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v0.31:Milk
| This article is about an older version of DF. |
Milk is a product Template:Led from milkable Template:L. Milk can be made into Template:L, used in Template:Ling Template:Ls or consumed as is (counts as food, not drink).
Female versions of certain animals are milkable. In order to perform milking, you must have a dwarf assigned to Milking, a Farmer's Workshop, an empty bucket, an empty barrel (or available space in an existing milk barrel), an available cage or restraint, and a mature, non-pet, milkable animal. It is unclear why pets cannot be milked, this seems to be a bug because milking is a requirement for some animals and presumably the Animal Care dwarf would be aware of this and oversee their regular milking.
Confirmed to be milkable:
The process of milking is performed as so: Assign the animal you wish to milk to the cage or restraint. Once the animal is restrained, order your Farmer's Workshop to Milk Creature. The milker will not necessarily pick the closest animal available. In order to reduce a tug of war between confining the animal to its assigned cage or restraint, and milking it, place the cage or restraint as close to the Farmer's Workshop as possible. The animal must also have milk available, you cannot Repeatedly alternate between milking and cheese making if you only have one animal available to milk.
The frequency with which animals are able to be milked is marked in the RAW files with the following tag: [MILKABLE:LOCAL_CREATURE_MAT:MILK:20000]. In this case, it is a cow and the time period is 20000 ticks, at roughly 1200 ticks per day. All creatures currently have this tag set to 20000, so there is no reason to favor one milkable creature over another, other than preference.
Known Issues
After finishing a milking job, the milker may generate a cancellation message if trying to take another job immediately: Urist McMultitasking cancels job, handling dangerous animal. They will subsequently just leave the milked animal to wander away on its own and retask anyway.
Sometimes two dwarves will have a tug-of-war over a creature if one decides it should be milked and the other wants to cage it. If you find your milking orders are taking ages, watch to see if this is occuring. It seems less likely to occur the closer the animal starts to the farmer's workshop, since the shorter route gives less time for the 'cage animal' job to be generated.
Because milk is considered a food and not a drink, dwarves will not drink it, even if they are dying of thirst.