Do you find yourself asking, “Why are you doing that!?” as your cow is stuck on your barn? Then this guide is not for you. But if you want to learn how to take care of animals, then it is.
Guide Contents
Chickens
Chickens are easy to take care of and simple creatures.
You learn to take care of a few in the tutorial, and you start with a few right off the bat.
All you need to do is keep them fed with fodder or grains. However, you do need to buy a feed trough for the chickens when you start.
You may have noticed that chickens don’t live for very long, so if you want to keep a positive rate of chicken production, you need to buy a rooster to fertilize the eggs. And I’m assuming they are laid with the other eggs. But I do not have a clue how to tell what eggs are fertilized and what eggs are just normal.
If you don’t want to keep buying new chickens every two years, I would suggest not gathering the eggs for a year or building a separate enclosure for a select few chickens and roosters.
Sheep
Sheep are a wise investment, as they give wool every few months and are rather cheap.
If you buy a ram (Male sheep), you can grow your amount of sheep every year and can sell the older sheep for a profit, or keep them for wool until they die.
Despite being smaller than a pig in size, they don’t eat out of feed troughs. You need a feeder rack for them. The feeder racks can be filled with cut grass you get from cutting grass with a scythe. You can use other feed types that won’t spoil, I will explain it in the section “Food.”
Before you sheer
Your animals CAN’T get cold, so there is no need to let the sheep have wool over the winter. Before you sheer, you need to clean the animal with a brush that you can buy from any animal trader, along with sheers to sheer them. You can sheer both male and female sheep, and the male sheep comes with a full coat of wool when purchased. You can sheer the sheep at any point along their cycle, it does not impact anything.
Cows
Cows…
Cows are annoying, Mother F. They barely fit into your starting barn, and you need to keep them fed and in a stall for them to produce milk.
I keep my only cow so far locked in its stall and let it out every day to milk it, then put it back inside. I have a feeder in there for it, so it won’t starve.
Food
Animals need different types of feed and ways to hold that feed.
The only animal that currently uses a feeder tray are pigs, and their only use is for meat. (Sorry fluffy)
And chickens only eat from the ground feeders. While all the others eat from feeder racks.
You can use the stray and hay to feed your animals, but they don’t get as fat as they normally would eating something else.
I found that cut and dried grass is the best food for animals for the time being. You can store cut grass in piles or bales to feed your animals over the winter, but it goes bad right after the winter.
That’s where Dried grass comes in. You can buy “Grass Drying Frames” from any livestock trader, and they can be used to dry grass for 48 hours (2 in-game months). When dried, the grass will not go bad over the winter and can be stored over long periods.
Why I use dried grass
While the bi-products of grains are straw, are widely prevalent and I don’t have to dry them. Straw sells for a lot, and it would be wise to sell the straw rather than let your animals eat it. Straw usually sells for 5X more than dried grass.
- Grass is $1 x 5 = Straw $5
Selling Live Animals
The game never explicitly tells you about selling live animals, except as a quest: “Saying Goodbye.”
The only way to sell an animal is to take it to the animal trader in the SAF and put the animal inside the pen to the trader’s left, where you pick up bought animals.
After placing your animal(s) you wish to sell, talk to the trader. Above your inventory on the left of the screen is a button that says “Show animals” (or something like that) and you drag the animals over just like selling any other Item.
Price is based on 2 factors for an animal:
- It’s cleanliness (how clean it is at the time of sale)
- Fatness (how well-fed the animal was)
Other stuff you might not know
To bale a pile of straw or grass, you use a roll of thread to make a bale. You can also manually add an additional 3 hay to each bale.
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