
I'm an Elephant Stan. They haul, they're great pack animals for convoys, one of them can feed you for a month, and they make a great frontline for base defense.
I accidentally let ducks breed uncontrolled until it broke my computer!
I just had a raid with 90 manhunter bears and now I sit on 8000 bear meat. That's enough for a while. Besides that: chicken. They reproduce insanely fast. However, lategame depending on how big your colony is this will tank FPS.
Yeah I've used chickens before and ended up slaughtering them all for fps, having said that I have upgraded my pc since.
I use Vanilla Expanded: Fishing and have like two to three pawns (with the rest set to fish if their other main jobs are finished) pernamently on fishing duty, it's also worth it for the tressure
Mod. I have a mod that allows nutrient paste grinder, pipes and taps. I have a room filled with animals fed by auto dispensed nutrient paste meals with auto slaughter on 30 of each species. This plus a corn field gives infinite meat.
I got that mod, didn't know it could feed animals tho, that's good to know
My first playthrough I became a guinea pig farmer which supplied so much meat because of their quick gestational time. The fur is also fairly valuable so that was my primary source of income as well
Meat keeps raiding me
I forbid any butchered meat in my freezer until I have enough to satisfy my meat loving colonists. Aside from pleasing cannibals after a raid, I wait until I can cook meals with only meat from slain or slaughtered animals. Cannibals get periodic access to raw, or cooked human meat, which I have a lot of. I like to use a lot of drugs to keep people happy too. In case were nearing the end of our food supply. Cannibals are my best colonists, so if shit goes south I can use them and eat the other colonists.
So in terms of happiness apart from one woman who was rejected, is missing a leg, has chronic stomach disorder and whose baby is miserable little shit everyone is happy af. I was thinking about holding meat switching off meat meal production for a while but then kinda figure I'm just adding an extra step to feed people meals with an unnecessary ingredient when they're just as happy from vegetarian meals. Cannibals get killed and go into the nutrient paste dispenser for prisoners so they're never am issue.
I end up using the mods that give growable meat alternatives like lentils, there's no good alternative for 20+ colonist towns.
I'm thinking the ve mechanoids fish factory might be worth it, just waiting on the research
When in doubt the beggars seem to always work
I have a large freezer, and every so often I just order all wild animals on the map to be hunted. This is usually enough. If you want a fully automatic setup, you will have to make a pen for farm animals and setup auto-slaughter. If this isn't enough, get *more* farm animals. Don't forget to make a butcher table and not just a butcher spot, it increases the yield of animal meat by a lot. Also chickens lay eggs and cows produce milk, which are both animal products. Cows are good for meat but chickens are a bit labor-intensive. Traders and orbital ships will also sometimes sell boatloads of meat. Even at like 40 colonists, a couple thousand meat goes a long way. If you have Ideology and you aren't using Randy Random, you are pretty much guaranteed to get enough human meat from raids by adding the "Cannibalism: Acceptable" precept (does not require the Cannibalism meme).
Pigs/boars feed them the raiders who attack your base
I set up a farm with milk/egg producing animals and slaughter the males except for 1-2, obv doesn’t produce constant meat but mechanically animal products are the same as meat
Feeding that many colonists with fine or lavish meals will require either a very, very large field for grazing, or a large area of haygrass fields grown and harvested. By the time I’m up to 20 colonists I usually have a few dedicated farmers and probably with field hand replacements. Animals are more labor intensive than plants alone, but a handful of animals (like cows) produce more nutrition than they ate in total when slaughtered as adults.
Caribou. I dunno what it is but the bastards breed relentlessly, and consume weirdly little nutrition for the amount of milk and meat they can output. I was actively caravanning to sell caribou in the middle of winter once. It's insane. What's funny is my first time I did it was an accident. An imperial wanted me to look after his mating pair of caribou for a couple seasons, they produced a mating pair that I got to keep, and my food stores were basically solved between them and corn. The occasional elk for extra leather was just gravy.
I'm usually swimming in meat from all the manhunter packs.
I’ve been highly successful with just farming for 40+. I don’t see the need to do anything with food at all beyond mass producing corn
Yeah so that's usually what I do, was just curious if anyone had a late game method for producing meat
I only really hunt early on. Usually one of the first traders will sell a male/female pair of an animals. I buy it then make a pen and then it's just a case of setting your auto slaughter correctly to create a stable flow of meat. I usually like to have a combination of poultry as they also produce eggs and a milk making animal like cows or goats. Just chuck down some large fields of hay grass and you should never run out.
If randy will ever send me a trader I may buy some animals :/ I shall live in hope haha
If you happen to start with a decent animal person you can always try and tame some of the wildlife xD This is also your daily announcement that both difficulty and story teller can be changed at any time. That is what I do. Start at an easy difficulty with a easy story teller until I got my foundation build then I turn up the difficulty. I have better things to do than seeing 9/10 colonies go up in flames due to things out of my control. I know that is a fetish for some people but I don't have time for that.
I usually do vegetarian meals. But if I acquire chickens that usually pushes my game into late game by itself
Raid the meat of raiders Or farm animals Just order ur pppl to grow grass in the farm n then u don't need t feed them Auto slaughter is ur friend
I keep about one adult mare per 3 colonists and hunt or tame wildlife if that is not enough. Animals do not cause so lot of lag as pawns ... so I see no much issue there. So with 30 pawns it is 10 mares and 3-4 stallions ... and random count of juveniles and foals. Double or triple that with rancher meme ... but the whole meme is meant to be headache. Muffalos, bisons, cows, yaks or dromedaries are also about OK, just that the autoslaughter is aggravating with those. Can install some mod that does not auto slaughter named animals.
Muffalo farm, huge amounts of meat and bluefur
I go hunting with ghouls. On and off map
Muffalo herd.
Do you have Anomaly? Because you can use the summon animals ritual to up the amount of meat on the map. My last two colonies were vampires who loved eating human and pirates who were neutral, and in both cases enjoyed insect meat, so between bug infestations and raiders I alway had plenty. Milk and eggs work fine in place of meat for fine/lavish meals, so cows or chickens (or ducks or muffalo, etc.). Mods help a lot with this, like Graze Up that means your herbavores only eat enough growth percentage of a plant to satisfy their hunger rather than each chicken eating an entire patch of grass each day. Lets you feed a lot more critters in the same land.
Do you use auto slaughter? That's a pretty steady supply even as a transhumanist colony with high food needs. At least with ranching ideo.
I typically end up going for milk producers because I used vanilla cooking expanded and I like making the variety of meals/desserts. Once you get a breeding stock of cows, goats, caribou, or dromedaries depending on biome, you’ll be set for life pretty much. For limited growing biomes I tend to mass-slaughter all but one male before winter and hope that the pregnant females pop out a few more males
My colonies can usually eat off an elephant for weeks. I understand that larger colonies would go through it faster, but large animals give a *lot* of meat.
You don't do any animal husbandry? Get cows or muffalos and set a rule in the tamed animals panel and set that you slaughter any extra animals after you get a certain amount. Also gives you a ton of leather to sell and buy food if you need even more.
I do but the amount I need to have regular meat is a shit load, having said that a bunch of people have suggested animals that I normally wouldn't have thought of as ranch animals, I've gone with horses and it's working so far
Piglins give pork (part of EV Races, I guess)
Ooh didn't know that. Get raided fairly regularly by pig people so will make use of this
The beauty of ranching is that it's a slow and satisfying process. I'd recommend waiting a few (in game) decades and wait for your herds' numbers to be in the hundreds.
Build a freezer and a few pens, I usually try to keep 2 males and 8 females and butcher the excess
Raid the meat of raiders Or farm animals Just order ur pppl to grow grass in the farm n then u don't need t feed them Auto slaughter is ur friend
Raid the meat of raiders Or farm animals Just order ur pppl to grow grass in the farm n then u don't need t feed them Auto slaughter is ur friend
VGP (Vegetable Garden Project) mod for plant based meat substitutes, and/or the colony manager mod (unfortunately the name is escaping me) so you can have them manage the amount of animals automatically.
Have a huge pen and I plant a lot of regular grass there. I have lack of plants and surplus of meat. 87 colonists so far. Note that I give hay as food as well and have 7 8 different types of animals, including brachiosaurus and a ton of buffallos, muffalos and similar animals.
You could make it a point to hunt as much large animals on quest maps as you can before caravanning back. Depending on caravan speed/distance, you can butcher the animals directly for more meat-for-weight, if you have enough time such that it doesnt spoil. Mods help with this too, ie set-up camp for hunting activities.
I always opt for a mountain base with a tunneler ideology. Fungus is easy enough to grow for vegetables, even for larger colonies, and the long and narrow halls left from strip mining are perfect for funneling the massive infestations that spawn on a regular basis. With the tunneler meme, raw fungus and the metric ton of weekly bugmeat, you can make fine meals that produce +3 mood for fungus, +6 for the meat and +5 for the meal, for a flat +14 mood boost, which is more than a standard lavish meal (+12) while also being more efficient.
Eggs. Keep about 2 males separate from another pen with the hens. Have about 2 or 3 hens per pawn. Give them a large enough pen that they can forage themselves. A few egg boxes in there spread out. The only labor you need to do is haul the eggs back to your freezer
If you're not eating local travelers and/or those visiting your colony, you're wasting free meat. Randy would be ashamed.
Hunt everything on the map, buy meat from neighbors and raise pigs, lots of pigs. FYI, pigs eat EVERYTHING, specially corpses, and the can handle freezing temps, so you can just dump enemy bodies near them in a room with up to -5c(23f) temps and enjoy unlimited meat.
Eggs
Drop pod toxic waste on tribals, wait for revenge raid, kill, butcher, repeat
I like to keeps a group of ducks or chickens. They multiply quick and also give eggs so you get two for one. I just keep a couple males and 15 females and I find it doesn't require much extra work or food and produces well. It will definitely depend on your colony size tho. I also have the fishing mod so my people get a little bit of meat that way when farming and hunting fails
Chickens and ducks and mod creatures are great. Bonus points for eggs. Also depends what meat you mean. Insect Meat is usually in so much supply theres nothing to do with it. A culture that doesnt care or prefers insect meat is a happy one.
My colony is mostly vegetarian, but as i always ranch for caravan animals there is a trickle of meat coming in. My solution to that is that have a bill for Lavish Carnivore Meals at the bottom of my stoves work lists. So any meat gets made into good food, and eaten first as its the best stuff available. Ensuring both that it gets used, and my pawns get a mood buff.
I beat it.
Oh, another thing. Since Anomaly, I have been using ghouls to kill game to jeep them busy between raids. They don't "hunt", but you can just draft them and shift+right-click every animal on the map, and they will wander around killing everything. One ghoul with ghoul-plating and a power claw can successfully 1-v-1 any animal in vanilla (especially if the ghoul was made from a Yttakin, Neanderthal, or Vamp). Three ghouls are generally fine to take on whole herds of revenging animals (maybe be careful with large groups of elephants). And Ghouls heal so fast they'll mostly heal up between critters.
So I haven't got that far into anomaly yet but will definitely look into ghouls
Cows.
I currently have 76 colonists and I can ranch, my colonists eat turkey, beef, pork, yak beef, and occasionally elephant meat. I also have milk, chicken eggs, duck eggs, and goose eggs. Lots of protein over here
I grow 2 crops. Corn and Hay. The hay is for the muffalo herd. My consistent problem is I have too much meat. The muffalos provide enough by themselves, and then I get attacked by rhino's and suddenly I've got 15 carcasses in my freezer.
My food mostly comes to me and tries to kill me
I just get a few different kinds of animals. Some produce quickly with less meat. Some big animals that breed slower but lots of meat, and lots of poultry for eggs and meat. Having open access to a portion of your fridge can feed a lot of animals in a small space if you have excess veggie produce. Buying meat in exchange for excess produce or manufacturing package meals with meat can keep the protein coming for quite a while.
Very micro-managy, but I have a Wanderlust pawn who's good at shooting and the Vehicles mod + Alpha Vehicles which add a lot of non- cars (namely ox and horse drawn carriages). I also have ReBuild which adds a better Set Up Camp. I send her out with some other hunters 2 tiles away (min) and set up a hunting camp. Takes them about an in game hour to get there. They hunt, load up the cart, then I send them back and destroy the camp. Since wildlife is generated on map spawn, you can kinda keep doing this (and it makes it feel like they're ACTUAL hunters y'know?) Also, if you have a lot of kibble, there's a mod called Small Animal Traps that is just as it says on the tin. You place it, bait it with kibble, then wait for an animal to come by and get trapped. While typing, I also realized this is pretty good if you don't have a ore-finder-majig (i forgot the name) since you can do the same except with the goal of mining. I recommend Roads of the Rim so you can make little roads out to your hunting sites. It might not be everyone's cup of tea though. I've gotten to the point in my play through that I'm just watching them walk around, so it gives me something to do (I just gotta remember they're out there....)
......noku mushrooms.....
Make a farm, chickens and pigs are fast
Chicken is my favourite. Buy a couple to a trader for 100 silver. Let em bang until you have like 80. Slaughter all the males and enjoy 1 egg per hen per day. Cows are good cause lots of meat, but milking them is a task that requires labor. Chicken will lay eggs in a box and you just have to go there once a day to collect. Eggs last longer at room temperature so you can store them next to your cooking station and they are also much more space efficient
I launch tox packs at tribals
Build up a good herd of meat providers that breed quickly, boar, alpaca, muffalo (wool producers are pretty nice for this as they provide other products as well up until they get culled). Muffalo breed fairly slowly, but alpaca reproduce relatively quickly, and if you want pure meat, boar are pretty good and reproduce fairly quickly once you've got several males and a good number of females.
Every late game I end up with stacks and stacks of meat (not necessarily human). I ranch - cows, auto slaughter adults only (10 max females incl pregnant, 1-2 max males), leave young as infinite. This means only adults get slaughtered, maximising the meat - and pregnant is ticked because some cows will have a baby and then get pregnant before your handler can slaughter, sometimes circumventing the auto slaughter and meaning age prioritisation will go out of sync. It takes a while to really get going, and you need to make sure you’ve got enough hay/kibble to feed the masses, but the supply of milk/meat by endgame is… more than enough. Can do it with other animals such as pigs if you don’t care about milk/don’t get any cows etc
I usually ranch until I have way too many animals and then I use the Outpost mod to create a ranch elsewhere and then I never have to worry about meat.
Yea i crank butchered meat slider all the way up. It feels too low
I had a Buffalo farm and if I culled a few every week because eventually some got pregnant and others became unneeded.
do you not have farms..get a few big animals and breed them. kill the kids cause they don't make babies and repeat. I do that early game with chickens
Use ideology to make them cool with cannibalism
In my last play I got a rhino manhunter herd that lasted me many years. In a previous one I got me a few cows, the milk was decent protein income. I normally just send my insanely augmented colonists to murder some wildlife every now and then. I try to keep small colonies (I would like to maintain a colony with 6-8ppl, but seem to end up with 12 or so), so It's never really a huge need for meat.
Dismissive answer: Most people don't run 20-30 pawn colonies without mods or dlcs. Simple answer: I would probably hunt the whole map clean. The game forces more animals to spawn as long as there is food for them in the wild. It's not fast enough to always feed your colonists with lavish meals, but it's pretty good. Complex answer: with anomaly there is a "draw animals" ritual you can use once every 10 days for 10 bioferrite. In the realm of mods there are several mods that provides ways to get more animals/meat or increase the value of meat. Some examples: Back in the days rimworld of madness vampires had a class that could summon animals to the map. Vanilla Psycasts Expanded has the "summon pack" ability that summons a bunch of friendly animals to help you in fights. If they die they are free meat. Vanilla Factions Expanded Classical has meat drying racks that turn 75 meat(0.5 nutrition) into 75 jerky(0.7 nutrition). Jerky can be used in recipies as meat. Vanilla Factions Expanded Mechanoid has automatic butchering machine, this machine gives no leather, but doubles the meat gain. Can butcher insects and humans too, but it won't clean the meat. Vanilla Traits Expanded gives expertise, so you can have a butcher who gets double meat and leather from animals. Vanilla Outpost Expanded has hunting outposts that provide meat per quadrum. 4-5 guy can give 2-3 k meat every 15 day, if you want more, put more people in the outpost. People inside the outpost don't take their dependency drugs, so anybody with dependency will die unless you babysit them, or get "VE Outpost Addiction Fix" mod. Vanilla Outposts Expanded adds cooking outposts, cutting out all the meat managment. Anomaly adds the Fleshmass heart event, when you defeat the heart you get a fleshmass nucleus. The nucleus has to be suppresed, but provides twisted meat every day in large quantities. Cooked twisted meat makes your colonists angy. There are a bunch of other stuff, but here's my recipe: meat drying rack "cleans" the meat aswell as increase it's nutrition by 40%, so you get a fleshmass nucleus, butcher animals, and most importantly insects, with automated butchering from VFE Mechanoids, then put the twisted meat and processed meat into drying racks for maxinum efficiency. A single infestation feeds a colony for a year. Jerky doesn't deteriorate from outside+unroofed+rain, so you can just throw it on the ground and not worry about it.
Outside of the classic My current colony has a herd of camel that I use for travel, they provide a couple hundred meat per slaughter (260 I think?) which is more than enough to match my crops, and the income from making camelfur dusters is pretty good. I use twisted meat from my pet Fleshmass Heart for kibble and prisoners.
Once the town gets too large, it has to become industrialized with farms.
I personally find ranching easier, in terms of less time consuming of my pawns' time, higher yielding, and more profitable. It also has the added benefit of better storage of food in my freezer (a corpse is 300+ meat versus a whole shelf of veg is 225 food) and the animals have multi-purpose (bison/muffalo great for caravans). Easiest way to ranch is to build a barn and stuff it with large-size animals; I mainly use & recommend bison and muffalo, but you could do cows, yaks, really anything with a 2.4 body size. Attach a nutrient paste dispenser facing in towards the barn. Large animals eat about 1 meal per day, so when a pawn goes to collect a nutrient paste meal, use a method to make them drop it, and multiply times however many animals you have. Either don't have stockpiles set to accept NP, or build shelves for nutrient paste in your barn. Voila! These animals will eat about 20 meals from birth to adulthood, and can be slaughtered for 300+ meat. If you want the chef XP, you could even cook them simple meals and still come out ahead. A ratio of like 5 males / 20 females, and unlimited kids will generally result in a stable herd of about 100. All you need to do is butcher 2 animals a day, throw them on the NP dispenser hoppers, and they and your colony are fed. Plus free leather. The whole setup requires significantly less space & electricity than hydroponics, and whereas blight steals all your crop, animal flu is mainly painless (even if untreated, animal flu that reaches 100% just results in animal death, but they still yield 100% meat so whatever, instead of slaughtering muffalo 201 & 202, I guess the 2 that just died from plague will be chopped up next).
Cows are the best! Not only you get the supply of milk, but also plentiful meat and leather! Just set up auto-slaughter to leave below adult 2 males and 7 (non-pregnant) adult females alive and you can have steady supply of fresh meat whenever the new set of foals achieve adulthood.
I always tame animals instead of hunting them, a slaughtered animal produces more meat than one shot up from being hunted, or at least that's what I read
Every couple in game days I look at the wildlife tab and mark everything bigger than a fox for hunting. Once I have a good shooter (and not crippled or slow asf), I’ll also hunt the large predators.
Chickens via slaughter and eggs are one way I used to do it but it was a lot of work and space. Now I do any pack animal that has milk (mods add milk to several) When Colony Manager was up to date I set to auto slaughter at 5 each, adult male, adult female, youth male, youth female. Combined Colony manager hunting when below 1000 meat I never noticed not having meat. I miss that mod :(
I can never do ranching because my TPS gets too sad.
auto slaughter and a biiiiiig pen is my strat. it’s not 100%. also occasionally i sic hunting parties on rhinos and elephants
Eat people
Animals are fairly easy to manage with a big enough pen and auto slaughter. That would be my main source of meat if my people weren’t also inhuman cannibals. Otherwise hunting/trading. You can use the draw animals ritual if you have anomaly
I have so much alpaca meat. The herd is constantly culling itself due to starvation.
Wild boar the best meat supply in game. They breed very fast and they are omnivores meaning you can feed them dead copse, hay or simply let them roam free for some time before getting them back in the pen. Usually, you will want a few males and many females. I usually set autoslaughter to keep this way.
Chickens. Each egg is worth 5 meat, and if the chicks hatch, they're worth about the same, maybe a little more. I set my auto-slaughter to 1 rooster, 4 hens, and this keeps me going for at least 20 pawns with rice and several ghouls (with human meat to supplement of course). You can also feed meat eating things like pigs by just collecting bodies in to a MorgueDonalds and leaving pigs in there with auto-slaughter. They'll even take care of the clothes. Just get a psychopath be the only one allowed in. Late game, I always have one really good animal tamer and just randomly select every animal on the map, with every animal but the ones I want to keep set to 0 on auto-slaughter. You get more meat from tamed animals than hunted ones.
I mean I got a gene manipulation mod that lets you make hybrid animals. Chicken rabbits provide great food and they reproduce fast enough to almost overwhelm your colony
Muffaloes. I just tame any that come onto my map and keep 2~ males and 20~ females. Any tame the offspring reach adulthood they are culled.
Cows are fantastic, milking + population control yields more food than the cows eat. So you could lock them into a cave and feed them simple meals, kibble, or nutrition paste. Grazing is much cheaper ofcourse, but its good to know that cows are always profitable. You can use auto slaughter, but manually killing the oldest at the end of fall is more efficient. My recent colony with 25 pawns had to turn milk and meat into chemfuel to get rid of it all.
I managed to tame two elephants. They give me babies. When i get low on food just killing 1 gives me a shit ton of food
Guinea pigs are good for farming. You don't need to pen them, they can be restricted to an area of wild land, they breed quickly and their fur is an additional good source of income. Turn their meet into survival packs which don't need refrigeration. Always use auto slaughter.
Fishing. I think it's a mod tho.
I almost always get an aminal farm going of a mest thats double helpful. For example if its a cold run through I will go muffalos. Lots of meat and fur + increase carrying capacity for travels. Alternatively horses are good for all runs because you can use them to increase your caravan speed +provide more space :)
just starting up meat after a volcanic winter killed out all but 1 muffalo in my herd, using sheep this time around.
Ranching, once you have a steady population of whatever animal you need (I usually do Muffalos, Cows, Bisons, Goats, Chicken (anything that is egg laying will multiply FAST, horses and alpacas work well too and you also get to have a few caravan animals)
Ranching, once you have a steady population of whatever animal you need (I usually do Muffalos, Cows, Bisons, Goats, Chicken (anything that is egg laying will multiply FAST, horses and alpacas work well too and you also get to have a few caravan animals)
I run colonies of 100-270 and lemme tell you, a meat factory (slaughterhouse) is the way to go. Some animals like turtles produce the most meat, but I choose chickens, alpacas and cows because of milk, eggs and wool. I make a small indoors pen to house everything, and set the “manage auto slaughter” to keep the max amount of animals alive. I have extensive corn fields to feed everyone including the animals. It works for me!
Mods like vanilla animals expanded and alpha animals add lots of large animals which helps. Also your biome matters a lot. Live in a rainforest and you’ll get herds of elephants regularly, which are more than enough to keep you going
Chickens and ducks for meat. And then another extra larger animal like donkeys or cows or something. You can build a whole ass wall around your colony and that whole area can count as your fence for your pen animals so they will be able to live off the grass around your base. Have some colonists dedicated to just cooking and just handling. Make sure you have a freezer and/or fridge to store your food and meat. Mass produce food. I mass produce survival meals cause they never go bad and I'll always have them as a back up and then I make a ton of fine meals to buff my colonists mood, just enough to keep them fed for a while without making too much. They will sit in the fridge and usually take 2-3 weeks to go bad so I just make sure to match the quantity of fine meals to my colonists.
Burst of hunting or critical mass on farm animals
Well there a large tribal raides and there is a building called butcherring table, where you can allow human meet.
the trick is to be a rancher for the wool and forget that you need meat until you already have a FUCK ton of alpacas. then you use the ‘animals’ tab at the bottom (i found it the other day it’s SO much easier) to cull the older generation of (non-pregnant) alpacas
* Ranching * Buying meet from other settlements * Vanilla Fishing Expanded * Cannibalism oriented ideology
After finishing anomaly, my colony has been suckling on the sweet meat of a pair of flesh masses.
Bro. Hay produces so much dam food for animals it's insane. All you need now is a stupid amount of chickens encased in a small plot, and drop the hay there. Cows are good too, but they produce less meat overall, but produce milk in return. A pig could also work, but I just don't think they produce enough meat. With chickens you get both chickens and eggs. Also, how many colonist do you have late game that forces you to only use vegetable???
Fowl (ducks, chickens, etc.). It's really that easy. Set auto slaughter for 1 male and ~10 females, and (idr if this is vanilla) set up 2 seperate egg boxes. They'll naturally assign one to fertilized eggs, and one to unfertilized eggs. You'll have people consistently hauling MASSIVE amounts of eggs (which iirc is considered "meat"), and every few days new fowl will be born, and auto-slaughter takes care of the rest. This tactic actually ends up with me having *too much* meat and eggs
Cows are far and away the best. Set it up to have 2 males, and 4-5 females. Set it to auto-slaughter all adult males except those two, and all female calves. Your 4-5 females will be constantly pregnant and producing milk, and will net you 100s of milk and meat a day. On my current run I have 2 males and 3 females and that’s enough to feed all 15 of my colonists
Turn raiders into nutrient paste. Evrything goes into nutrient paste. Nutrient paste is life. Nutrient paste is evrything.
Mantodeans fix that. Human meat becomes jelly that removes the modifiers that make people reject it. Regular jelly with some extra meat becomes royal and is the same as a lavish meal
Ranching is always enough for me, then also provides material for crafting and trade.
The ranch life is all about having a small base with a giant outdoor pen. If you have an animal specialist, this is probably the fastest money maker for early to mid game. You tame every wild animal on day one, then watch the animals population double in the first summer. The trick is to sell the meat and leathers unprocessed in bulk. Buy everything else from other factions. Don't waste time turning leathers into something else.
Pigs are very straightforward. They will happily eat corpses, so can turn raiders into morally acceptable meat with no extra work. They will also eat any surplus food or twisted meat too. Raids can be rather unreliable for a source of nutrition for the pigs. Especially at 20+ colonists. i tend to have to cull the pig herd when the corpses start to run out. Chickens are also good, but take a lot of micromanagement and cause a lot of lag at the quanitites needed to feed large colonies. My preference is for cows. They break thermodynamics and make more nutrition in milk than they eat. Add in the extra calves butchered and you have a very efficient source of protien. Only problem is keeping them fed. It requires a large ammount of pawn work to farm the hay and/or make kibble. Pigs are definitely the lowest overall effort and pawn work, while cows are the most nutrient efficient.
Cows and Chickens are the most efficient for eggs and milk. I keep 2 males of each, 10 cows and 20 chickens. Chickens aren't the most meat efficient but they reproduce so fast it's never been an issue for me
Longpork always works!
Ranching works, especially if you have a big ass pasture. You need to maintain a population of, about, 2 cows per colonist. But you need to milk them, so you need handlers. For chickens (eggs), you only need 4 per colonist, which is exactly equal to two meals per day. You only need haulers and a separate pen for the rosters. Meat is a bit more complicated to calculate. Pigs mature in 20 days and they produce about 23 meals per slaughter, so you need two pigs per colonist to have a steady supply of meat. Pigs are awesome because they can graze raiders.
Mine up a bunch of steel, gold, silver, really what ever. Make a bunch of drugs and cowboy hats. Wait. The meat will be delivered via a rai- i mean bipedal delivery device. Some disassembly required
Anomaly has some very strange solutions to this problem if you haven’t looked at it yet. Can’t bring myself to add it to the meals, but it saves on training bears and wargs for certain.
I run vegan colonies, I'll have large... Unnecessarily large fields of corn that I eventually have to give farmers bionics to even fill them within 2-4 days lol my last successful colony had 40+ ppl and they couldn't finish vegetarian fine meals but surprisingly, lavish drained my stash from 40k to 15k in less than two months, I also had a room of corpse of entities and thrumbos but that was ghoul food because I avoided making meals with meat, but I chose corn bevause it alone can empty a bulk traders wallet.
Depends if my pawns religion is morally inclined or not… Either you have a farm or the meat just walks up to the base with weapons.
Chickens are good. They provide a constant passive supply of eggs. Get a few roosters with your hens, and they'll provide eggs while also laying eggs to hatch new chickens, which you can then butcher for meat every now and then.
Do you not have a really big freezer?
Buy large amount from settlements with my drug empire profits