Cattle Problem (more than a problem... it's a major issue!)

Farthest Frontier General Discussion
1

Does anybody have any ideas with how to deal with the cattle problem?
Apologies as this could sound like a rant, it’s not.
This situation is borne out of frustration, as my meat supply was “golden”, as I didn’t have to rely on traders for the bulk of items relating to cattle.

This questions is rhetorical as such, as I know Crate are dealing with this, but it would be nice to know when they get to resolve the issue with cattle/barns.

Can’t we at least sell them back to traders, as you can with other items, as it would solve the issue with cattle?

I’m overrun with cattle in my barns. I had seven of them. I had to make more barns to take the “overflow” of cattle as I had a massive excess of cattle in my barns (I ended up with seven barns as the buggers wouldn’t stop reproducing in any of them, so I had to build more to take the excess)
I tried milking turned on, and off, to varying degrees, to see if that would stop them reproducing, it didn’t.
I started off by reducing the number of herders to see if that helped when I first got cattle, and all they did was to wander off, so I fenced them in. I should’ve done that from the start, as they wandered off all over the place and the herders took ages getting them back to the barns, so they weren’t doing their jobs as such (milking, herding, fetching goods, butchering etc;)

It appears that herders don’t seem to slaughter cattle, even when they’re set to slaughter, (it shows them as butchering cattle) but the herds kept increasing. I tried getting hunters, and soldiers too, to kill them, and had no luck with that.
The cattle ended up getting sickly, so much so that I ended up demolishing all but one of my barns. I then left the cattle in their fields to slowly die off - basically starve to death - No messages about them dying off as there were no barns for them to use, so no messages about this. They eventually died out, and that took a number of years, but the remaining barn still kept producing cattle - an overabundance of them, again.
So I deleted that one too just so I could go back to square one and start again.

No doubt it’ll be a lather rinse repeat scenario on the cards.

Answers on a postcard please…

2

I don’t understand why you felt the need to build more barns, when the herd reaches maximum size all new births are matched with slaughters. I’ve only once built a 2nd barn… I could see you would have problems getting anything to work if you hadn’t fenced your cows in though, and it doesn’t actually say anywhere in the game that you have to fence them in… did you have 7 barns worth of cows wandering everywhere? Ooh… my nose is curling up.

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3

If your herders don’t butcher the cattle above the limit I guess you’re dealing with a major bug.

I’ve like 4-5 games running, testing different settings and always my herders butcher the cattle above the limit, be it tier 1 barn or tier 2 barn. The game I’m running now has two barns with 12 cattle each and 3 birth/year/barn. I have them butcher one cattle in each barn mid-year manually to keep the smoke houses busy. And once the new year starts they butcher the ones over limit automatically.

And yes housing them in, even with pacifist mode, is the go to. I usually drop the barn and have them build a fence surrounding the pasture AND the barn and as soon as I get my first pair of cows I build a second fanced pasture next to it with a gate.

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4

I know people were having more problems with the barns in earlier game versions, the OP might be related t o that, but I’ve never had issues

5

Why put up a fence, rarely do my cattle roam. Though I had one cow on other side of the map, silly cow. :slight_smile:

6

Bears mostly

7

You should indicate what version of the game you are playing on. All my barns in all my towns butcher cows when over the herd limit.

Maybe you are playing on an old version of the game…

8

I have just stopped playing this because each of my herds suddenly becomes unhealthy and the cattle are not released to graze. I have had it happen repeatedly, and no amount of toggling what I think is the graze button, or setting their grazing, or allocating even more herders, makes any difference. The only thing that helps is moving the whole barn, and with the best will in the world, moving a barn every couple of years is a drag on the economy. This settlement is 100 years old, and the barns were fine until they weren’t. V annoying bug.