Hey there!
I love the ideas. The reason I'm able to make a chicken coop is because eggs are "objects", thus are inanimate and allowed to be a material.
I'd need some way to turn "pawns", living objects that move around with totally different code systems, into "objects", I would be set on making this a reality.
I would be grateful for you to fish around in different libraries and look at other mod abilities.
The qualifications to turn a pawn into an object for my idea to happen are:
1. the object can be picked up by a pawn in some shape or form, in their pockets
2. the pawn no longer exists as a corpse on the map, or as its normal self
2a. above can be avoided with a tradeable object being bought first. The issue is how realistic it would be. I would need serious brainstorming.
3. the way my mod would pull this into effect it is not uncanny (can be sci-fi, just normal sci-fi)
This may sound confusing but I am not a fan of joke mods, so I am attempting some perception of realism. If you can help out with brainstorming, that'd be great!

Hi !
I have no problem at all to brainstorm with you and pushing this mod further. However, I'm not a programmer. But I'm a graphic designer, so I could possibly help on that part (just let me know the kind of file are needed for the graphic and the restriction).

I got few more ideas earlier this week for that mod.
Would be nice to make it a "must have" mod :D

For development, I'll ask around if I can get you some answer on what you've ask.
Where do you want to do the brainstorm (not here probably). ?

Hey! Thanks to @smikeproject for opening this discussion, I'm using family share to play Rimworld so I can't comment on stuff unless there's a discussion thread ^^;. Hopefully you two don't mind me chiming in! First off, just wanna tell you kind modders how much people like me (that run and debug 1000+ active mods modlists for funsies) appreciate your work. It's you guys that make these games as much fun as they are, after the original Devs gave you the clay to work with, so to speak!

Anywho, I agree with Smike, if you feel up to the task, I would also very much appreciate other farm buildings to help boost performance and add more realism to the game. Sadly I also don't have experience in coding, all I can really do is go through output logs and troubleshoot errors, haha. I don't know if this is applicable or not, but have you looked at MAI by Haplo? That mod adds tiered robots, which are either bought or crafted, and when placed they then activate into special pawns that can be uninstalled and reinstalled whenever or wherever you'd like. Perhaps that might help you to solve the mystery of making animals placeable/carryable? If you haven't already figured that part out, that is! Then, maybe make the player use the corpses of vanilla animals to turn them into tradeable objects afterwards, via an hightech-ultratech esque workbench reliant on a pawn's Intelligence score? Sort of like in Genetic Rim, by Sarg Bjornson.

As for what you should use to represent these tradeable objects, perhaps call them Tokens? Like, Chicken Token, Cow Token, Horse Token, etc etc. If you'd rather a more sci fi name, perhaps call them Stems or Replicators/Replicants... Prints, Xenobots, Nanos. Maybe even an acronym, like E.G.G, if nothing else works! :)

Edit: many apologies in advance if I misread your posts!

@Midnight, I thought about something yesterday. What if you consider the building like a "trader". So the building let you "sell" (for free) your animals (right race/kind) to the appropriate building. So it would be stock like inventory just like trader does.
I don't know how the coding works, but it may have some kind of solution there to make it easier to adapt for almost any kind of animals.

And depending on how many animal you've stock in the building, you generate ressources (a % of the total of animals stock or maybe be use CapFloor (25- 50 - 75 100 animals for X ressources by CapFloor). Each building could have 1-3 size to help you evolving your farm expansion and efficiency.

For buildings, I got some ideas on paper right now to push this further. :D

PS: You should start a Discord channel, so we could talk about the development there to be more efficient.

I don't like having a million discords, but I'll ask my friend if I can borrow his discord for a chat room :3
Mlie's a good guy, I think he'd let me camp out in his discord.

Just got a room created on a server I'm friends with the owner on. I put the link/code in the comments, should be visible to all.

If you were thinking of other animal coop buildings couldn't they be done with new items like animal crates that are bought from traders. That way you don't need to worry about changing a pawn into an item. That would allow for some sort of realism in the creation i would think.

Ok, I can see how that'd work, I was concerned nobody would accept this idea but I think I can make buyable crates of cow and sheep.
I may come back to rimworld soon, but that's a maybe.