Animal enclosure builds

[Ramzax]

How have you all built you animal enclosures?
I built a 6x15 enclosure for 1 chicken and it ate all of the grass.
That seems a bit excessive.
I'd be curious to see how you've all done it.

I did see the grass conveyor in: SPOILER Help with sustainable food
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9707

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I've replicated it and am able to sustain a single cow with this. This also seems a bit excessive for maintaining livestock.

[Mason11987]

How have you all built you animal enclosures?
I built a 6x15 enclosure for 1 chicken and it ate all of the grass.
That seems a bit excessive.
I'd be curious to see how you've all done it.

I did see the grass conveyor in: SPOILER Help with sustainable food
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9707

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Show

I've replicated it and am able to sustain a single cow with this. This also seems a bit excessive for maintaining livestock.

Was your enclosure open to the air?

[Ramzax]

yes.
Just a 16x6 rectangle with grass blocks surrounded by cobble. I'm trying out fenced areas with different surface areas.

[dawnraider]

I see other people have found my build :)

The grass conveyor is definitely excessive for just keeping animals, it's really only needed for automating animals, which isn't even fully possible yet. From what I've heard is that a cow needs about 16x16, sheep and pigs needs half that, and chickens need half again. I have not really done my own testing on that, however.

[Ramzax]

I've been testing animal closures today on my server.
For chickens thus far I have found a 6x6 enclosure with a fence perimeter, leaving a 5x5 internal area is sufficient to keep a chicken alive. Less than this resulted in the death of chickens.
I believe that if you regularly, at least daily, fed a chicken a 4x4 internal area with a fence perimeter that was grass would be sufficient to keep a chicken alive.
I'm working on the area necessary for sheep, pigs, and cattle.

[gaga654]

I'm a little confused by your description - if the interior is 5x5, wouldn't that make the whole thing 7x7, not 6x6? And when you say the fence perimeter was grass, do you mean there are grass blocks under the fence blocks?

[Battosay]

I managed to find some screenshots I took when I was testing what's the minimum space required to safely keep a chicken indefinitely :

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I tried first with fairly small pens :

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But after only a couple weeks IG half of them were dead, and the other half was starving, about to meet the same fate :

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So I made slightly bigger ones :

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And they were still all doing great after several months (ignore the missing chicken on the further left, it was suicidal and jumped in front of my axe) :

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[Hiracho]

The minimum size needed is more like a math question. How much do the animals eat per day, and how much grows on a day. With most animal pen designs the rate at which grass grows is low and most of all very unstable because the animals eat the grass that is also used to spawn new grass. A cobbleblock fenced pen with half eaten grass field barely makes new grass blocks. Battosay's designs are able to go a lot smaller because of all the fencepost grass that keeps a high growthrate.

With this in mind I've designed some cages/pens that have a huge grass regrowth rate. So maybe focus on that factor :)

One thing I found that really stabilizes grassgrowth

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Is using a grass roof! grass can grow down from the roof effectively giving each dirtspot 9 pottential seeds to grow from :)

[Ramzax]

Thanks guys, I had started playing with using internal fences to give grass a regen point.
I'll see what I can do to make more effective sheed/pig and cow pens.