Animals have arrived at the domes and are here to make colony life better for everyone. Surviving Mars: Project Laika adds a variety of pets and livestock that you can use to benefit your colony and improve life on the Red Planet.
This DLC adds two things: Pets & Farm Ranches Pets: They're a cosmetic aspect with no mechanical impact what so ever. If there's a dome, and people are in it, animals will spontaneously appear and wander around. They don't consume food, oxygen or space, they just exist like some kind of phantom. There's a lot they could have done with pets mechanically but they did absolutely nothing with it. A lot of these pets are rather baffling too. Llamas and Deer for instance... Farm Ranches: An alternative to growing crops, you can raise animals for slaughter to provide food. But wait a minute, don't animals consume more food than they produce? Correct! But not on Mars apparently! Some strange product of the Red Planet has caused animals to be able to subsist on nothing but Oxygen and Water, making them very efficient and an easy alternative to those bland greens you were growing in that hydroponics tower. To boot, apparently you need absolutely no skills or training to handle, raise and butcher farm animals so any old person can do it, no specialisation required! Another one-up on those no-good botanists! If you can't tell I'm being sarcastic, the Farm Ranch is poorly balanced and some of the livestock options feel like bad jokes, like being able to farm OSTRICHES in out-dome ranches. There are no tech bonuses or specialisations for ranches and with no requirements you can use unspecialised colonists on them and again the real nature of livestock inefficiency is entirely ignored. Cows hanging out on dirt will eventually grow to full size and produce food without needing to invest any of your other crop stock into them. A more realistic and appropriate use of livestock would be as a food-sink comfort boost for any non-vegan colonists. But no its just an unbalanced reskin of standard farms.
This DLC is a very easy pass. It adds nothing of meaningful value and personally I disable it because it reduces my enjoyment of the game by being quite immersion breaking for me.
