I set my barn pop to 15 and every year 3 cows were born and 3 were slaughtered, but after for some reason cows were not slaughtered one year. I didn’t notice until some weren’t killed another year and I now had 21/16 cows in my barn and everything started going sideways with 100 dying by starvation. Manual commanding slaughtering didn’t work either, I tried a few other things like lowering barn pop to see if that would do anything but no. Now I command a ghost town, so that’s fun.
After I build a second barn and transferred the extra cows + the ones I had in storage to the second barn the herders started to slaughter the cows, but not just the five I requested, they killed 8 in the first barn (lv 2) and one in the second lv 1 (which was never over capacity or requested to kill) I suspect more were to be killed in the first barn but than the blizzard hit so they went indoors.
Hello, i have the same issue. I tried relocating the barns but it doesn’t help. I haven’t tried splitting the herd yet. I will try as soon as i can afford to build new barns.
Hi, seems like the storage was the main issue - thanks for the hint!
However, it seems that was only part of the solution. The cows of the overcrowded barns were running around all over the village (even during winter) and my villagers weren’t able to catch them. Thus they still weren’t slaughtered. I think this was fixed when I built a new barn and split the overcrowded herds so that no barn was over capacity anymore. The cows stopped running away and now everything seems to work like normal again.
So if you have this issue: First make sure you have enough storage/stoarges of the afflicted barns are empty. Then you need to split the overcrowded herds so that they aren’t overcrowded anymore (built additional barns as needed).
Those are defiantly good things to help with the issue, but I’m still wondering why after I split the herd so many were slaughtered. I only ever manually selected 5 to be killed but like 10 died.
Looking at your first screenshot it would make sense if they killed 9 given you changed the herdlimit to 12. In that case I guess once a cow is selected to be slaughtered it doesn’t matter if it switches barns - it will still get killed. Here I can only think of one solution: After you split the herd fire all shepherds working at the source barn, let the game run for a few seconds and then reemploy them. This might reset the slaughter orders and save the cattle.
