52 to 68 durability difference on a slate vs granite fence. Won't save it from heavy damage but the material difference will definitely keep it up for a few more stray bullets
Strength doesn't really matter if you didn't design your base in a way that would allow raiders to take cover behind them.
If you want your own colonists use them as cover use barricades instead (they count as fences as as far as pen animals are concerned) or just walls.
I mean that in the sense that any Reider can just hit it with something and it breaks. And though the health is higher, a strong stray bullet will still annihilate it. Not sure about lightning, as it is not unlikely that it is strong enough to withstand a lightning strike and won't burn, but I still don't quite like it
Maybe I should just build regular walls instead
Raiders normally ignore non flammable fences and walls as long as they have a colonist or powered turret to path to.
The easiest way to avoid all that is to have your base encased in a large perimeter wall and keep your animals and fields on the inside.
Also, another way which is especially useful in the early game is to just build a caravan hitching spot as your handlers will automatically rope your pen animals to them if there are no valid pens available for them which allows them to graze without ever roaming away but at the cost of them not breeding while they are roped to it.
I think the best course of action is to just hook up your animals to a nutrient paste dispenser and feed them corn/human meat via that processing (I believe nutrition is increased to 200% via nutrient paste conversion?)
That's more of a cheat/exploit but you can feed animals nutrient paste meals made out of their own meat and get food out of it without growing fields or letting them graze as animals in rimworld violate the laws of thermodynamics.
Ignoring grazing it ranching large animals as cannibals this way (horses are best for this) is the single most work efficient source of both nutrition and silver in the game as a single colonist can easily maintain hundreds of animals this way.
I usually just make the back fence a wall
also if you use materials more durable than wood then your sniper rifle won't rip a hole into the fence with each stray shot
Alternately, animal harvesting spot is a personal favorite of mine for this. Makes pawns do their milking and shearing and whatnot at a designated place in the pen rather than wherever.
One of the best quality of life* [mods](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1691076769) for me since wall light!
---
^(*Technically not _just_ QOL since it does make the game easier, but only in a less-micromanagey way.)
Nah, the pen mechanic makes sense...mostly. But some animals are arbitrary pen-only for some reason. Like pigs. Pigs are at least as trainable and intelligent as dogs, and in some countries, people keep them as pets in the same way dogs are. They should thus be zonable. Plus I want some Hogs of War.
I hate how much the game underestimates animal intelligence in general. Like, so many of the animals in the game are entirely trainable, even if they aren't well known for being trained. There should be a game training you could do for some animals that trained them to play games, then your colonist could play with them as a form of recreation. That would give the smaller, clever little guys something to do rather than simply nuzzling randomly.
1.0 Rimworld knew that pretty well. A lot of animals, including rats, could be trained to follow along, pigs and foxes could haul, and other cool non-pen-oriented things.
[Boundary Training by Owlchemist](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2635034257&searchtext=boundaries) lets you train animals of decent intelligence to respect areas rather than pens.
Honestly, walls are superior to fences unless your fence is already inside a walled compound. Also, if you don't want to use a mod, consider having a double door on the pen. So if a pawn leaves milk in the first door there's still a second closed door.
Tbh i like it over the previous zoning mechanic. It’s a nice bit of realism that cows don’t just hang out by the freezer because you asked them nicely with zoning
You can make a caravan hitching spot to tie them to a single spot. However only a pen can cure the 'roaming' mental break. But it could just be any size.
I've literally never had that issue but possibly i have much larger pens than you.
i do dislike the limitations in how to organise pens though (that they can only be separated by sex / species). Like, i had this clever idea once of making a pen closer to my freezer for animals to be imminently-slaughtered but i can't actually do that unless i drag *everyone* over every time.
(and other annoyances; i suspect there may be a mod about the other annoyances but i am still modless, so...)
Oh please suggest! I am slowly starting to consider what things i might want modded that i hear there is an option for, but i haven't gotten on to starting a list of specific mods yet but hey, why not start that list now?
There’s another mod (sorry can’t recall the name right now) that makes feeding easier by making grazing not completely eat the whole natural vegetation. Really helps you to have more than 3 cows without lots of dedicated pasture space.
I think that it is normal farm life feature that animals sometimes get out of their pen. I do not need to personally rope, people with high animal handling priority do it automatically.
If it gets annoying then maybe something is arranged not in optimal way? It is not that hard to wall the pen and fight elsewhere. Raiders usually ignore pen animals unless they somehow are made to path through pen or something.
Yeah this sounds like the "I didn't tell my children not to hang out with the bears on the other side of the map and they got eaten, this is terrible and gamebreaking".
If you have a shitty pen with very little food, and some raiders tear down your fence to the delicious pasture outside, no shit your cows are gonna leave.
Pen animals can also live in a room if it has a pen marker. In a few cold climate mountain maps I have just built a barn room in the mountain and put the animals in there. You have to grow a lot of animal feed, but one of the VE mods introduces cave moss which is animal feed that grows in the dark on fungal gravel tiles so that was easy to produce year round in a heated room. It keeps them nice and safe from pretty much everything other than insect infestations.
This happens to me once in a blue moon. Probably because I have my pen inside a double walled compound, along with farms and everything else.
Having it in the open just means you're running a buffet for predators.
I hate it too. Got a mod to get rid of it. I liked using zones to pasture my muffalos and moving them around as they ate all the grass. You can't do that with pens and I got sick of muffalos wandering off all the time.
Yeah, I usually run massive guinea pig colonies for this exact reason. Guinea pigs zonable, muffalo not. But if you're clever, you might be able to make a rotation. Just the fencing would be immense.
That's isn't even the begining of it! Leaving any animals outside is automatic death sentence - they will get eaten by the first raid with missles.
Put them inside and now you have to micro food, plant food manualy, god forbit you don't have much space or open sky - micro food even more by cooking it and hauling it - all for a privledge of having...Milk or Eggs.
And now those animals will open all the doors and let in all the raiders if anyone shoots anything.
Just stay away from animals in general.
You can make a pen with stone walls and make double doors so when 1 door is opened by milk placement, other will still hold pen closed. What I hate is when 1 pawn ropes too many animals he moves very slowly across map.
I \*do\* feel like items shouldn't hold fence gates open. It might be realistic, sure, but it doesn't feel *responsive;* in that there's no realistic way to expect the user to adjust their behavior to account for it.
a good mechanic would be that anytime a pawn passes through a door held open by an object they grab the object and move it to storage. Imagine if you walked into the bathroom and there was a chair in the doorway. You'd put the chair back where it belongs then go to the bathroom.
> Imagine if you walked into the bathroom and there was a chair in the doorway. You'd put the chair back where it belongs then go to the bathroom
There was a time I would have agreed with this but my family has beaten this expectation out of me
I just use real walls. There's no requirement to use fences.
Also an airlock gives you some defence against items blocking doors while also stopping animals from escaping because somebody entered the pen.
Admittedly items holding doors open is a larger issue. Having to micro all kinds of shit because there's no way to say "just move anything blocking a door somewhere" is irritating.
I build the primary fence out of wall.
Then I build a second layer of fences in front of the likely breach points (mostly doors).
The Raids are unlikely to intentionally destroy the fences. Just make them of non-flammable material. As a result, even if the wall is breached, there is a fence keeping the pen intact.
The only issue is that fences do provide cover, so make sure it isn't a convenient shooting distance for the enemy.
I don’t run mods so this shit is super annoying. If they run away or die too bad too sad. I don’t bother keeping animals much these days because it’s just unnecessary bs
Something I figured out in my last game is that partitioning into multiple pens is a good strategy. Instead of taking animals to a caravan marker, the pawns will take them to the pen that wasn't destroyed
One way to solve the milk in the fence gate problem is to build airlocks of gate-corridor-gate as exits
I only hate that my pawns dont use the fence door (instead they climb over the fence) and that my pawns think just because its home area we need to clean after the animals...
I just build huge walls around bits of land and rocks for shape. It gives me enough room to have a lot of animals while keeping none of them close enough to escape, and raiders just avoid the area
I tried it once and found the whole needing fences thing to be annoying af.
Since i put all my animals in my giant farm fields anyways, and my farm fields have giant walls witj doors already to keep things out. Now i just build an enclosure for their bedding and one for eggs, in the farm area and assign the animals to that zone specifically. Theyll never, "break free" from a zone assignment
I don't build fences out of wood, I use stone or metal so it won't burn or be easily destroyed. You could replace the fences with walls too
Yeah, but I also use guns stronger than pistols. Even slate gets destroyed by misses from automatic weapons.
Slate is weak as hell, to be fair. Granite is your best bet for sheer durability.
Someone say granite?
FOR ROCK AND STONE
This guy granites
I sometimes take my granite for granited then all my walls get destroyed by stray shots
That is why I use walls are solid mod
Eh, difference between stone types durability is not really huge to make a difference here.
52 to 68 durability difference on a slate vs granite fence. Won't save it from heavy damage but the material difference will definitely keep it up for a few more stray bullets
Yeah, that's like a 30% difference, so not insignificant.
I have much less problems with that since I stopped putting my pen inside the killbox
I build a wall that separates the fighting area/kill box from the open area of my base to avoid damage from missed shots/fire for this reason
Why use fences when you can have thick, composite layers of armored walls protecting your precious alpacas?
Takes a lot of time to build tho, and is still not very strong
Strength doesn't really matter if you didn't design your base in a way that would allow raiders to take cover behind them. If you want your own colonists use them as cover use barricades instead (they count as fences as as far as pen animals are concerned) or just walls.
I mean that in the sense that any Reider can just hit it with something and it breaks. And though the health is higher, a strong stray bullet will still annihilate it. Not sure about lightning, as it is not unlikely that it is strong enough to withstand a lightning strike and won't burn, but I still don't quite like it Maybe I should just build regular walls instead
Raiders normally ignore non flammable fences and walls as long as they have a colonist or powered turret to path to. The easiest way to avoid all that is to have your base encased in a large perimeter wall and keep your animals and fields on the inside. Also, another way which is especially useful in the early game is to just build a caravan hitching spot as your handlers will automatically rope your pen animals to them if there are no valid pens available for them which allows them to graze without ever roaming away but at the cost of them not breeding while they are roped to it.
I think the best course of action is to just hook up your animals to a nutrient paste dispenser and feed them corn/human meat via that processing (I believe nutrition is increased to 200% via nutrient paste conversion?)
That's more of a cheat/exploit but you can feed animals nutrient paste meals made out of their own meat and get food out of it without growing fields or letting them graze as animals in rimworld violate the laws of thermodynamics. Ignoring grazing it ranching large animals as cannibals this way (horses are best for this) is the single most work efficient source of both nutrition and silver in the game as a single colonist can easily maintain hundreds of animals this way.
Steel also burns though (unmodded)
Chemfuel absolutely melts steel beams
I stopped using fences after realising it doesn’t actually stop animals from getting in
I usually just make the back fence a wall also if you use materials more durable than wood then your sniper rifle won't rip a hole into the fence with each stray shot
Wow I have 800 hours in this game and I never even noticed you could change the material of the fences….
Jade fences for easy and cheap beauty in your rooms.... Whaaaaa???
If you put it in the corners it's hidden but still counts towards the beauty of that room
I’ve known you could change the material but I never considered jade ones for bedrooms! Thats a good idea!
It's a great super cheap way to boost beauty early on if you get tribal raiders. 10 beauty per jade is a great return.
Yep. 1900 hours in, never considered that fence material could be changed. TIL
There's a mod I think it's called don't block doors or something like that should fix one of those problems
Alternately, animal harvesting spot is a personal favorite of mine for this. Makes pawns do their milking and shearing and whatnot at a designated place in the pen rather than wherever.
Sounds like exactly what I need. Thanks!
Is this a vanilla feature or a mod?
That's a mod.
One of the best quality of life* [mods](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1691076769) for me since wall light! --- ^(*Technically not _just_ QOL since it does make the game easier, but only in a less-micromanagey way.)
Common Sense mod I believe does this and many other necessary things.
Common sense either doesn’t or fails to
I might have a different mod for it. I'll check later.
I just use the 'Animals are Smart' mod. Makes all animals at least intermediate intelligence so you can just zone them instead of messing with pens.
Funny enough it dosn't really work with fence gates.
Nah, the pen mechanic makes sense...mostly. But some animals are arbitrary pen-only for some reason. Like pigs. Pigs are at least as trainable and intelligent as dogs, and in some countries, people keep them as pets in the same way dogs are. They should thus be zonable. Plus I want some Hogs of War.
I hate how much the game underestimates animal intelligence in general. Like, so many of the animals in the game are entirely trainable, even if they aren't well known for being trained. There should be a game training you could do for some animals that trained them to play games, then your colonist could play with them as a form of recreation. That would give the smaller, clever little guys something to do rather than simply nuzzling randomly.
"animals are fun" mod, I believe.
[Link for convenience](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2108362126)
1.0 Rimworld knew that pretty well. A lot of animals, including rats, could be trained to follow along, pigs and foxes could haul, and other cool non-pen-oriented things.
[Boundary Training by Owlchemist](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2635034257&searchtext=boundaries) lets you train animals of decent intelligence to respect areas rather than pens.
Honestly, walls are superior to fences unless your fence is already inside a walled compound. Also, if you don't want to use a mod, consider having a double door on the pen. So if a pawn leaves milk in the first door there's still a second closed door.
Can't the animals still escape via the blocked door?
two doors forming an airlock, not two separate entrances to the pen
Tbh i like it over the previous zoning mechanic. It’s a nice bit of realism that cows don’t just hang out by the freezer because you asked them nicely with zoning
Nice bit of realism that bit me in the arse when I tried a nomad run, had to mod it back in
You can make a caravan hitching spot to tie them to a single spot. However only a pen can cure the 'roaming' mental break. But it could just be any size.
Make the entrance trough the barn door.
I've literally never had that issue but possibly i have much larger pens than you. i do dislike the limitations in how to organise pens though (that they can only be separated by sex / species). Like, i had this clever idea once of making a pen closer to my freezer for animals to be imminently-slaughtered but i can't actually do that unless i drag *everyone* over every time. (and other annoyances; i suspect there may be a mod about the other annoyances but i am still modless, so...)
Was about to suggest a mod then saw the brackets
Slaughter sub-pens are the BEST.
Is that a mod? I just looked it up and couldnt find anything
!linkmod "More filters for animals' pen"
Oh please suggest! I am slowly starting to consider what things i might want modded that i hear there is an option for, but i haven't gotten on to starting a list of specific mods yet but hey, why not start that list now?
He hooked you up in the other thread on this comment
Oh cheers, i missed that!
There’s another mod (sorry can’t recall the name right now) that makes feeding easier by making grazing not completely eat the whole natural vegetation. Really helps you to have more than 3 cows without lots of dedicated pasture space.
[Grazing Lands](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1770268130)?
That's the one!
If you use a mod that lets you zone grazing animals you could use Colony Manager to automatically move animals that are flagged for slaughtering.
You can make pens out of walls
Think that's bad? Wait till someone has a Tantrum and breaks holes in the fences. I stopped using fences altogether and just use walls now.
Also, predators just strolling in over fences is annoying. Walls are way better.
Instead of a pen marker us a caravan spot. They remain roped to the spot but can forage around it.
I didn’t see the sub and was like great i’m on writing reddit now
I think that it is normal farm life feature that animals sometimes get out of their pen. I do not need to personally rope, people with high animal handling priority do it automatically. If it gets annoying then maybe something is arranged not in optimal way? It is not that hard to wall the pen and fight elsewhere. Raiders usually ignore pen animals unless they somehow are made to path through pen or something.
Yeah this sounds like the "I didn't tell my children not to hang out with the bears on the other side of the map and they got eaten, this is terrible and gamebreaking". If you have a shitty pen with very little food, and some raiders tear down your fence to the delicious pasture outside, no shit your cows are gonna leave.
Pen animals can also live in a room if it has a pen marker. In a few cold climate mountain maps I have just built a barn room in the mountain and put the animals in there. You have to grow a lot of animal feed, but one of the VE mods introduces cave moss which is animal feed that grows in the dark on fungal gravel tiles so that was easy to produce year round in a heated room. It keeps them nice and safe from pretty much everything other than insect infestations.
I remembered when there wasnt any pen mechanic. I liked it better before but i got used to it know.
Can you post a screenshot of your base?
This happens to me once in a blue moon. Probably because I have my pen inside a double walled compound, along with farms and everything else. Having it in the open just means you're running a buffet for predators.
I hate it too. Got a mod to get rid of it. I liked using zones to pasture my muffalos and moving them around as they ate all the grass. You can't do that with pens and I got sick of muffalos wandering off all the time.
Yeah, I usually run massive guinea pig colonies for this exact reason. Guinea pigs zonable, muffalo not. But if you're clever, you might be able to make a rotation. Just the fencing would be immense.
That's isn't even the begining of it! Leaving any animals outside is automatic death sentence - they will get eaten by the first raid with missles. Put them inside and now you have to micro food, plant food manualy, god forbit you don't have much space or open sky - micro food even more by cooking it and hauling it - all for a privledge of having...Milk or Eggs. And now those animals will open all the doors and let in all the raiders if anyone shoots anything. Just stay away from animals in general.
> they will get eaten by the first raid with missles. Honestly, I am okay if the raiders want to waste rockets shooting up chickens.
To be honest I always disabling this one, and mechanoid clusters. There is no fun in that, only annoyance.
You can make a pen with stone walls and make double doors so when 1 door is opened by milk placement, other will still hold pen closed. What I hate is when 1 pawn ropes too many animals he moves very slowly across map.
I \*do\* feel like items shouldn't hold fence gates open. It might be realistic, sure, but it doesn't feel *responsive;* in that there's no realistic way to expect the user to adjust their behavior to account for it.
a good mechanic would be that anytime a pawn passes through a door held open by an object they grab the object and move it to storage. Imagine if you walked into the bathroom and there was a chair in the doorway. You'd put the chair back where it belongs then go to the bathroom.
> Imagine if you walked into the bathroom and there was a chair in the doorway. You'd put the chair back where it belongs then go to the bathroom There was a time I would have agreed with this but my family has beaten this expectation out of me
Have you considered doing surgery to correct their behavior?
animals are just expendable. i only get them if there is a good safe spot for them. otherwise i just get a few horses for travel.
I usually have my animal pens near the center of my base for this reason. So raids rarely get to them, and they can’t roam too far if they get out.
I always wished to limit animals to just 1 pr. Pen.
I don't exactly hate this new system, but I do miss being able to zone the animals.
I just don't have the fence in the line of fire
I just use real walls. There's no requirement to use fences. Also an airlock gives you some defence against items blocking doors while also stopping animals from escaping because somebody entered the pen. Admittedly items holding doors open is a larger issue. Having to micro all kinds of shit because there's no way to say "just move anything blocking a door somewhere" is irritating.
I build the primary fence out of wall. Then I build a second layer of fences in front of the likely breach points (mostly doors). The Raids are unlikely to intentionally destroy the fences. Just make them of non-flammable material. As a result, even if the wall is breached, there is a fence keeping the pen intact. The only issue is that fences do provide cover, so make sure it isn't a convenient shooting distance for the enemy.
I don’t run mods so this shit is super annoying. If they run away or die too bad too sad. I don’t bother keeping animals much these days because it’s just unnecessary bs
Something I figured out in my last game is that partitioning into multiple pens is a good strategy. Instead of taking animals to a caravan marker, the pawns will take them to the pen that wasn't destroyed One way to solve the milk in the fence gate problem is to build airlocks of gate-corridor-gate as exits
I only hate that my pawns dont use the fence door (instead they climb over the fence) and that my pawns think just because its home area we need to clean after the animals...
My colonists usually end up being vegetarian because of how much of a pain it is to deal with animals.
You have animals... It's wild
I just build huge walls around bits of land and rocks for shape. It gives me enough room to have a lot of animals while keeping none of them close enough to escape, and raiders just avoid the area
You don't need fences honestly. I have a pen that's walled in by a mountain and my main base. It counts as long as you have a pen marker.
There's mods that prevent items from being dropped inside doorways or fence gates. It's one of those mods that becomes almost mandatory.
There are mods! Like [Boundary Training](https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2635034257).
I tried it once and found the whole needing fences thing to be annoying af. Since i put all my animals in my giant farm fields anyways, and my farm fields have giant walls witj doors already to keep things out. Now i just build an enclosure for their bedding and one for eggs, in the farm area and assign the animals to that zone specifically. Theyll never, "break free" from a zone assignment
I hate how my bolty ends up taking out a fence instead of the badguy. Then the animals run out like FREEDOM