Caravans in Rimworld are an important part of the mid and late-game. It’s critical that when you’re putting your caravan together that you’re doing it with the best animals, otherwise your wasting precious food and time. It also happens that the best caravan animal in Rimworld is one of the best animals in Rimworld as well! While we do have an animal preference when it comes to our caravans, we understand that some players are in different biomes or simply prefer a different playstyle. So we compiled a list of three animals we think are noteworthy enough to include on a “best animals in Rimworld” list.
What we are looking for to determine what the “best caravan animal” is essentially two things. How useful they are in an actual caravan and how useful they are when they aren’t. It seems pretty simple but a lot of players look past the second requirement. Animals take a lot of work to keep alive so they better be useful when they’re sitting around at the colony too. They need to provide some benefit be it in materials or by being good at breeding livestock. When they’re in a caravan they need to be able to carry a good amount of weight and survive taking a stray bullet in a raid.
Best Caravan Animals
Muffalo
The muffalo is the single best caravan animal in Rimworld and that is a fact. They are also one of the best animals in general in Rimworld to tame. If you find a pack of them hanging around your map and you have a solid tamer, go get those suckers. Muffalo are great for a number of reasons.
Muffalo are good for caravans due to their high carry weight. Every muffalo increases your caravan’s total weight capacity by about 73.5 kilograms. Maximizing the amount of profit you can make per trip should be your highest priority. No point in making two trips, just bring more muffalo!
They can also survive cold temperatures your caravan might encounter while you’re traveling from A to B. Other animals like the dromedary or elephants will have trouble in colder climates, but not the muffalo!
Muffalo are the Best Animals in General
Muffalo are also just great animals to have around when they’re not out on a caravan. They can provide a ton of wool for your colony. Every 25 days you can shear your muffalo and get 100 wool which is useful to make cold-resistant clothing with. Muffalo are also able to breed fairly quickly. Once they get pregnant they pop out a muffalo baby every 28 days. This means that you can sustain your colony, depending on its size of course, with just 1 or 2 males 10-15 females.
Your females will also produce 12 milk every 2 days. Milk can be used to make fine meals or can just be sold. Milk is surprisingly worth quite a bit of silver.
Muffalo are also great if you’re in a pinch during a raid. Send them out to be a meatshield for your colonists and just butcher the dead after the raid is over. Which brings us to another thing they’re great for, instant food. Having animals on hand means you will have a constant supply of food from either milk or slaughtering new ones, but they can also be slaughtered if your colony falls on hard times. It’s better to kill a few muffalo to hold your colony over till the next harvest than to lose to starvation!
Dromedary
Dromedaries are a great option for players in a desert-like biome. They are very similar to the muffalo, with just slightly worse stats for a caravan. They carry 5 kilograms less than muffalo but have similar milking, gestation, and shearing periods and rewards. Go with dromedaries if you’re in a desert and need animals that can stand the heat, otherwise, the muffalo is your best option… unless you want to have an army of elephants carry your stuff around.
Elephant
The almighty elephant. A bit of a joke choice since they require so much food, more than twice the muffalo, and dromedary and because they are insanely hard to tame. They can also turn manhunter if you fail while taming them, so be careful! Elephants take a long time to mature as well, two years and take 48 days from conception to birth making it slow going if you plan on building your elephant empire from scratch. The main benefits of these beasts are their insane carry weight and the fact they are walking tanks during any raids.
On a caravan, they will increase the total weight by 140 kilograms making them almost as good as two muffalo and just as good as four extra colonists. They’re also great at defending caravans since they can be tamed to be released when attacked, or they can just be used as meatshields to defend your colonists.
Elephants are great animals to have in a caravan, but they’re not the best caravan animal in Rimworld in our opinion. They’re great at roleplaying and just fun to have around in general, but overall the best caravan animal in Rimworld has got to be the muffalo, or the dromedary if you’re in a desert biome.
If you’re interested in more Rimworld content, check out our guides on the best mods, best armor, or best melee weapons!