Animal Feeding Trough

[Peffern 94]

Suppose you had a big field filled with livestock. It would be a bit of a pain to go out and feed each individual one every day. What if there was a feeding trough that you could fill with grain once a day, and the animals would pathfind to it and eat it? It doesn't seem like it would be hard to implement, and it would help with the monotony of raising animal familiarity.

[Red3Tango 10]

Never thought of this idea, but think if it could be put in would be awesome!

[Regnilse 21]

I would like that. It would also be nice if you could also fill it with grass or straw so the animals would eat that instead of the grass in the pen, I've had it where my sheep ate all the grass and stopped growing wool, if I had a trough then I wouldn't have had to move them.

[Hector49er 31]

But then they would be familiarized with the Trough...

 

In my opinion a trough defeats the object of familiarization because there is no interaction with the animals. How do they magically like you more from eating from a trough? Did you sit them all down and have a heart to heart (OMG puns today) conversation explaining where the food comes from and that you have their best interest in mind?

 

I am not opposed to the idea of a Trough for feeding animals, merely that the Trough should NOT familiarize them.

 

Perhaps rather than trying to tame an entire heard of Buffalo you should just try working with a few at a time? Then perhaps breed the tamed ones until you have your desired herd size. 

 

Ropes are also nice to use to keep your animals from roaming too far o jumbling up when you are managing them.

[Bioxx 796]

A trough is something that dunk and I have discussed in the past. I think we agreed that we want something like that but there are a whole host of other issues that have to be taken into account that you don't normally think of. So we'll see what happens.

[TonyLiberatto 364]

I think a trough could be used if animals had hunger. So if they have to eat everyday then we need some kind of easy way to feed. Another option that I like is to have cows and horses eat grass, the same way sheep does. It makes  believable, with a code that already exists.

One way to add animal hunger without the risk of  loosing all your animals would be  to have animals never dying of hunger, but just stop producing goods. It's believable, because a hungry cow will not give milk, a skinny pig has no meat and you cannot ride a weak horse. The whole familiarity mechanic works the same way it does now, 

[Hector49er 31]

I think a trough could be used if animals had hunger. So if they have to eat everyday then we need some kind of easy way to feed. Another option that I like is to have cows and horses eat grass, the same way sheep does. It makes  believable, with a code that already exists.

One way to add animal hunger without the risk of  loosing all your animals would be  to have animals never dying of hunger, but just stop producing goods. It's believable, because a hungry cow will not give milk, a skinny pig has no meat and you cannot ride a weak horse. The whole familiarity mechanic works the same way it does now, 

 

I believe animals already have a sort of hunger system. I seem to recall that animals would eat grass and regenerate health if they were injured. I also  think that there were accounts of people's animals starving to death, perhaps? I know there were discussions regarding how much land it takes to feed X number of type Y livestock. If I can find evidence to my point I will edit in a link.

[Reyvinn 18]

Hector, ypu're probably referring to this add-on:

http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/4976-164078x-rusticam-melius-v120/

Animals dying of hunger was never implemented in TFC.

But who knows what future builds might bring

[Regnilse 21]

Ohh ya I like Djakuta's idea, make animal hunger important but not devastating.