Kibble is the lifeblood of Rimworld animals. Whether you’re feeding livestock, building an elephant army, or civilizing feral humans, dog food plays a prominent role in building and maintaining your spacefaring empire.
In this Rimworld Kibble Guide, I’ll be reviewing the process of creating, distributing, and maintaining your kibble production lines. As a bonus, I’ll detail “alternative sources” of ingredients and how to send animals to fight in your stead.Â
Bottom Line Up Front Summary:
Harvest plants and slaughter animals so your colonists can produce kibble from a butcher’s table. Create a large pen for grazing animals and deliver kibble to your carnivores to prevent starvation.
Kibble: Animals’ favorite food
The product of 1 unit of plant and animal nutrition, we use kibble to feed and tame animals. While it takes a short time to produce, employing kibble is more efficient in managing our animal’s hunger and taming wild creatures. If we want to train a batch of wild beasts into an ultimate fighting force, we’ll need a allot of kibble.
Production
Step 1: Building a Butcher’s table:
As we embark upon our kibble-conquering animal empire, we begin with creating a butcher’s table in the production section of our architect tab. I recommend placing the table within our freezer to preserve the meat. To create a freezer, build one to two cooling units in an enclosed room, ensuring that the blue end-faces inside and the red outside, and set the unit’s temperature to -30 degrees.
Also, place our table close to our stockpile area but away from our cooking station. While it may seem more convenient to place the butcher’s table in the same room as our cooking table for efficiency’s sake, the process of butchering animals dirty’s the floor around us. An unclean cooking area is more likely to produce food that gives our colonists food poisoning, slowing their movement and making them puke.
Step 2: Assign a Colonist to Cooking
If you haven’t done so, go into your colonist’s work tab and select the cook option out of the several types available. Make sure you choose the colonist with the highest cooking skill to increase their efficiency and go into their priority tab and set cooking to “1.” This cooking colonist will also produce food from the cooking stove if you have any bills active, so keep that in mind.
Step 3: Create a Kibble Bill
Now we can create a bill from the butcher’s table to get our colonists to start automatically producing kibble. To begin, click our butcher’s table, select “bills,” select create kibble, use the arrows to make kibble a priority, and hold shift to increase the kibble production to 100. This process will automate our kibble production unless we get a message saying we’re “missing material, ” then we’re either lacking plants or meat.
Step 4: Build a Freezer in your Pen
Now that we’ve set up kibble production lines, we need a place to store all our delicious dog food. Create a large pen with a marker inside if you haven’t done so. Next, build a small building inside, approximately four by four blocks, with a cooling unit and door. Set the cooler to -30 degrees to prevent the kibble from spoiling, and place down a dumping zone set to receive only kibble when your animals are hungry
**Note: Pen Size and Grazing
If your farm animals are herbivores and reside within a large pen, they’ll naturally graze upon nearby grass instead of eating the kibble you’ve provided. Their preference for grass over kibble enables us to stockpile kibble for cold winter seasons where grazing is limited. However, note that animals will continue to reproduce, and a pen size that lasted the last rimyear will be far too small for the next one.
Ingredients:
While it’s easy to produce kibble from any leftover Muffalo meat or rice, we can utilize some neat tricks to be more efficient for larger, food-starved colonies.
Meat
Required for producing kibble and feeding carnivores, we acquire meat through butchering creatures at a butcher’s table. To obtain this resource, we’ll either have to hunt wild creatures, slaughter extra cattle or wait for predators to leave some prey for us to take advantage of. Alternatively, we can buy meat from merchants or steal it from enemy encampments.
Alternative sources of meat
Insect meat: While your colonists can eat insect meat, many religions and memes dislike using insect meat in meals and put colonists in a bad attitude. However, instead of letting all that delicious meat go to waste, we can feed them to our animals in tasty kibble dishes. To enable the use of insect meat in kibble, go into the details of the kibble bill and allow the use of insect meat in kibble production.
Also, if your colonists aren’t butchering the insectoids outright, ensure the butcher animal’s bill enables the use of insects. Now you can turn those pesty infestations into a tasty source of food!
Human Flesh: If you’re that depraved to feed your animals, human flesh is an excellent ingredient for kibble. However, if your colonist belongs to a non-cannibal religion/meme, and most colonists do, you will suffer a mood penalty for cutting open their fellow man.
To use human flesh in kibble, we’ll have to enable butchering human corpses from the butcher’s table and then enable using human flesh in the kibble tab. Getting a cannibal colonist to perform the process should remove the penalty of cutting people apart, but nearby colonists will still disapprove of such actions.
Another alternative to using human flesh in kibble is simply dumping human corpses in the freezer within your pen. Carnivores will naturally feed off the frozen bodies of your foes and friends. While colonists will still suffer a mood debuff about being near human corpses, it’s less severe than rendering people into kibble.
Plants:
Rice: Growing rice for kibble production is an excellent choice for colonists with limited growing skills. Quick and easy to grow, rice is a good choice for gaining usable plant matter for cooking. It takes approximately three days to produce and grows faster with a sunlamp nearby.
Berries: If we live in a temperate, fertile region, we’ll have access to a ready supply of berry bushes. While these bushes don’t give us a large portion of food for our trouble, they are immediately available, unlike crops that can take several days to grow.
Gauranlen tree – If we have access to the Ideology DLC, we’ll eventually receive a notification of a Gauranlen sprout appearing nearby. Harvesting the plant gives us a seed we can plant to grow Dryads that can independently grow berries.
After planting the seed in a safe, fertile location, select who you want to connect to the tree. This person will be permanently bonded to the tree and spend nearly half their day pruning it. I recommend picking someone with a high plants skill to speed up the pruning process. Also, be sure to change the caste from the default hauling caste to the berry caste and get your colonist attuned to the tree to make the change.
After several days you should have two to three berry-making dryads producing 40 berries every two days. With this tree, we’ll have access to a steady supply of berries to make kibble.
Taming:
If we have colonists with a sufficiently high enough “animals” skill, we can use kibble as a more efficient and effective means to tame animals or wild people. To manually tame creatures, select the animal you would like to tame and click tame. Then choose the colonist you want to handle the taming process and click on the preselected animal to begin the process.
To automate the taming process, select the animals you would like to tame, and in your colonists’ work tab, make a colonist’s “handle” option the highest priority. If we are successful, the colonist will bring the now tamed animal into the nearest pen. That colonist can continue taming that animal with kibble to make it guard, haul, and follow your tamer if that animal is trainable.
Warning: Some creatures react aggressively to failed taming and will attack your tamer. The game will notify you of an animal’s likelihood of attacking on a failed taming, so be careful when taming hostile creatures.
Training:
Tameness: This details how tame a creature is and prevents it from going wild. If we neglect to maintain a domesticated creature’s tameness, that animal will eventually go wild and attack livestock within our pen. Stay vigilant and assign a person to keep charge of handling.
Guard: Animals will follow their master around and protect them from foes. This skill is handy for protecting your colonists from dangerous foes or using this creature as a raiding partner.
Attack: Send your beats out to devour your foes! Training attack enables us to send domesticated creatures to attack enemies from afar.
Haul: Turn your animal into a productive part of your colony! While we can’t manually control our creatures, training our animals to haul encourages them to transport resources and remove the burden of carrying from our weary colonists.
Utility Animals
Horses (animal skill:1)– Horses are the most worthwhile creature to tame early on. These majestic creatures can carry 84 kilos of weight and give your colonists the riding bonus while traveling, which nearly halves their travel time. I advise taming horses as soon as you have a pen and the need to travel.
Muffalo (animal skill:5)Â – These large, commonplace animals are an excellent source of meat and wool. Muffalo function as wonderful pack animals and food during lean seasons. While they don’t confer the same riding bonus as horses, the amount of meat they deliver when harvested makes them worth taming.
Boomalopes (animal skill:5)– Boomalopes are an excellent source of chemfuel. When matured, every few days, they produce 11 bits of chemfuel we can use in generators, transport pods, explosive shells, and other weaponry.
Warning: Boomalopes are dangerous
However, despite their great use, boomalopes also explode when killed and can light your entire pen on fire. Worse yet, if you have any chemfuel laying around, the fires will ignite the chemfuel, potentially exploding your entire base. Make sure your boomalopes are well cared for, or they’ll turn on you in death. I’ll never forgive boomalope 5, who single handly destroyed my entire base after dying of starvation.
Warmongering Animals:
Elephants (animal skill:7)Â These sturdy herbivores are great companions in plant-dense environments. Their preference for veggies makes it easier to feed them when meat gets scarce, and their strong tusks can easily disable unguarded foes.
Grizzly Bears (animal skill:8): Ferocious and deadly, bears are a great beast to tame if you want a carnivore that will quickly tear your enemies apart. While they’re vulnerable to enemy attacks, keeping a doctor at the ready should prevent their untimely deaths. I recommend purchasing bears from vendors, bears can attack and kill your colonists if you fail to tame them.
Megasloths (animal skill:10)Â Easily one of the most powerful creatures to tame, megasloths are readily available and incredibly vicious. I advise again to purchase megasloths from traders, like bears they have a high chance of attacking on a failed tame.
Thrumbos (animal skill:10)Â Heavily protected and extremely dangerous, Thrumbos are the most potent and challenging animals to tame. One Thurmbo can easily take on a group of 6 melee warriors without a scratch, and three thrumbos can take care of entire enemy bases.
However, even at a max animal skill, the chances of taming these creatures is 1-2%. Luckily enough, from time to time, the game confers an inspired taming bonus to happy colonists, enabling them to domesticate the next animal they attempt to tame. So keep your colonists happy to bypass this improbability.
Wild Humans:Â After succumbing to madness, many colonists end up going into the wild to become one with the animals. We can tame and eventually civilize our wayward brethren but doing so takes time and a large amount of kibble. After some amount of time, we can turn that substitute teacher gone animalistic back into a functioning part of our burgeoning society.
Other Animals:Â While other animals provide products like milk and wool, they don’t come close to the benefits horses, and boomalopes provide. I recommend switching to handling muffalo in place of unavailable horses. Also, if you have a colonist with a high animal stat (+16) try taming thrumbos for extra protective pets that provide plenty of resources when slaughtered.
Alternatives to Kibble
While kibble is the most efficient way to feed your animals, losing your cooking colonist can impair your kibble production. Luckily there are several alternatives we can employ to prevent our animals from starving.
Gauranlen tree Inside pen – Planting a berrymaking Gauranlen tree inside your pen ensures your animals will always have access to a steady supply of berries. While this does nothing for carnivorous pets, Gauranlen trees are a great way to keep your herbivores fed. Even if the person attending the tree becomes unavailable for a few days, the tree’s dryads will continue producing berries.
Depositing Pemmicans – After large sting operations, returning caravans will likely receive many pemmicans from dead foes. While our colonists can use this long-lasting food, our animals can too. Once our colonists return home, force your horse to drop the foodstuff manually, and nearby animals will come rushing to eat. This food even works for carnivorous creatures too.
Manually Dumping Food – If we have a surplus of potatoes, rice, or corn, consider creating a dumping zone within our livestock pen. While less efficient than kibble, this dumping zone is a great way to keep your herbivores from starving.
Corpses for Carnivores
If we’re rich in corpses but low in meat, delivering corpses to our animals is a great way to keep our carnivores fed. We’ll start by creating a dumping zone inside your pen’s freezer and ensuring it only accepts “fresh corpses.” Now our warglings will nibble and chew on that unsuspecting marauder that tried to steal our mega flatscreen TV.
FAQs:
Question: How do I make kibble?
Answer: Go into the bills section of your butcher’s table and select make kibble. Prioritize it above butchering animals, and the colonists you’ve assigned to cooking shall automatically produce kibble.
Question: Why should I use kibble?
Answer: Kibble is 25% more nutritious than feeding your animals plant feed or animal meat.
Question: How do I feed my animals kibble?
Answer: Make sure to deposit kibble into a zone inside your animals’ pen. Refrigerate the kibble inside the pen to prevent it from spoiling.
Question: Can I feed my colonists kibble?
Answer: Yes, but they’ll be very unhappy about it.
Conclusion
Well done. You’ve put together an autonomous system of kibble production to keep your animals going throughout the winter. Whether you’re an aspiring horse herder or breeding elephants for battle, you’ve taken the first step toward mastering Rimworld. Now send forth your flock of battle beasts and attack! The dawn of your animal empire is nigh!
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