Animals

Animals in Ymir are a source of meat and leather and can be found in four forms:
 * 1) As a Resource that can be gathered by a hunter.
 * 2) As a herd roaming on the world map, which the player can either hunt or capture.
 * 3) As a hostile Unit during a random event while exploring the world map.
 * 4) As an inventory item obtained through capture or breeding.

While a hunter or attacking a herd provides meat and leather directly, animals in inventory form must be processed by a butcher.

Animals on the Worldmap
'* Mediterranean, Arid, and Desert climates rely on Flax from Gathering Camps for Textile production. Cotton can also be grown in Continental climates as a more-efficient alternative to Llamas.'

** Deer used to be a breedable animal due to a bug; this was fixed on version 0.3.0.7, and since can only be found in the wild

Ranch Production (Overview)
Eventually, finding animals to continue hunting on the worldmap becomes difficult as their numbers are depleted. Once settlements have unlocked the appropriate Knowledges, their Armies can begin capturing herds to raise as livestock on Animal Farms. After they become fully grown, you can send the animals to a Butcher to be converted into food and other materials.

For a detailed breakdown of each step, see respective the Animal Farm and Butcher pages.

Since ranch production scales with Fertility, but not Workforce, we can "measure" the overall efficiency of ranching for each animal species based on the amount of Fertility you need to produce the same materials. The following table provides a brief summary of those values:

Wool Paddock
* Cotton and Flax have been scaled to match the same area coverage as a Wool Paddock (from 4x4 to 16x16) for this comparison

** Doesn't include the rounding effects for the first 0.1 units of production, so players first unlocking ranching will see much lower costs (temporarily) due to the strong rounding effects for Level 1 buildings.

Hostile Animals
Not all animals in Ymir get along well with porcos. There are a few additional species which can be found anywhere on the worldmap, but are treated as Barbarians that will immediately attack any units that step on their territory.