Hunting and Animal Husbandry

Two ways to put meat and materials on the table. Hunting wild game with spears, bows, and traps, and raising your own livestock for eggs, wool, milk, manure, and food.

Meat, hides, and animal products come from two systems that grow with you. Early on you hunt wild game with thrown spears, a bow, and traps, which feeds you and pays the Hunting chapters. Later you raise your own animals in pens, which gives a steady, self-sufficient supply of eggs, wool, milk, manure, and meat without leaving the village. Both run on skills and technology, and both reward setting them up before you actually need the output.

Hunting wild game

You hunt with thrown spears, a bow and arrows, and traps, with a rabbit trap as the early staple (setting one is a Chapter II goal). Skinning a kill needs a knife. The Hunting skill governs all of it, and reaching higher levels unlocks perks, including a wildlife-highlight perk around Tier 2 that makes spotting game far easier and helps you eat through winter.

The chapters structure your hunting progression:

Chapter	Hunting goal
II (A Survivalist)	Set a rabbit trap, hunt an animal
IV (Into the Wilderness)	Build a Hunting Lodge, hunt 3 fox or boar
VIII (A Big Game)	Acquire a bow, hunt 1 moose, 1 wisent, 1 bear

Passive animals like rabbits and deer flee when you approach, so the challenge is closing the distance or trapping them. Aggressive animals like boar, wolves, wisent, and bears fight back, so big-game hunting in Chapter VIII wants real gear and care. Hunting and the Survival technology category feed each other: hunting, gathering, and fishing generate Survival points, which unlock hunting buildings and schemes for hunting gear, campfires, and traps.

Animal husbandry

Raising livestock is unlocked through the Farming technology category and gives your village its own supply of products. Each species has its own building:

Building	Animal	Main products
Henhouse	Chickens	Eggs and chicks (need a rooster plus hen)
Pigsty	Pigs	Manure, a key Fertilizer input
Cowshed	Cows	Milk
Fold	Sheep and goats	Wool (sheep), Milk (goats)
Goose House	Geese	Goose products
Apiary	Bees	Honey and related goods

You assign Animal Breeders to tend the pens, and their Farming skill sets their efficiency. Most animals, bees aside, eat animal feed, so a working pen needs a feed supply.

Breeding and products

Breeding needs an adult male and an adult female of a species together. Offspring appears with a per-male reproduction chance that varies by species (per Neoseeker):

Species	Reproduction chance
Sheep, Goats	14%
Chickens, Pigs, Cows, Geese	15%
Horses	25%
Donkeys	26%

Some products need the right tool on the worker: a worker shearing sheep for Wool needs Iron Shearing Scissors, and one milking goats needs a Bucket. Chickens give eggs and chicks but need a rooster alongside the hens. Lifespans and maturation are tracked, so a pen needs management over time: pigs mature in about a year with an adult lifespan around 18.75 years, and sheep live around 12.5 years (per Neoseeker).

Pigs are worth keeping even if you do not want pork, because their Manure is a key Fertilizer input. Pair a Pigsty with the rot-to-fertilizer trick and your fields run on a self-made fertilizer supply.

Tying it together

Hunting and husbandry close several loops at once. Hunters and Fishermen plus a Cook keep food production running so the village feeds itself. Pigs feed your fertilizer supply, sheep and goats and cows give wool and milk for the crafting and food chains, and chickens give eggs. Set the pens up before winter and they keep producing while wild food gets scarce, which is exactly when a self-sufficient village pulls ahead of one that still hunts for every meal.