Cow

The cow is a large herbivore best known for its milk and tasty meat.

Taming

Cows don't spawn in the wild and thus cannot be tamed. They can only be obtained via trading or received through the animal self-taming event. A cow can be milked for up to 15 units of milk per day (depending on your pawns animals skill) which means that a single cow can provide enough nutrition for one and a half meals a day if cooked into a simple meal, or three meals if cooked into a fine meal. This can be quite important, as it means that as long as you have enough food (either natural grass or haygrass) to keep your cattle fed, you can create a settlement that is entirely self sufficient for food even if your food crops become ruined or get destroyed.

Training

Cows can be trained as follows:

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.

Feeding and Nutrition Efficiency

A cow requires 1.36 nutrition per day to survive, while producing 0.75 nutrition of milk per day (depending on your pawn's animals skill) which can be cooked into 1.35 nutrition worth of simple or fine meals. So even if there's little natural grass to be had, you can efficiently convert vegetable nutrition into animal product nutrition by feeding cows vegetarian simple meals. Nutrition efficiency is lost by raising calves and keeping a bull for breeding, and gained by slaughtering dead cows and unnecessary calves.

Note that kibble requires meat or animal products to make and is significantly less nutritionally efficient than simple meals (125% v 180% of ingredients), unless using human or insect meat that would otherwise go to waste. It's also useful if labour, not farmland, is your bottleneck. Nutrition can be traded for labour further by feeding your cows raw haygrass (115% nutrition/tile of corn) or corn (239% nutrition/work of haygrass).

Animals