Are you fed up with going on hunting? Are you looking for alternative sources of food? If yes, then stop looking. We have got the best solution to your problem – Start your animal farm! As you have a colony to feed and keep them warm and healthy, you have to feed them, and an animal farm is one of the best solutions for this issue.
For starters, breeding chickens seems to be an excellent way, but it is full of complications and will get to it with time. This guide will help you get to know everything in detail about upholding a chicken farm that will surely help you keep the people of your colony well fed for many years.
Well, you are looking to build a chicken farm that is big enough to meet the food needs of your colonists, but there is a bit of confusion due to some questions like:
- Where would you get the chickens?
- Is it essential to train every single rooster and hen?
- How to get fertilized eggs in a large amount?
- How can you make a more extensive farm?
- How to stop the roosters from fertilizing the eggs so you can start to feed on them?
- Will you be able to provide sufficient food to them in winter?
- Will you get any assistance from the mods available in your colony?
Also read: How to Get Plasteel in RimWorld?
Breed Process Between Roosters and Hens
Three ways will help you acquire your first chicken.
- Buy at least a single hen and roosters from a trading merchant. The buying of multiple hens will somehow ensure that soon there will be more chicks, but you should buy a single rooster at the start.
- Buy some fertilized eggs from a merchant. In this case, you will not know whether the chicks that are getting born will be female or male, so purchase a lot to ensure that there is one rooster in them.
- Sometimes a sudden event can become the cause of the joining of a few hens and roosters to your colony.
Taming Process of Hens and Roosters
Roosters purchased from a store directly are usually tamed as they wander in groups, and they will follow your instructions through an animal area. If you buy fertilized eggs as an alternative, you’ll have to tame the hens and roosters, or they’ll eventually leave.
In this situation, you must tame all of the chicks that emerged from the eggs while ensuring that your colonists do not get attached to them. Keep in mind that they are adorable, but you are letting them breed with each other only to feed your colony. Therefore you must treat them as such.
Fertilization of the Eggs of Chicken
You will have to slaughter chickens to feed your colony, so to keep the balance, you must let them breed faster. One rooster is enough to fertilize all of your hens. So you need at least one rooster on your farm.
You need a grown-up rooster and a grown-up hen to develop some love so that they breed, and the hen will eventually lay many fertilized eggs once the pregnancy period ends. Fertilized eggs approximately take three and a half days to turn into a small chicken.
By tapping on the egg development, you can follow it. Ensure they are put away in a comfy area inside a place in the building so that their nutrition remains intact and does not spoil. A quick warning for beginners is that If you place fertilized eggs in a refrigerator or you leave them exposed on the outside, the embryo of the egg will perish, and the eggs will convert into an unusable item (not even edible).
If you don’t check fertilized eggs in the storage of your fridge, they’ll get stuck there and die eventually.
Feeding the Hens & Rooster
Chickens, like other animals, can also eat the grass located on the map if there present any, so you won’t have to worry about them as long as the climate is pleasant and they have sufficient space to roam. You must keep the hens in an area that is fenced from all sides to protect them from wolves and various predators present near your area.
The process of breeding chickens begins at a slow rate but ultimately grows significantly.
Since natural grass dies in the winter, you’ll have to make hay grass (or any other vegetable accessible). The hay grass and kibble can be stored in a place without allowing animals access throughout the entire year while you wait for the winter season to arrive. Allow the chickens to enter the storage compartment or store the food someplace that is accessible for the animals when winter comes.
Ensure the temperature of the area is appropriate for hens; if you leave them outside in the cold, they will perish. They will also die if the temperature rises above 50 degrees.
Also read: How to Feed Animals in Rimworld
Controlling the Rate of Chicken’s Breeding
Give food to your chickens till they’re ready to be slaughtered. Allowing them to breed at a rate that is higher than the people of your colony can eat, will result in many of them, which will demand a lot of resources.
To escape from this situation, keep just a single rooster in an isolated zone of your farm after you have enough hens (slaughter all the additional roosters). When you need additional chickens, you can relocate them into the area with hens. Your hens will lay certain unfertilized eggs that can be used in meals while they are not being fertilized.
Specifics About Chickens
- After every 1.7 days, chickens lay one egg.
- After every eight hours, they reproduce.
- The total time that a chicken egg requires is 3.5 days.
- As a result, a chicken’s reproductive rate is one after every 5.533 days per female.
- A chicken usually requires 7.2 days to mature into a juvenile and eighteen days to mature into an adult.
When slaughtering chickens, leather is not produced. On the RimWorld Wiki, you can learn more about hens and eggs.
Also read: The Best RimWorld Hydroponic Layouts
Useful Mods to Have a Cheerier & Resourceful Farm
The Manager for the Mods of the colony is highly recommended. It will let you create chicken-specific zones that will be automatically allotted to fresh chicks. You can also allocate zones to chickens that have been selected for slaughter, and they will immediately travel there. The spare hens and chickens will be designated for slaughter automatically if you set an extreme number of hens and chickens.
Finally, proper application of this mod would help you a lot to create your farm into a self-sustaining farm.
