animal husbandry Ewe Milking Cycle

[ElvnHospitaller]

A quick question here since I was having trouble milking my sheep a second time.

For Ewe to continue to produce more milk, do I need to keep them fed during their lactation period? Or am I just being too impatient for the next milking period?

Cheers in advance

[Dilan Rona]

Not having the best of times myself at times (impatient). But you cannot milk a gen 0 ewe. If you are lucky, you can milk a gen 1 ewe. But you can ONLY get milk after the ewe had its baby. and only for the first 10 or so days. After that the milk stops. Later gens does get easier to milk (same restriction of 10 days after giving birth still applies)

[LadyWYT]

24 minutes ago, Dilan Rona said:

But you cannot milk a gen 0 ewe.

This isn't true--you can milk a gen 0 ewe, it's just very difficult. I think the failure rate is something like 95% or higher. In any case, I've done it, so I know that it's possible, but it does take a lot of patience and isn't really worth the effort most of the time. You're much better off waiting until gen 1.

 

1 hour ago, ElvnHospitaller said:

For Ewe to continue to produce more milk, do I need to keep them fed during their lactation period? Or am I just being too impatient for the next milking period?

In any case, welcome to the forums! You don't need to keep feeding your ewes in order for them to produce milk. You can only milk them once per day(24 in-game hours between milking times), so it's more just a matter of being patient. The once-per-day limit is also why it's not a bad idea to keep older ewes around until you have enough higher generations to replace them, though do make sure the older ewes are at least gen 1, for reasons stated above.

[Echo Weaver]

It's technically possible to milk a gen 0 ewe, but it's mostly an exercise in frustration. You really get access to milk with a gen 1 ewe. It's a pain in the butt -- 1 out of 3 success rate, but it's doable.

[Phantom72]

Quote

Ewes cannot be milked every day, despite lactating. This can be checked by reading the tooltip.

Actually moving my bighorns to my base and had a read through the wiki today and came across the above. Personally I hope we can milk them once a day, I'll soon find out.