It’s mid summer now and my cows are still inside, while the shepherd keeps hauling in root vegetables to feed them. I already got warnings they are getting unhealthy, but for some reason the shepherd refuses to let them out in the field where they grazed the previous years. The field seems fertile enough, it gets an 89% score.
Is my shepherd just a moron or is this some feature I’m not aware of?
If You have milking turned on they will stay inside until any barn worker will have time to milk them.
Milking is turned on, but after the last supply run the shepherd milked them but still wouldn’t let them outside when he was done. Or can they only be outside if milking is turned off completely? Because that would be weird, he can just get into the field with a bucket and milk them there, right?
No if they were milked they should go to the grazing ground You selected. Check if You have one properly selected.
I do have it selected, I checked it again. I have a savefile where you can see it happen within a few seconds, is there a way to attach it to a post here? For some reason the upload button only accepts images.
I have checked it more closely and now found that my shepherd didn’t produce any milk when milking, he just entered the building and immediately cam out again to stock more root vegetables.
If I press disable milking the cows will reappear and go into the field, but as soon as I re-enable milking they will go back into the barn again.
It means that they need to be milked. They will stay inside in that state until someone properly milk them. He was probably doing it but got stopped with bringing more food task
But why does his milking task get interrupted by the bringing more food task, when the barn is already full of food and it’s mid-summer so they don’t need winter food yet anyway?
That’s the game design thing. Bringing food is higher priority and they stock the barn all year not only for winter unfortunately. Add more workers or reduce herd size if he can’t keep up.
I have let the game run longer and it turns out he will eventually milk the cows. Apparently he refuses to do so if the food storage of the building is not entirely full, and because it was at 124/128, he interrupted his milking task, went to a root cellar to get 4 more food, and when he brought that, he got the milking task again, this time successful. Then the cows were allowed outside onto the pasture.
So apparently, if he starts milking while food stores are not at 100%, the game will interrupt him and he will attempt to first fill the food stores. But if he gets food from further away, the food stores will have depleted more during the time it took him to restock, his new supplies won’t bring them all the way to 100%, and he will try to get even more food. So he will keep running back and forth, never milking cows, until he finally manages to stock the barn to full capacity, and only then will he start milking. The result is that the cows don’t go outside until mid-summer, needlessly eating into my root vegetable stocks and missing out on half a year of grazing.
As an aside, I played for several hours yesterday and didn’t see this behavior, but now it happens right after an update, so maybe it haas something to do with that? In any case, it would probably be better if the importance his AI places on milking and getting food supplies is more balanced, so he won’t skip out on one task completely to keep doing the other task.
The same has happened to me. I cannot enable milking on my herd or they will die. Also they cannot graze on my farm land at all.
I don’t know how close to real life the devs want to take time to make this particular aspect of the game, but they may not realize that not milking a cow within a certain time-frame can cause all sorts of problems for the cow, healthwise, up to and including death (brief explanation here: What happens when a cow needs to be milked but isn’t? | Unbottled). It would be more lifelike to prioritize milking over food gathering. Then, the cows, having been milked, can be turned out to graze, leaving the worker free to run and get more fodder, if needed.
Just a little FYI.
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