Along with the DLC Ideology, Rimworld’s 1.3 update has also added a bunch of new mechanics and features. One such features is the inclusion of animal pens. These self-built areas are the new zone in which certain animals will stay inside. Certain animals such as donkeys and horses will need a pen to stay in, otherwise they may try to escape the colony.
Using new structures and items, this guide will show you how to build a pen for your animals, set up food in the animal pen and show you how to use animal pen markers.
How to Build an Animal Pen in Rimworld
There isn’t a great deal of objects surrounding building an animal pen luckily in Rimworld. There are three different objects relating to animal pens in Rimworld. These are; Fences, Gates and Pen markers. All of these are pretty self-explanatory but just in case…
Animal Pen Objects:
- Fences: Uses to mark the borders of an animal pen. These are unpassable fences that can be made from all of the different stones and metals in the game.
- Gate: These are gates in which animals and pawns can pass through to get into animal pens. Animals won’t be able to pass through these on their own and will require a pawn with the Handling job to bring them through.
- Pen markers: These signpost designate which animals are to be kept in what pens.
Building the Animal Pen
You will need all three of these in order to build an area for your animals. It doesn’t matter in what order you build the pen at all. I am going to start by laying down the general fenced area and put some gates on them. You can find fences and gates under the Structure group in the Architect menu. Place down a fenced area and don’t forget to add a gate. This is just like building a room for your pawns.
The size of the pen depends on what kind of animals you would like to have. Obviously for larger animals you will want to build a larger pen area. It may also be a good idea to build a barn inside the pen.
This can be a place for your animals to sleep and lay eggs. Once you have the pen set out you will need to build a Pen marker in order to change it from a random fenced area into an actual animal pen. You can find the Pen marker under the Misc heading.
The Pen marker also has many different variants depending on which material you choose to use. Once you have built a Pen marker you will be able to decide which animals can use the pen. Before you place one of these into the fenced area your pawns won’t use the pen for animals.
Deciding Which Animals Go in Which Pen – Pen Marker Settings
Now that you have a Pen marker inside one of your animal pens there are a bunch of different settings that you can change with the pen. To change which animals are allowed in the pen, select it and inside the pop-up menu you can see a tab called Animals.
This menu functions the same way that Zones function for items. You can allow or disallow certain animals in each pen. See the image below.
You can even separate male and female animals using this menu. This is helpful if you don’t want certain animals to breed and multiply. By selecting the Food tab you can get an idea on how much nutrition will be available in the pen. This will also give you an estimate on some animal’s food consumption per day.
This menu can tell you how many of each animal the pen can support without external food sources. Very helpful if you don’t have much food in the colony or don’t want to have a pawn hand-feed the animals.
The last tab that is available from the Pen marker menu is the Auto-cut menu. This is a very helpful menu where you can decide which plants will be cut automatically when growing in the pen.
If you don’t want any trees or bushes at all to grow, you can un-check them in this checkbox menu and your pawns will automatically cut them down if they start to grow in the pen.