Tortoise

Tortoises are crawling omnivores which live in the moderate climates of the temperate forest and temperate swamp, and the sweltering humidity of the tropical rainforest and tropical swamp.

Analysis

Tortoises are the single best animal for meat : nutrition input, or nutrition efficiency. This is due to their remarkably low hunger rate. A tortoise farm can also produce a lot of leather. However, tortoises are not pen animals. They must be re-tamed every 7.5 days, or carefully slaughtered just before they become un-tame, which requires a lot of micromanagement. Players may prefer to ranch animals like the ibex and horse, as they do not require nearly as much work to farm.

Nutrition

When slaughtered, a tortoise yields 21 meat and 11 lizardskin as a baby; 36 meat and 18 lizardskin as a juvenile; or 70 meat and 25 lizardskin as an adult. 1 meat is worth 0.05 nutrition. A tortoise's fertilized egg only provides 0.25 nutrition, compared to the 1.05 of a butchered baby. Therefore, a tortoise should always be allowed to hatch.

An adult tortoise consumes 0.13 nutrition per day, and a fertilized female creates an average of 0.3 offspring per day.

When offspring are slaughtered as babies, a female tortoise will produce 0.32 nutrition of meat per day, giving a potential nutrition efficiency of 242.6%.
If the offspring are allowed to grow to adulthood, they will consume an additional 0.27 nutrition per day, but will instead yield 1.05 nutrition per day as they are slaughtered, resulting in a potential nutrition efficiency of 260.5%.

This does not consider the food required of male tortoises. A female:male ratio of 8.88:1 reaches an optimal fertilization rate. With this ratio of tortoises, you reach a "true" nutrition efficiency of 251.2%. For reference, the next best animal, the chicken, has a nutrition efficiency of 178.6%, after considering their female:male ratio. Chickens do not produce leather. The next best animal that produces leather is the ibex.

Some care must be used when managing tortoise eggs, as tortoises themselves are omnivorous and do not seem to discriminate against eating their unhatched young. Make use of restriction zones and hauling labor to pull freshly laid eggs away from animal pens and into safe hatcheries to maximize yield.

Combat

Turtles are poor animals for combat. They do little damage, and due to their low health scale, they aren't durable, either. Turtles can occasionally be seen beating much larger predators, such as lynx and cougars. This isn't because tortoises are great at combat, but rather a consequence of RimWorld's combat RNG. Armor has a chance to completely negate damage, so turtles have a higher-than-usual chance to win. And if a tortoise loses, you usually won't see their corpse (it'll be consumed right away).

Because of their low damage and high-ish armor, turtles can be used to train the Melee and Medical skills. A well-armored colonist can land many melee blows on a tortoise without much risk. This trains their Melee skill. A doctor can tend to the colonist's and turtle's wounds, which trains Medical. Rinse and repeat a few times until the poor beast finally dies. Note that beating up human prisoners is even less of a risk (prisoners do not fight back).

As manhunters, tortoises are trivial to deal with, due to their slow speed. If you have any sort of ranged weapon, kiting tactics can be used to easily defeat a tortoise pack. Even if you don't have a ranged weapon, you could run to the nearest door and close it.

Training

This animal can be trained as follows:

Guard:
Attack:
Rescue:
Haul:

*As of version 1.1.2610, all animals can be tamed. The percentage of likelihood of success depends on factors such as the Animals Wildness Percentage, Pawn Handling Skill, and others. More information can be found on the animals page.

Health

Body part	Health
Head	15
Skull	15
Brain	6
Nose	6
Neck	15
Jaw	12
Eye ^[1] (left, right)	6
Ear (left, right)	6
Body	24
Kidney^[2] (left, right)	9
Lung^[2] (left, right)	9
Liver^[2]	12
Heart^[2]	9
Spine^[2]	15
Stomach^[2]	12
Limbs (left, right, fore, hind)	18
Appendage (left, right, fore, hind)	12

↑ Located inside of Head.
↑ ^2.0 ^2.1 ^2.2 ^2.3 ^2.4 ^2.5 Located inside of Body.

Armor

Armor

Gallery

Tortoise facing east
Tortoise facing north
Tortoise facing south
Tortoise decaying

Version history

0.7.581 - Added.
0.12.906 - Can now lay eggs.
0.18/1.0 - Now provides the new lizardskin, which merged its previous leather type, tortoise leather, with cobraskin and iguana skin.
1.0 - Tortoise armor was reduced from 50% to 30%.
? - Armor increased back up to 50%.

Animals