Camels eat about 10 straw per hour per camel and produce camel meat, camel milk, leather, oil, and dung. A Dromedary Pen is used to raise camels.
A Dromedary Pen requires the following to build:
The Dromedary Pen must be built on sand, however, a single tile of sand is sufficient if you are standing on it when you build.
Camels are attracted by building a Dromedary Pen, filling it with straw, and leaving the door open for a wild camel to wander in. Which pens get a camel are determined by an auction: every game day at midnight, the open camel pen with the most straw in an area will receive a camel. For the purposes of camels, Egypt is divided into four quadrents; each quadrent receives one camel each night. When a wild camel enters a pen, it will eat all the straw in the pen.
The cost of a new camel varies, therefore, depending on how populated an area the camel pen is located in. Approximate costs (which may be inaccurate or out of date) are:
When examining a pen for new camels, you may see a message indicating that a camel nibbled on the straw and then left. This indicates that the pen, while not the one with the most straw in the area, is close to being the top.
Camels breed quickly, so once you have a breeding pair of camels, there is little reason to continue to attempt to attract wild ones. Close the door to the pen at this point so that a wild camel can't appear and eat your entire straw supply.
Camels stud; a pen containing at least one male and female camel will produce up to one new camel for each female per breeding cycle. (For this reason, there is little reason to keep more than one male camel in a pen.)
For a period of time after a female camel has given birth, you may feed her honey in order to induce the production of camel milk.
While camels will eventually die of starvation if left unfed, there is no such thing as camel pox.
(See also: Agriculture, Livestock, Feed The Animals Law)