Should I separate my poultry into separate pens?
I've seen this done in many tutorial videos, but I'd like to know if this makes a difference. Should I put each species of poultry (chickens, turkeys, geese, etc) into separate pens, or does one large pen for all of them suffice?
Best Answer
The only benefit to doing that that I can think of is so that you can control how many nest boxes each species has access to, thus ensuring that your poultry populations remain roughly balanced. If you put all of your birds in one pen, there's a chance that one species could hoard all the nest boxes, which might eventually cause the other poultry species to die off (but you'd wind up with a whole lot of the species that hoarded the nest boxes).
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Answer 2
When it is time to lay eggs, the animal will occupy the Nest Box until they have hatched. If you have Chickens, Turkeys, and Geese all sharing the same Nest Boxes then it's entirely possible that one group will take up all of the Nest Boxes and prevent another group from breeding.
It won't be a huge deal (unless you use some sort of task automation) since you will need to manually select which animals you want to butcher and can keep control of the population that way. Population control is a concern with poultry. Having several hundred eggs hatch at once can be quite hectic if they start running all around the map. Separating each species will then allow you to better maintain the population. You could close off all of the Nest Boxes for a given species if they're breeding too much (or simply laying too many eggs) without affecting the population controls of another species.
As another pointer, what I like to do is to make several "breeding" Nest Boxes, and I put each Nest Box behind a door. Doing this ensures that the eggs won't be taken from the Nest Box before they hatch, an an animal that doesn't graze is perfectly content being stuck on the same 1x1 square for all eternity. If you do this, just make sure to un-forbid the door after the eggs hatch, otherwise there will be lots of !!FUN!! going on shortly after.
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