Animal feeding, familiarity and fam. cap

[NikkyD 34]

Let me discribe my current situation,

 

i have a roughly 20 by 20 fenced in area with cows, sheep, pigs, horses and donkeys.

Almost all of them are tamed (white border), ALMOST, because there are some cows that i have for a long time right now and i could swear their fam. never increases...

this is the part where the problem sets in.

 

I do not know how long this animal has been in my pasture, i do not know how often i tried to raise its fam., all i do know is, that its 'heart' is empty. So there is a cap, makes sense, but how do i know that it is reached ? I keep feeding all animals, getting a bit confused with all the different animals coming at me because i am holding grains in my hand. Did i already feed that pig ? lets just try again... ok, wont eat means i already fed it this day. Some cow, the same... its just that is the only female cow left that doesnt give milk, so i know its "the one". I did feed her a lot of times and still am, because when i click through them all i look for is the heart icon. Male animals can be given food more than once until they are in breed mode. So when i try to feed every animal once and come across the same bull again but dont realize it, i feed it again... and again... and again and if enough time passed in between they will never enter breed mode, they just eat all the food.

 

Often animals dont show the gender, my pigs never do and they dont breed but i couldnt care less and the heart icon seems to have like 5 states only or so, empty, 1/4, 1/3, 2/3 and full, never seen any others.

 

Let me point out some things that i am missing

 

some icons to tell me

- - > that an animal is pregnant (maybe a baby icon above the heart ?)

- - > the gender, just use the known male/female symbols.

- - > more detail about when it was last fed

(feeding on day 1 before i go to bed means i have to wait till evening on the 2nd day to be able to feed again and not miss out a day. If its not a specific time, i will simply have to wait and check from time to time to see if it works now which eventually moves the schedule more and more into the evening)

 

Why i would like to have icons ? My animals have the tendency to crowd in a corner, for reasons i dont know/care about, and clicking them all once is difficult as i have to shove them around to "free" them up so i can click them properly without hitting the big cow behind the small sheep etc.

 

 

 

My question to you guys and gals out there is simply: How do you handle / maintain your animals at the moment ?

 

Do you have the same problems or is it just me ?

[abdyman 14]

animals from the wild will never keep familiarity, not sure if this applies here, but wanted to let you know.

meaning your original parents that u used for breeding should be killed because it will always fall to nothing, offsprings will keep it from there on after.

 

edit: read below

[Kittychanley 1,002]

animals from the wild will never keep familiarity, not sure if this applies here, but wanted to let you know.

meaning your original parents that u used for breeding should be killed because it will always fall to nothing, offsprings will keep it from there on after.

 

This is completely 100% wrong.

 

Adult animals all have a familiarity cap that can be reached, regardless of if the adult was found in the wild, or it was raised from a baby and is 2nd+ generation. However, that cap is not below the "white border" amount is required for familiarity to stop decreasing.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

The problem it seems is that you have all of your animals crammed into one space, rather than actually separating them out into individual pens. Have you perhaps considered roping the specific animals that you wish to familiarize, and leading them off into a pen that is separated from all of the other animals?

 

The cap that exists for adult animals is above the white border level of familiarity. The cap is there so that you simply cannot get adult animals up to the 100%, gold heart level. You can get fairly close, but not all the way. You will know when the cap is reached because the heart will look over half full, and after a few days of feeding it won't get any fuller.

 

It is intentional that animals do not have a gender chat message unless the animal has no visual cues (dogs, horses, bears, etc). If you can't tell that the cow is a girl, look at the horns and the backside. If the horns are long and it has no udder, it is male. If the horns are short and it has an udder, it is female. Male pigs have tusks, female pigs do not. Male sheep have horns, female sheep do not. There is no need for an additional icon next to the familiarity heart, because you can already tell the gender of the majority of animals just by looking at them from a distance. For those which you cannot, there is the chat message.

 

As for a pregnant indicator, there is already the chat message. If you have all of your animals crammed into such a small space that you can't tell which female cow you clicked on that gave the pregnant message, I would suggest you maybe be a bit more humane and separate the animals a bit more. You can even go so far as to separate out all of the pregnant animals into their own pens.

 

When you are focusing on increasing the familiarity of a specific animal, I would suggest you utilize the in-game calendar, or a real-life timer. Either pick a time of day in-game to feed your animals such as sunrise or sunset and always feed them at that time, or set a real-life timer to go off every 20 minutes, and feed the animals every time the timer goes off. It is exactly 24 in-game hours between each time you can feed an animal. If you feed an animal, and you see the breeding heart particles, or you get the "can't do that" message, then it hasn't been 24 hours yet since you last fed it.

[NikkyD 34]

My animals would have plenty of space! Its just that in minecraft animals seem to wander into a direction regardless of fences etc so they all end up in a corner.

 

It is just that i want to be "humane" and somewhat realistic, they have plenty of space and i dont want to go all weirdo and rope them to the fence just so i know which animal was the one i was trying to feed.

 

 

Why are you so opposed to more icons ? You act like they would be gamebreaking or counter beneficial.

[Kittychanley 1,002]

Icons can very quickly clutter a screen and make it really ugly. While I rarely use this term, "immersion breaking" also comes to mind. When it is already fairly easy to get the information you are looking for, adding icons to also show that same information is redundant, and messy.

[abdyman 14]

couldn't you name them in alphabetical order and feed them/know who you are feeding like that?

[Kittychanley 1,002]

couldn't you name them in alphabetical order and feed them/know who you are feeding like that?

 

Animals have to have a certain level of familiarity before you can name them, so that kind of ruins the whole point.