One of my favorite features of colony sim Rimworld, is the ability to tame animals for your colony. From beast to defend, to lovable dog companions, there are a bunch of different creatures to befriend. One of the downsides to animal ownership however can be the mess.
Just like in real life animals are dirty in Rimworld. If you have a horse or other creature trudging through your kitchen they will make the area dirty which will leave your colonists unhappy. This guide will show you how to keep animals outside of your colony in Rimworld.
This will help keep your inside areas clean so that you won’t have to have colonists constantly cleaning the place up because of the animals.
How to Keep Animals Outside Building in Rimworld
One neat feature that you will need to use in order to keep animals outside is the zone feature. With this zones, you can create areas where certain members of the colony are allowed. Using this, you can set up areas for your animals as well. Once you have set up specific areas of the map for your animals, they will not leave those zones if you set them not to.
First, select the Architect tab from the bottom of the screen. Now, head to the option called Zone. Here you are able to set up different areas such as stockpiles and growing zones. The one we are interested in is the Expand allowed area. Under this heading, you will be able to create an area for your animals where they cannot run out from.
After selecting this option, click on the option in the menu which reads Manage areas… Now that we are in the allowed areas menu, create a New Area. Once you have made a new area, give it a name and get out of this menu. Select the option Expand allowed area once again and select the new area you just created. You can start painting an allowed zone.
Creating an Outside Zone for Animals
Now, we can create an area for our animals to roam around in. Make sure to include any areas where your animals need to go, such as their sleeping spots and feeding areas. Paint a zone outside of your colony. Make sure that any inside areas are not selected in this zone, otherwise the animal will still be able to walk in there.
Creating a zone for animals is also a great way to keep them around the colony. If you are worried about raider or animal attacks, you can create an allowed zone close to home. You can also use this zoning feature to make sure animals won’t eat your crops! Good if you are depending on those corn fields…
Now that we have create a special zone for our animals to roam around in, we have to assign them to this zone. Once we have done this, they will no longer be able to roam around inside the buildings of our colony.
Restricting Animals to Outside Zones
So we have created a zone for our friends to stay in outside. Great! Unfortunately they do not yet know that this beautiful new zone is meant for them to stay in. To restrict your tamed animals to this zone, simply select the animal you wish to send here. Now, next to their Health status you will see that they are set to Unrestricted by default. Click on this and assign the animal to the outside zone that you had just created.
You can see in the image above that I am assigning my faithful iguana Dorian to the outside zone we just created. This will keep the animal from coming inside again. Be aware that once you assign animals to a zone they will not leave it under any circumstances. If there is no food available in this zone the animal will die before they even travel one tile out of the zone to get food.
Another thing on zones is that with a recent update to the game some animals will no longer stay in a zone. For animals such as donkeys and cows, you will need to create a pen for them to stop them roaming around. You can select that link to see a guide on how to create an animal pen.
So that was how you keep the animals outside in Rimworld. Using zones you can keep animals exactly where you wanted. With some well-placed zones, you can even send out animals to attack invading forces with a front-line of cows, even if you haven’t trained them to attack.