Thrumbo

Thrumbos are large, powerful animals not native to any biome, instead appearing in all biomes through a random event.

Diet

Thrumbos are both herbivorous, eating growing plants and harvested vegetables, and dendrovorous, eating live trees. Note that unlike the other dendrovore, the alphabeaver, thrumbos will not eat anima or gauranlen trees, but will eat polux trees.

Training

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.

Analysis

Thrumbos are difficult, but rewarding, to kill. They are extremely durable, with natural armor and a health scale of 8, extremely dangerous with powerful attacks and high DPS, and can move faster than a colonist. A rampaging thrumbo can threaten the entire colony. Take precaution when attempting to hunt them, as average firearms can take 4 or 5 dozen shots to down one, and never engage them except on favorable terms.

With the right strategies, they can be reliably killed. Their horn is worth 800, and is a modestly powerful melee weapon, equivalent to an excellent steel longsword. Their fur is valuable, worth a thousand silver, and protective. The duster alone is almost as protective as steel plate armor, but can be worn over a flak vest for incredible protection. Note that juvenile thrumbos do not drop horns.

While a number of hunting strategies are viable, the use of a psychic shock lance bears specific analysis. After the thrumbos are downed, assign them to be hunted, and the hunter will perform a neck cut without damaging the body. Before difficulty modifiers, Butchery Efficiency, and Trade Price Improvement:

The lance costs 550. It can down 2 thrumbos.
The horns alone are worth 2x 800.
The fur is worth 2240 - before it is processed.
- This is enough to create 4x dusters, worth 4620 in total at only Normal quality.
They also yield enough meat for 112 simple meals.

As the colony always buys and sells at a disadvantage, these numbers will always be smaller in practice. Depending on the skills of the colonists, the exact numbers can vary by a lot.

Thrumbos may be affected by the Animal self-tamed and Mad animal events. Since thrumbos are powerful enemies, they are ineligible for the mad animal events until your colony has progressed enough.

Tending and bonding

If you can down a thrumbo with weapons, it will often have dozens of wounds to tend. This makes an incapacitated thrumbo a great opportunity to train healing skills. There is also a small chance the doctor may bond with the animal, netting you a free pet thrumbo.

With a 0.4%, or 1 in 250, chance to bond with each wound tended, that can add up to something worth pursuing; tending 40 wounds results in a ~15% chance of bonding while also providing a significant amount of Medical skill experience. However, this is dangerous for the thrumbo. There is a high risk of permanent brain or eye injury, let alone the chance of just killing it.

Tending as medical training represents a risk if you are after the horn/fur/meat, where you might not want a bond to form - the mood penalty for the death of a bonded animal is significant, -8 for 20 days.

Hunting tactics

Tactics can be separated into a couple of key categories:

Just shooting it

The most basic approach. Draft a large amount of colonists - half-dozen at the very least - with powerful weapons, line them up at max range, and unload. Ideally, the thrumbo is downed or is hit in the legs. Use natural terrain or chunks to slow thrumbos down whenever possible. If multiple thrumbos are too close to each other, then you'll anger the whole herd - watch out!

Doors and autodoors can slow thrumbos down on your escape route, so long as they can't just go around the door. When placing doors, have them a few tiles apart, so that colonists can close the door behind them.

The Burden or Stun psycasts, if available, can be used to inhibit the thrumbo. A psycaster, with either psycast and high neural heat capacity, can make thrumbo hunting trivial so long as you don't anger more than one at a time.

Kiting

Use a fast colonist (at least 120% Moving; 2 bionic legs, Go-juice, or a colonist infected with Fibrous mechanites) as bait. Have them lure and outrun the thrumbos, while other colonists shoot. A fast enough colonist can even take potshots. Just make sure your kiting colonist is always the closest to the raging beast. Otherwise, it may give up and attack something else instead.

Peek-a-boo

Have all your colonists shelter inside. Pawns should take turns peeking out of doors and taking potshots, then retreating inside. Repair the doors constantly. The doors need to be durable to survive a thrumbo attack. Rinse and repeat (many, many times).

Sniper

A pawn with sufficiently high hunting stealth and range (from a sniper or bolt-action rifle) can inflict fatal wounds on the thrumbo, with a relatively low risk of aggroing. After 4 or 5 sniper shots, the animal can be left alone to slowly bleed to unconsciousness. Go-juice recommended as an emergency plan.

Entrapment

The basic idea is simple. Encase a sleeping thrumbo in a room, fully surrounding it with walls - wood is fine. Before you close it in, place 35 beers, enough to get the thrumbo blackout drunk. Beer counts as a food item - when the thrumbo gets hungry, it will drink all of it and pass out. You can then assign a colonist to hunt, netting you a free thrumbo corpse.

Food as bait: On maps with no/little trees, thrumbos, like all other animals denied their food source, will seek out any available food to consume. Thrumbos can therefore be lured into areas with food. Beer counts as source of nutrition, i.e., food. Create a room with food and an opening, and when the thrumbos enter, seal it off.

Other trap methods: Heatstroke could feasibly be used to kill the thrumbo. Fire could work, but it damages the corpse. Starvation could work, but the thrumbo will constantly be trying to break out of its cell.

Let other people do it

Aggro a thrumbo. A manhunter thrumbo will attack a trade caravan, a group of raiders, or any other human, regardless of faction. Use a long-range weapon to attack, hide behind doors, and hopefully your "friends" will deal with it. Trade caravans often have enough manpower to take out a single raging thrumbo.

A berserk thrumbo will attack the rest of its herd; usually, a thrumbo v thrumbo fight will have both combatants bleed out to death. A psychic insanity lance can make thrumbos berserk. The Berserk, Berserk Pulse, and Manhunter Pulse psycasts all do what they say on the tin. Animal warcall will call a thrumbo to only be aggressive against enemies.

Static defenses

Spike Traps: Make sure to aggro only a single Thrumbo - by shooting at it with a rifle. Escape back into your base, leading the Thrumbo through at least 3 spike traps. That will hurt it badly enough so it will bleed out within 9 to 11 hours. Time you can spend hiding behind a steel door, researching, sleeping, etc. while the Thrumbo slowly bleeds out.

Turret overhaul: You can easily get a lot of firepower against the thrumbo. It's rather cheap, but effective. Place many turrets, and let them fire. Thrumbos will target onlineturrets as if they were human. You can lose a turret or two, but even if they are destroyed, they may explode, dealing damage. Just make sure that the explosions don't destroy the other turrets.

Artifacts: Shoot with a psychic shock lance, rendering it unconscious. Assign a colonist to hunt it and they can slit its throat with no danger and no risk of damaging the valuable horn.
- If you're really feeling like overkill, then shoot the thrumbo herd with an orbital bombardment targeter or orbital power beam targeter. Even then, thrumbos are so tough they may survive.

Taming

Thrumbos' 98% wildness makes them one of the hardest animals to tame, as even at level 20 you may only have a 1% chance to tame it. Previously, the best method of training a thrumbo was capturing a wounded one and healing it, as your doctor has a 0.4% chance of bonding with the animal per wound treated and there was significant risk to being in melee range of a now-manhunter thrumbo. However, with the elimination of their manhunter-on-tame chance, there is now little risk in taming besides wasting food and the handler's time. Note, however, that 9 hours must elapse between taming attempts. Ideally, a taming inspiration would be used, assuming the inspired pawn has sufficient skill to attempt it.

Since Thrumbos will try to wander off the map even if trapped for too long it can be difficult to manage their taming process over a long time. By putting a downed Thrumbos into a Cryptosleep casket you can wait for your pawn to get a taming inspiration for a easy 100% tame without lots of attention.

Successfully tamed thrumbos are of little everyday use to a colony when compared to ordinary dogs, sporting a voracious appetite and a high resistance to training. Their high wildness means keeping them trained and tamed will require an inordinate amount of handler time. Carry mechanics do not allow the thrumbo to carry multiple stacks of items despite its strength.

Still, thrumbos have significant utility in combat. Being extremely tanky melee fighters, they can be used as a last line of defense against an infestation or mechanoid drop. Additionally, Doomsday rocket launchers are highly dangerous in the late-game, capable of one shooting colonists from a long range. With thrumbos, however, one can release them and let them tank these rockets. A thrumbo can tank 5-6 volleys without being downed due to their high hit points, making the raiders exhaust their rockets for some easily treated wounds. Thrumbos usually manage to charge into groups of raiders, which can even cause the raiders to use their rockets in friendly fire, single-handedly dispatching raids while your colonists remain completely safe themselves.

Although extremely difficult to achieve, taming one thrumbo of each sex will allow the colony to breed yet more thrumbos, resulting in a potentially inexhaustible source of their valuable fur and horns. However their long gestation period makes this more time intensive than other animals. Also keep in mind that keeping them tame to build a sufficient breeding herd will likely totally monopolize your handlers' time.

Thrumbos are slaughtered in one hit like any other tame animal, so killing them this way is not dangerous at all.

Health

Body part	Health
Head	200
Skull	200
Brain	80
Nose	80
Neck	200
Jaw	160
Eye ^[1] (left, right)	80
Ear (left, right)	80
Body	320
Kidney^[2] (left, right)	120
Lung^[2] (left, right)	120
Liver^[2]	160
Heart^[2]	120
Spine^[2]	200
Stomach^[2]	160
Limbs (left, right, fore, hind)	240
Appendage (left, right, fore, hind)	160

↑ Located inside of Head.
↑ ^2.0 ^2.1 ^2.2 ^2.3 ^2.4 ^2.5 Located inside of Body.

Armor vs. weapon types

Armor

Gallery

Thrumbo facing east
Thrumbo facing north
Thrumbo facing south
Thrumbo decaying

Version history

0.12.906 - Added.
0.12.910 - Now much more powerful in combat
Beta 19/1.0 - Hunger rate 4.5->3.5
1.1 - Changed rare thrumbo incident to send from 2 to 6 thrumbos. Previously could spawn with only 1 thrumbo
1.3 - Revenge chance on tame fail 1.8%->0%; Meat yield 360->560; Leather yield 120->160; Hunger rate 3.5->2.8; Gestation time 60 days->20 days.
1.3.3074 - Prevent thrumbos from eating Gauranlen trees in addition to anima trees.

Animals

Herbivorous: Alpaca • Bison • Boomalope • Capybara • Caribou • Cassowary • Chicken • Chinchilla • Cow • Deer • Donkey • Dromedary • Duck • Elephant • Elk • Emu • Gazelle • Goat • Goose • Guinea pig • Hare • Horse • Ibex • Megasloth • Muffalo • Ostrich • Rhinoceros • Sheep • Snowhare • Squirrel • Turkey • Yak • Toxalope

Dendrovorous: Alphabeaver • Thrumbo

Omnivorous: Boomrat • Grizzly bear • Human • Husky • Iguana • Labrador retriever • Megascarab • Megaspider • Monkey • Pig • Polar bear • Spelopede • Raccoon • Rat • Tortoise • Wild boar • Yorkshire terrier • Waste rat

Carnivorous: Arctic fox • Arctic wolf • Cat • Cobra • Cougar • Fennec fox • Lynx • Panther • Red fox • Timber wolf • Warg

Dryads: Barkskin • Berrymaker • Carrier • Clawer • Gaumaker • Immature dryad • Medicinemaker • Woodmaker

[Head-1] Located inside of Head.

[Body-2] 2.0 ^2.1 ^2.2 ^2.3 ^2.4 ^2.5 Located inside of Body.

[1]

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