Animals

Fish and small birds come from fishing and trapping, not as live livestock. Animals cannot catch the Knox infection, and zombies do not hunt them.

The Rancher and Farmer occupations start with Animal Care; see traits and occupations.

Wild deer, rabbits, turkeys and raccoons leave tracks you find in Search Mode. What you can read depends on Tracking:

Deer migrate along fixed paths and stay alert for a long time once spooked: approach downwind, crouched, with a rifle. Traps catch small game and, since 42.7, raccoons alive. Trapping and fishing are covered on farming and food.

1. Place a butcher hook from the Building menu.
2. Hang the carcass and bleed it.
3. Butcher it for meat, hide, bones, fat, head and blood. The hook gives more meat and keeps the hide; on the ground large animals often lose it. Car kills give much less.
4. Work the leather: scrape it on a softening beam, tan it in a tannin barrel or with brains and water, then dry it on a rack sized to the hide. Drying takes about a week and stops below about 4°C or in rain.

Meat starts losing value about 12 hours after the animal dies, even on the hook. Butcher, cook or freeze the same day.

Livestock in Build 42 live in a painted zone, not a building. Open the zoning menu from the icon on the left of the screen, add an animal zone, drag it over the tiles and confirm. A contented animal stays inside its zone with no fence at all; a stressed cow or pig will break fences, including the ones the game placed, so the fence is for keeping zombies out rather than animals in.

Size

Zone size is width times height across connected zones. Adult cattle want 80 tiles, sheep, pigs, chickens, turkeys and raccoons 40, babies and rodents 20. An undersized pen cuts daily growth to about an eighth, so the animal stays small and butchers small.

What to build

Put two troughs in every pen, one for food and one for water. An empty trough with open sky above collects rain, and in a pinch a bucket or pot left in the zone counts as a water source. Link each trough to its zone through the trough menu so the animals feed on their own. Chickens inside the hutch do not show as being in the zone, which is normal.

Our pick: roof over the troughs and the hutch, not the whole pen. Animals seek covered tiles in bad weather, and a roofed corner is enough.

Animals eat in a fixed order: food dropped on the ground first, then the trough, then their mother's milk if they are young, then the grass under their feet. Grass is free but an animal living on grazing alone grows smaller than a trough-fed one, so troughs are for weight and yield, not survival.

What goes in the trough

• Hay and animal feed bags are the purpose-built options; feed turns up in farm supply shops and barns.
• Vegetables and fruit, fresh or from your own plots, work for cattle, pigs and sheep. Most edible food that has not rotted is accepted.
• Chickens and turkeys also take seeds, nuts and insects, so the foraging leftovers are theirs.
• Cut grass is the winter answer. A scythe cuts a 3 by 3 area at a time, the grass regrows, and the cuttings store in a trough or crate.

Hunger, thirst and health

Hungry or thirsty animals lose health slowly and die if ignored, and hunger or thirst above 80% adds stress on top. Water must be in a trough or container; animals do not drink from ponds or puddles. Filling the water side of a trough can clear the food side, so check both after a top-up. Animals in unloaded chunks do not eat or drink, which is why a herd left at a far-off farm can be dead when you return. Keep them within your base's loaded area or move them.

Our view: one scythe and a fenced lawn feed more animals than any amount of looted feed. Cut in summer, stack it under a roof, and the cattle eat through winter without a single shop run.

The renewable products all come from the same morning round. Keep a bucket, shears and a rag in the pen crate and the chores take a few minutes of game time.

Milk

Cows produce milk once they have been pregnant, and ewes after lambing. Right-click the animal with a large liquid container in your inventory, such as a bucket, pot or tray, and choose Milk Animal. Capacity grows the more you milk, and a cow that is neither milked nor nursing slows and stops. Leaving an udder at about 85% or more damages the animal, so milk daily. At Animal Care 8 you can milk an animal regardless of stress. Milk goes into a butter churn for butter and into the mildew spray for the garden. We have found no vanilla cheese recipe in 42.21; cheese is loot only unless a mod adds it.

Wool

Right-click a sheep and choose Shear. Manual shears come from barns and tool shops; electric shears are quicker but need power. Stress can interrupt the job. Wool goes to a spinning wheel for thread and then yarn, and from there to warm clothing.

Eggs

Hens and turkey hens lay about once a day into the hutch nest boxes. Read the Hutch Info menu and collect daily, because a dirty hutch makes the birds sick enough to die. Cleaning needs water and a stain remover. Livestock trailers have a nest box option too, handy when moving a flock.

Calling them in

Once an animal's acceptance of you reaches about 40, a shout brings it to you, which makes milking and shearing far quicker than chasing.

Dogs: there is no dog or pet companion in vanilla 42.21, and the horsebox trailer carries no horse. Both are Workshop territory for now.