Suggestion: Animal food and animal tweaks

[NerdyName Lvl 60 USEastPolar BearPosts: 44]

Hi, so I’ve been doing some thinking about how to improve animal farming so it’s a bit more forgiving and so that players don’t hog all the animals; I think a few different types of animal food with different effects and a few tweaks to how animals work would help.

Animal tweaks: Just a couple things that’d make it so you don’t need like 20 of each animal.
-Remove that thing cows and sheep do where they stop producing milk and wool, even if you gotta extend the time between milking/shearing sessions or reduce the amount you get per session.
-Maybe occasionally have chickens shed a feather instead of lay an egg

Animal food: I’m thinking something similar to how spice bushes work where you grow something that gives you animal food, then that thing has a chance to give you rarer food with other effects.
-Plain Animal Food: makes an animal follow you for a short time and temporarily boosts their speed, hopefully making moving animals less tedious.
-Uncommon Animal Food: permanently boosts one random combat stat (Attack, defense, health etc) of an animal by a small amount so after a while you might not have to worry about random wolf spawns.
-Rare animal food: Has a chance of permanently increasing the amount of milk/wool you can collect from a cow/sheep at a time, and how often a chicken lays an egg or sheds a feather.

I know over time this could result in people having near-invincible animals that give them ridiculous amounts of stuff per animal, but I really feel like that possibility would be better than it is now with a few people that have an “Animal monopoly”.

[Seryn Lvl 300 USEast2SkeletonPosts: 166]

Using some form of feed or bait to get animals to follow you for a short period of time would be amazing; a tweaked dog AI might work since dogs follow you after being fed.

Buffing animals I’m less interested in, they die of old age after 2-3 days anyway. A sheep farm with proper spawns can net hundreds of wool fine when it’s set up right.

so that players don’t hog all the animals

better than it is now with a few people that have an “Animal monopoly”

This applies to chickens but not sheep or cows, and I haven’t seen chickens being aggressively farmed enough to make a difference in several months. Sheep in particular are just obnoxiously rare, which is why people build farms to breed flocks in the first place. You just need to find two sheep to start with, which can be a pain.

If you’re feeling philanthropic you can set up open sheep spawns, but since the sheep die they need to be frequently replaced; I eventually just focused on my own farm. Alternatively I used to leave my farm open to the public but other players would break the spawns and kill every sheep they saw so I wouldn’t recommend it.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 8 months ago by  Seryn.

[NerdyName Lvl 60 USEastPolar BearPosts: 44]

I’ll admit I didn’t know about the age thing, maybe that’s why most of my animals just disappeared one day. Okay, I can see that this basically went from a “tweak” request to an “overhaul” request so IDK the feed would be nice but I’m not holding my breath for the other parts.

[Polar BearPosts: 49]

The problem I have with setting up a farm is that cows and sheep need grass/dirt tile to spawn on, afaik. And dirt/grass inside my base means that every single day I have a griefer escape-rope, wall-jump or just log in inside my perimiter and kill all my animals. I am so tired of it that I basically gave up on farming.

Please make it so that if I’ve built walls, raiders at least have to destroy them to get inside.

[Seryn Lvl 300 USEast2SkeletonPosts: 166]

How effective are arrow towers these days? If they pop up inside there shouldn’t be any cover.

[Polar BearPosts: 49]

I did not try, but would not towers kill my animals? If not, that could be really good since towers got much cheaper recently.

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