Following a raid I had a rogue goat make it into my arable area, unfortunate, but whatever. (also secondary point, the sheer volume of food a single animal can eat from a field is insane!)
Watching my goat herders (4 herders, 8 goats), a herder would set off to retrieve the rogue animal, and then cancel the task and go to milk a goat still in the barn, another herder would take the task and get a few meters and then cancel and return to milk, and so on.
This kept happenning for a few minutes, until presumably the goats in the barn ran out of milk.
This would be less annoying if the rogue animal didn’t eat enough foodstuffs to support a small village.
This problem was likely made worse due to the goats not being milked as much during the raid, but nevertheless afaik there’s no penalty for not milking animals (other than no milk), whereas the rogue animal eating half a field of crops is very annoying.
The easiest way we found during the playtest to deal with rogue animals was to surround both the grazing area and the barn/hut/coop with fencing so there was no way for them to escape.
Unfortunately, the fencing doesn’t always work. If you don’t put a gate in, the workers cannot get to the animals/buildings. And if you do put a gate in, the animals can at times use the gate to get out.
Sorry should have said with gates. I raised the bug during playtest and was given the fence/gate fix then and it hasn’t let me down yet. My current play through is at year 144, ~1700 people, 5 large barns, 2 chicken coops, 2 stables, and previously had 2 goat huts and no escapes yet.
That’s good to hear. I haven’t used livestock since the new release, but if the issue with animals opening the gates themselves has been addressed, then yes, fencing is the solution.
They are normally fenced in, to prevent wandering, but a raider decided that a fence gate was too important not to destroy, creating a gap for them to escape from.