RimWorld Animals Guide and Tier List: best pets, mounts and livestock

How the ranking works

Each animal is scored for two jobs and takes the better tier of the two, so a great fighter that's useless on the farm still ranks on its fighting. Nothing here is hand-placed; the tiers fall out of the numbers below, which is why a few pets and pests sit lower than their reputation.

War only counts animals you can actually train to attack — everything else scores zero on this side, however scary it looks in the wild. For the ones that do fight, the score is damage per second times health scale (staying power), then docked for how dangerous and skill-hungry it is to tame, and for a pure-meat diet you have to keep feeding in the field. Crowd-control abilities — the mastodon and elephant's war trumpet, the alpha thrumbo's terror roar, the hive queen's acid spew — add a bit on top.

Utility is throughput: how much food an animal returns over a year — its breeding rate times meat yield times nutrition efficiency, which already prices in the feed spent raising young — plus points for what else it hands you. Eggs, wool, milk and chemfuel count; so do the work jobs — hauling, caravan packing, and Odyssey's foraging (pig, raccoon) and digging (megasloth, megavole). Therapy and nuzzling pets get a mood bonus, which is the only thing keeping cats and lapdogs off the floor.

Figures are from the 1.6 / Odyssey game data on the RimWorld Wiki. The formula is deliberately simple and a little opinionated about risk and upkeep — treat the tiers as a strong starting read, not gospel, and tap a chip to see the exact numbers it was scored on.

Taming and training

Before the tiers matter you have to tame the thing. Your chance to tame depends on the animal's wildness and your handler's Animals skill, and some species won't let you try below a minimum skill. Fail to tame a predator and it may turn manhunter on the spot — which is why the tame-a-grizzly plan generally ends badly at skill 4.

Training is a short menu. Guard and Attack need intermediate intelligence; Haul and Rescue need advanced plus enough body size. Odyssey adds Forage for pigs and raccoons, Comfort for cats and pandas, digging for megasloth and megavole. Roughly two dozen species can haul; most small omnivores cannot.

Follow isn't trained but toggled, and it's the setting most players miss. Following animals accompany a drafted colonist or tag along on field work, and a rescue-trained follower will carry a downed colonist off the field. Different animals suit the two modes: dogs make the best following animals in a fight, while a pack beast should stay home unless you want it shot. Training also decays, so a specific animal you haven't drilled in a fortnight has quietly forgotten how to haul.

The best pets in RimWorld

A pet is a different job from war or work, and the winners aren't the animals at the top of the grid. A pet is judged on what it costs to keep, what mood it hands back, and whether it can also do a job while it's being cute.

Huskies and labrador retrievers

Huskies and labrador retrievers are the best pets in RimWorld, and it isn't close. Both have advanced trainable intelligence — the level that unlocks hauling and rescuing a downed colonist. Both sit at 0% wildness, and that's worth being precise about: wildness doesn't grant those jobs, it controls how fast training decays. At 0% a trained animal holds its skills 12 days between refreshers; at 100% it's 6, and anything above roughly 10% can revert to wild. Dogs never do.

Huskies hit harder, carry more and shrug off colder biomes; labradors are cheaper to keep and breed larger litters. Huskies also nuzzle colonists, and Odyssey adds comfort training on top. The downside for both: predators hunt them, so a lone dog outside the walls is bait.

Cats, and the mood question

Cats catch vermin, and with Odyssey comfort training they hand a sad colony a little extra mood. Without it a cat is a mood debuff waiting to happen — it eats, it adds wealth, it does nothing else. Cats can't be trained to haul either, which is the line between a pet and a worker.

For a mood-starved colony, take the husky. It nuzzles, hauls and rescues for a normal dog's keep. A cat is a pet; a husky is a pet with a job — and that's the whole of the best-pet question.

Pack animals, mounts and caravan speed

Caravans need two different things and most players conflate them: something to carry weight, and something to ride. Pack animals solve the first, mounts solve the second, and only some animals do both.

For load it's pure pack capacity: mastodon 157.5 kg, elephants 140, muffalo, horses and bison 84, dromedary and yak 73.5, donkey 49, alpacas 35. Those large herbivores are the ones worth bringing. Other pack animals exist but don't earn their keep, and a dog or a pig can carry items around the base with no pack capacity at all.

For speed you need a rideable animal, and this part is vanilla: caravan riding speed has been a base-game stat since 1.3, no mods required. It applies to world-map travel only — your colonists don't ride around the base or into a firefight unless you're running the Giddy-Up mod. Horses ride at ×1.6, thrumbo matches it, the Odyssey alpha thrumbo doubles it; donkeys, dromedaries, elephants and the Odyssey mastodon sit at ×1.3. Muffalo, despite the reputation, have no caravan riding speed at all.

You need one mount per colonist for the full multiplier — a single horse among five pawns does next to nothing — and only adults can be ridden. Two animals can look identical on a tier list and behave nothing alike on the road.

So caravan speed means horses and load means muffalo or mastodon — horses plus one heavy packer beat either alone, and alpacas ride along as cheap overflow. In a desert run dromedaries replace both, because they survive the heat.

Farm animals: what livestock actually returns

Farm animals are the backbone of early food production, and two kinds of return are worth separating. Renewable resources — eggs, milk, wool, chemfuel — arrive on a timer without killing anything. Other resources come only at slaughter: meat, leather, fur, the odd trophy. Nutrition efficiency decides whether either is worth it: what an animal produces against the food it will consume getting there. Animals that produce a lot and eat a lot lose to small ones that barely eat, which is how chickens beat most of the roster.

Pigs are the quiet workhorse: 238 pork and 68 pigskin from one adult, they breed fast, and as omnivorous grazers they eat almost anything. The catch is that they eat live plants, so keep pigs off your crops. Odyssey lets you train them to forage — the only real job a pen animal gets.

Cows are the milk animal with a carcass attached: 14 milk a day, 336 beef and 96 plainleather at slaughter. Goats produce less at 4 milk a day but have the lowest hunger of any milk animal, 0.36, which makes them the efficient choice when pasture is thin. Chickens and ducks both lay one egg a day; chickens win on eggs because they eat less, not because they lay faster.

Tortoises are the outlier: the best meat return per unit of food in the game, giving back more nutrition than twice what you put in. They aren't pen animals though, so you have to tame them again every week and a half — efficient, but not much fun to manage.

Leather, fur and wool

Every animal you kill is also a hide, and the leather is often worth more than the meat. Leather is stuff in RimWorld's sense — a material you build clothing and armour from — so what you slaughter decides what the colony wears.

Kill a cow or a horse and you get 96 plainleather; muffalo give 96 bluefur, pigs 68 pigskin, alpacas 40 camelhide, sheep and goats 33 leather each. At the top end a grizzly bear gives 86 bearskin, a megasloth 160 heavy fur, an elephant 160, a mastodon 180, a thrumbo 160 thrumbofur — the best stuff you can put on a colonist without crafting an exotic. A thrumbo also drops a horn worth around 800 silver, and elephants drop tusks; those are the other resources people mean when a hunt pays for itself.

Wool is the renewable version, and the ranking surprises people: megasloth and mastodon shear 10 a day, muffalo, bison and muskox 8, alpacas and sheep 4.5. Goats give no wool — unlike alpacas, they're specifically a milk animal. Only adults shear or milk, which matters more than it sounds; see life stages below.

Wildlife: the animals you hunt instead of tame

Not every animal on the map is a project. The wildlife around your base is a standing supply of meat, leather and the occasional windfall, and hunting is cheaper than husbandry for the first year.

The rule of thumb is body size against risk. Deer, ibex and boar are free meat — herbivores that don't fight back and can't be tamed into anything useful anyway. Squirrels and hares cost more ammunition than they return. Anything that fights back — bears, rhinos, thrumbos — gets shot from a wall or not at all, because a botched hunt turns into a manhunter, and manhunters are among the random events that end colonies outright.

Different animals also clean up differently. Omnivores and carnivores eat corpses off the ground, turning the aftermath of a raid into a week of free food, but don't assume they'll haul: pigs, wargs, cats, raccoons and foxes can't be trained to carry items at all. Nor will they tend a wounded colonist — that's rescue training, and the rest of the roster doesn't have it.

Life stages, breeding and eggs

Every animal has three life stages — baby, juvenile, adult — and they matter for more than flavour. A baby is 20% of adult body size with a quarter of the health, and neither a baby nor a juvenile produces wool or milk. Reaching adulthood takes 12 days for a chicken, 20 for a pig, cow or muffalo, so a herd bought as young stock produces nothing for three weeks.

Breeding runs on a loop: an awake, non-sterilised male has a 1/12 or 1/8 chance per hour to seek out a female. Live-bearing species then have a 50% chance of pregnancy; egg-laying species are fertilised every time, which is why a flock snowballs and a mammal herd doesn't. A pregnant animal that is starving or badly harmed may miscarry, though the mother is otherwise unaffected.

There is no universal male-to-female ratio, which is the most repeated bad advice on the subject. It's derived per species: one male per nine tortoises, one per four for cows, elk, yak and muffalo, one rooster per two or three hens. Every extra male consumes as much as a female and produces nothing.

One trap specifically for egg farmers: fertilised eggs are ruined outside 0–50 °C. They keep their food value but never hatch, so a coop that freezes stops being a breeding operation without telling you.

Keeping animals alive

Animals meet their own needs if you let them, but three things kill a roster that looks fine on paper.

The first is temperature. Every species has a comfortable band, and once you're more than 10 °C outside it they take hypothermia or heatstroke. The bands differ wildly — a muffalo tolerates −55 °C, a pig gives up at −5 — so the same barn is generous for one animal and lethal for another. A heater and an animal flap solve it. What doesn't solve it is roofing the pen: roofs stop grass growing, and that pasture is the whole point.

The second is zoning. Tamed animals eat whatever they can reach, including the meals you cooked, so keep them out of the freezer, the kitchen and any clean room where filth would raise infection risk. Predators need their own zone away from the livestock they'd otherwise hunt, and a hungry bear will go through a coop in an afternoon.

The third is arithmetic. Megafauna eat like colonists — two or three thrumbos is a second kitchen — and every tamed animal adds colony wealth, which scales the raids against you. A high tier only pays if the animal earns more than the tougher raid it invites.

One myth worth killing

A cluster of numbers about RimWorld animals circulates on aggregator sites and in AI answers. These six are wrong, and most share a tell: they're quoted as "per colonist fed daily", a statistic the game does not have. Every figure on this page was checked against the game data instead.

The horse one is the most expensive, because it changes a decision: people tame a stable of horses expecting to nearly triple their travel speed and get 60% — still the best mount in the game, but not what was promised.

FAQ