I’m playing a NA game and it’s fun, however I have several sad hearthlings due to their pet dying of starvation.
I clicked on a pet rabbit and there is a hunger icon. Hovering over that tells me that I can have my cook make food for the rabbit and have my shepherd feed them.
Ok, cool, but … to get a shepherd I need to promote my trapper with a shepherd’s crook and that needs a carpenter. To get a carpenter, I need a level 5 blacksmith.
So unfortunately, any pets my hearthlings obtain are just going to keep dying until I have done the following:
Assign a hearthling as a mason.
Level the mason up enough to make a blacksmith hammer.
Assign a blacksmith.
Level the blacksmith up to level 5, so they can make a carpenter’s saw.
Assign someone to be a carpenter.
Level the carpenter enough that they can make a shepherd’s crook.
Promote a trapper to shepherd.
Also have a cook to create food for the pet.
Now, for livestock, I understand the process and I expect it to be tough to get livestock working in the snow biome, so that’s cool, but it feels a bit rough that my hearthlings are auto taming themselves pets that they have no way to feed. :’(
Pets don’t need a shepherd, they just need a stockpile with food in it (they’re not smart enough to steal food from containers). Some pets eat meat while others eat vegetables though.
We should change the description to reflect that. Rabbits are also pasture animals from the shepherd, that could be the reason why the text is like that.
The cook can craft the feed for the pasture animals, but that’s only for them, and feeding them is managed by the shepherd. Pets eat any kind of food, except animal feed.
It seems we use the same buff for starving pets and starving livestock, so they share the text, but it’s only applicable for livestock, pets behave differently.
I don’t think it’s just the buff text - my trapper is really upset currently, due to two pets starving.
Currently my only storage is a 20x20 stockpile that has jerky, raw meat, sweet potato and all sorts of stuff in it. The starving rabbits just hop around on it until they die.
you are not alone… i had like a game with 4 utterly depressive hearthlings due to dead pets… even with a bursting stockpile of all manner of foods (including animal feeds)
I’ve just finished moving all the food into storage chests, so now the rabbit can’t get at it.
The current save has a starving pet rabbit called snowflake just next to a basket of sweet potatoes on the floor. When I loaded it and watched, Snowflake hopped to the potatoes and ate some of them and is no longer starving!
I’m going to say for now that it must have been my fault somehow - I may have had the cook use all the sweet potatoes, so there was nothing for the rabbit to eat.
Could you consider having an alert if a pet is starving and taking damage, or maybe just if a pet dies? I didn’t even notice there was a problem until there were many upset hearthlings - I was too busy building.
Another query though - is there any sensible way to maintain a small stockpile with food for pets, when I want the majority of my food stored in chests? It seems a bit haphazard as to which storage solution a hearthling selects when storing something.
I have now found a separate issue - I am unable to remove “Roasted Sweet Potato” from the cook’s crafting queue (or anything from any crafting queue actually). Normally I would drag it to the trash can icon.
Here’s the save file. 1531846481297.zip (5.8 MB)
Hmm you’re right, dragging doesn’t seem to work in your savefile.
Well, as a workaround you can go to the Orders tab and click on the trash can icon of the corresponding row instead.
Or just right-click the orders you want to remove.
I also have a stockpile that holds raw meat, and another stockpile that holds raw food vegetables. I have it further away from the dining tables and cooking area, and storage chests with those foods closer to the dining area and cook station. Because the Hearthlings hopefully will grab their food for eating closer to their dining tables. Once in awhile, when the stockpiles for food that pets eat from is getting low, I have to take food out of the storage chests to fill up the stockpiles again, by choosing to hold nothing in those chests. After the stockpiles are full I allow those storage chests to hold food again. Seems kinda tedious.
Although I haven’t had any pets die this way, I think also the Cleric might be healing them occasionally.
Another problem though, is getting carrots for Northern Alliance in the Arctic biome. The farmer can’t grow them, and their isn’t much available from vendors. Maybe there is more if you build a trading stall, but I haven’t used those yet, even playing up until just before Titan quest, and Tier 3 town. Also barely even bothered with a Shepherd with this NA group.
I would guess no, simply because supply shelves are technically containers with a fancy rendering to show the items inside.
However, if animals were made able to eat food from containers (and honestly for most of them it makes sense – raccoons, squirrels, foxes, cats (and big cats), dogs, baby dragons, mammoths, various bugs… all known for either being intelligent, or actively breaking into food storages IRL); then it would make it super simple to add either pet feeding bowls or animal feed troughs. Pets could then look after themselves, and even though farm animals wouldn’t be able to use them, it would still be an awesome and characterful way to store animal feed right near the animals it’s being used for.
Speaking of animal feed, it doesn’t make much sense that it’s the only kind of food that pets can’t eat. It might be due to technical reasons, or to prevent pets from eating all the food reserved for livestock (AFAIK the livestock feed is made from a single basket of carrots/corn/bale of wheat though, so even if pets do it eat then it’s not much different from them eating the raw ingredient; just that the cook has to process one more…) It would be great to have a recipe for “kibble” or similar which works as animal feed for meat-eating pets and possibly even farm animals (varanus farming woot woot!); I suspect all of this could be done simply enough with a mod but I’m not sure about making pets eat the animal feed – I assume that’s just Lua changes, but don’t want to hang my hopes on an assumption haha.
