Rimworld has a lot of content to offer in it’s deep colony simulation. From installing cybernetic limbs to exchanging 20 wooden clubs for a nuclear warhead there is quite a lot always going on. One feature of the game is the ability to tame animals. You can tame animals to keep your colonists happy, haul objects and also for defense.
There are a few different skills that animals will be able to use. Depending on the type of animal you have tamed, it may be possible for your colonists to teach them to attack enemies or even save colonists. This article will show you how to train your animals in Rimworld so they can rescue, defend or do many other tasks.
How to Train Animals in Rimworld
As taming animals is going to be the goal here, I’ll assume you already have already managed to tame animals in Rimworld. You can only train animals that already belong to your colony. These are the animals which can be seen in the Animals tab at the bottom of the screen.
To tame your animals in Rimworld, follow these steps:
- Find your colonist with the highest Animals skill and make their priority to Handle very high under the Work menu.
- In the Animals menu select the animal you’d like to train
- Open up the Training menu and tick the skills you’d like the animal to learn
- Make sure you have food in you colony that is within this animal’s diet
- Your handler will automatically attempt to carry out training with this animal at different intervals
- Wait for your handler to have enough successful training skills on the animal
- Allow or Disallow the learnt skill by using the Tick and Cross in the Training menu
The only thing you need to keep in mind is that this will take time. More advanced training techniques will take longer to train. Each time your trainer makes a successful training attempt the number shown in the training menu will go up. Using the image above, it will take two successful training sessions to teach the Yorkshire Terrier how to attack.
The success of a training attempt will depend on your colonist’s Animals skill and the animal’s Trainability. You can see this at the top of the Training menu.
Skills that Animals Can be Trained to Learn
There are a number of different skills that animals can learn in Rimworld. Basically all of these are going to be beneficial. There is no down-side to training your pet animals whenever you get the chance. Even if you don’t want them to follow your characters around or rescue them, these skills can be toggled on or off.
The skills that animals can learn in the base game of Rimworld through training include:
- Guard: You will be able to assign one “Master” colonist who the animal will follow and defend when they are drafted. This colonist will need to have a good animal skill depending on the trained animal.
- Attack: The animal can be sent out to attack distant targets while they are following their master.
- Rescue: Animals with this skill will pick up downed colonists within their allowed zone and bring them to a free bed.
- Haul: Animals will help move items around and bring them to their zones. Extremely helpful.
Not all animals can learn all of these skills however. There are some animals that can’t even be taught to follow a master. Check out the animal’s Training menu to see which options are available to that type of animal.
Colonists Not Training Animals in Rimworld
If you’re finding that your colonists are not training you animals there are a few things that you can look into to try and fix this. There are a number of reasons why your animals aren’t getting trained. For example;
- You don’t have any usable food to train the animal
- The colonist is failing at their training attempts
- Noone is set to tame animals in the colony
I will go into more detail on each of these problems below and how to solve them.
No Usable Food
As I’ve already gone into in a previous post sometimes when you attempt to tame an animal in Rimworld you will get the message “Cannot tame, no usable food”. Funnily enough this also applies to training animals too. Every time your colonist attempts to train an animal, they will need one unit of that animal’s food.
Animals can only be trained with specific food to their diet. If you don’t have any food that the animal can eat, your colonist won’t be able to train the animal. You can check out any animal’s diet by selecting them and clicking the little “i” as shown in the image below.
Kibble is one of the best foods to have for training animals as it is eaten by almost every single animal in the game. The exception to this is the Warg which only eats raw meat. If you don’t know how to make kibble in Rimworld, click here.
Colonist Failed Training Attempt
If you do have enough food and your colonists can’t seem to train the animals, the problem might be in their skills. The success of training depends mostly on your colonist’s Animals skill level. The higher this level, the better they are at teaching animals. If you can see they are constantly failing their training attempts, you will have to raise this skill. You can do this by having them train lower class animals first.
Many of the dog breeds such as huskys and labradors in the game have a very easy trainability. This is because they are smart animals which love to be trained. A good way to level up a colonists’s animal skill is by training them. Another easy way to get animal skill is by just taming every animal you can find on the map. A word of advice though, try to go for the animals which can’t eat you, should you colonist make them mad.
Set a Colonist to the Handling Job
If you find that you have enough food in the colony the reason noone is taming animals might lie in the fact that noone is set to do so. In Rimworld, colonists will perform tasks based on their list of Work Priorities. You can decide which colonists should focus on which tasks under the Work menu.
The work task related to training animals is the Handling task. If none of your colonists are set to perform this task your animals will never be trained. Another reason they aren’t doing this is because this task might be a lower priority than others. If a colonist has the cleaning skill at a higher priority than anything else, they will basically spend their whole life cleaning as it will always be dirty.
Make sure one of your colonists is set to the Handle skill and the priority is at 1 if you really want to speed up your training attempts. This will make them prioritize this task before any others.
Is there a way to increase an animal’s trainability?
Hey Jon,
Unfortunately there is no way to increase this value. It is simply assigned depending on the type of animal. For example, It’s easier to train a Labrador than a turkey.
There is a mod that increases all animals trainability which you can find here. That will make it so you can train every animal to follow, haul and attack.