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31 posts in this topic

Have you read, understood, and followed all of the rules listed in large text at the top of the suggestions forum?(Yes/No): YES
Answering "no" to the above question will result in your post being deleted.

 

Hello!

I've read all the posts and haven't seen this suggestion before, but I apologise if I'm wrong.

 

I think it would be a nice addition to the game to have to feed the animals you tame. In TFC1, all  you have to do is feed animals a bit a grain and once they're familiarised, voilà, you have yourself a near infinite supply of meat (pig splosions!). I've always thought that it was a shame that these mechanics were not carried on after the animal was tame.

For example, in summer, the animals could hang out in the pastures and eat grass and be fine, but in winter, with the harsh weather, animals would have to be hearded indoors (or left in the pasture, I just like the idea of building barns) and fed.

To do this, troughs and feeding stations could be implemented. The played would have to refill them regularly. Big animals would eat more than small animals.

 

The point is not to add a tedious mechanic to the game, but te incite the player to manage his animals: does he want 10 dairy cows, or 10 sheep, or simply 5 of each? Can he afford to have so many animals? Should he expand his farm to account for more animals? For those who like the stone age, wood troughs could be built, and further down the line iron troughs with a bigger food capacity.

 

The troughs and feeding stations could be filled with grain or straw (3 straw would equate 1 grain), or vegetables. This would enable variety and wouldn't penalize the player too much (by saving all his grain for the animals for example. Straw could a viable alternative in winter when food is scarce). Food put into the feeding station would not decay (to enable the player to go exploring for a few days without fear of his animals dying of hunger). To stop us from using these feeding stations as storage, food that has been put in could not be retrievable (any food you put in would fill up a bar for example, and have an animation like when you put iron in a bloomery)

 

 

I've always thought it was a shame we can't feed the animals vegetables or fruit (sheep love carrots, horses eat apples!). In this way, more than just grain or straw could be put in the troughs. Pigs would eat anything (even meat and dairy), horses would eat fruit, vegetables and grain, cows and sheep only vegetables and grain. I'm not sure how this could be implemented if there's a bar on the trough. Maybe with a % of vegetables/grain/straw (much like the crucible). In a trough with 1% grain and 20% dairy, only the pigs could eat from it until it's filled back up.

Finally, water troughs could also be implemented, but I don't want to expand too much on that, the point is too have fun not to add too many tedious mechanics. But tell me what you think of that.

 

Hope you like the idea, criticism is welcome :D

 

(On a completly different topic, thatch could be used for insulation, but I'll open a new suggestion for that)

Edited by Donjons
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Straw is just the dry hollow stalks left over from processing grains. Livestock will eat straw, but it's more of a filler than anything. Pretty lacking in nutrition. Animals fed straw definitely need other foods along with it.

 

Or . . . they could eat hay, which is something like oat, wheat, or alfalfa harvested and dried while it is still leafy, green, and full of nutrients (before the seed head is ripe). Perhaps hay could be obtained by introducing alfalfa as a new crop, or it could be a drop you collect by using a scythe on less than fully mature grain crops.

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What could also be implemented (but maybe that's going to far) is a weight variable. Animals fed solely on straw (or left to starve) would be thinner and produce less meat, less milk, less wool...

The player would have an incentive to feed his animals properly.

 

And i'm totaly up for hay or alfalfa, I love having a variety of crops to chose from. It would also mean I have to dedicate a small part of my farm for animal feed.

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Could be an interesting addition.  As long as the food in the trough doesn't rot, and as long as animals don't die from lack of food, it should be workable for SMP, I think.  The previous suggestions of reduced offspring, reduced weight for meat, and reduced production of milk/wool, would all be suitable penalties, without killing off the player's hard-earned animals.  It's also a good idea to have it be seasonal, so it's not a constant grind.  I suppose maybe grass would have to change color based on seasons, in order to show when the animals have to start being fed via trough.  If animal health came into play, they could become sick as well, and part of healing them might be feeding them from a trough, regardless of season, in addition to whatever medicine might be required. 

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Back when I was a developer for TFC and in charge of animals, I had lengthy discussions with Bioxx and I think Kitty about the feasibility of such a feature. Being a shepard/herdsman back in the day was a full time job. Adding the familiarization mechanic means that players at least had to acknowledge their animals once a day until they are tamed, but it really doesn't approach the sort of interaction that is possible. Most of the time, we arrived at the same conclusion, that this feature would suffer the same problem that many other features might: time scale. If any significant time passes while you're offline (say on a server) your animals could go a long time without any care. Taming an animal does take a while, but the feature is designed so that a player who really cares can do it in one sitting (about an hour or two of real time for wild animals, and not to fully tame). The other issue is the scale of time in TFC. A day is 20 minutes, and half of that is night. Without good protection, working at night can be very dangerous. We try to approximate or represent real events in TFC, but you can only do that so much. An in-game hour is 50 seconds long, and you have about 12 of them to get everything done in the day. Moving around is done in real time, so that really drags down productivity. In real life, walking a kilometer (1000 blocks) might take you 10 minutes at an even pace. If that was scaled to in-game time, that would take less than 10 seconds. In reality, it takes 12 in-game hours.

 

Basically, players can't be online all the time and it just becomes one more thing to take up all the time you have in a day.

 

As far as the functionality, this means that it couldn't be required for animal survival. One of the approaches I looked into was using it as an efficiency tool, which probably fits better into the style it took in real life- thousands of years ago, shepherds herded mouflon or primitive sheep through the low hills and mountains, grazing them on grasses. Wild animals in real life do graze to sustain themselves, eating the grasses and vegetation that naturally grow. Obviously it's incredibly high maintenance if you're taking your animals out of their pens and leading them somewhere to eat (as well as dangerous- mob AI is finicky and difficult, and there are wolves and cliffs and bears-- it's not a good idea). Instead, the animals would eat grass blocks as they currently do. Animals do in fact have an internal hunger value that determines whether they'll heal or regrow wool, and they restore it by eating grass. Wolves have to be fed meat. Each block of grass they consume gives them one day's worth of hunger, and if they're less than a day's worth from max, they can do all those things I just mentioned.

 

The proposal was to modify this system so that they might only eat tall grass, which would have to grow at a semi-predictable rate. Then, based on the amount of tall grass they eat and its growth speed, you could calculate how many grass blocks an average sheep would need in an enclosure to sustain itself. Feeding would only be necessary if there wasn't enough grass for the animals to sustain themselves. It means that if you leave your animals unfed, they /would/ die, but only until they reached natural equilibrium again. There are obviously inherent flaws in this system, and it might be better to fudge it and just calculate if the animals can eat based on proximity to other animals and the number of grass blocks around them (less reliance on AI, but potentially harder on memory, not sure). Regardless, I think we decided that it just wouldn't work terribly well.

 

The other option is to make it non-mandatory, and only a bonus. Feeding animals might increase their production rate of wool or milk or eggs or maybe make them fatter to give more meat. Something like that.

 

Since I've left the TFC team I have no more say in the matter, but I thought I'd give my two cents.

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One idea that I proposed was to make a system similar to the one we have now for Familiarization.

Because of Server/Multiplayer and single player exploration, we have to take on account and make it so animals would not die of starvation.

I think the way to go would be to tie animal production to a minimum of 5 day feeding.

take a chicken for example: Feed a chicken for 5 days and after that it will give you an egg a day as long as you keep feeding.

The same could hold true for other animals:

Sheep with Wool.

Cows with Milk.

Any and all animals unfed would be considered too skinny to give any meat.

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I'd like at least an option to enable animal death through starvation and old age. Then it becomes a massive achievement to create a sustainable herd. That's the kind of achievement not every player will have the will or ability to accomplish on their own, but is still very worth doing. Putting in the effort to transform a consumable resource into a renewable resource creates opportunities for trading. And trading is only meaningful in a world where one person can't or won't do it all.

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One idea that I proposed was to make a system similar to the one we have now for Familiarization.

Because of Server/Multiplayer and single player exploration, we have to take on account and make it so animals would not die of starvation.

I think the way to go would be to tie animal production to a minimum of 5 day feeding.

take a chicken for example: Feed a chicken for 5 days and after that it will give you an egg a day as long as you keep feeding.

The same could hold true for other animals:

Sheep with Wool.

Cows with Milk.

Any and all animals unfed would be considered too skinny to give any meat.

 

I like this idea. But the last point  "Any and all animals unfed would be considered too skinny to give any meat." shouldn't be so strict, i think a minimal (3 or 4 less than normal) and shouldn't be applicable on wild animal (if wild animal give any meat because you don't feed them seems no sens)

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I only play singleplayer so I'm not too concerned, but like subarctic_guy says it could be a addition to the butcher profession in multiplayer.

The butcher of the server would also be farmer.

Though it would be more beneficial on servers if the animals didn't die.

Regarding what dunkleostus mentioned, filling the troughs shouldn't be done ever single day, but maybe every two or three days (after all it can hold a lot of food). The more animals, the more troughs. If you're going on a trip, just add another trough or take the risk that the animal loses weight. Just like you're not going to feed your animals every single day, they also shouldn't lose weight in one day. Maybe 5 days to lose production and 5 days to gain it back?

That way with one trough full the player could leave for at least 6 or 7 days before getting too penalized (good for servers and the adventure part of the game), but at the same time this keeps the management part of the idea since he'll have to provide enough food to fill up the troughs before he leaves, in addition to food for himself.


As for the idea or sheparding and herding the animals to different pastures, why not, if we can get pas the fact that moving animals is a nightmare.

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Thinking better I like the idea of a buffer time. So 5 days to fully fed and 5 days to starving.

Now consider that 5 Minecraft days equals 100 Minutes. In a busy server, just going to sleep for 8 hours equals 480 Minutes, so any system where animals die of hunger would not work on a server.

What about if you go on a trip in real life and cant play for a few days? That's why I suggested that animals should not die of starvation. I know is not realistic, but for servers I do not see any other solution.

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I am with the idea of making animal husbandry "faster". Just looking at the forum and the ideas we give, it seems like tfc will be impossible in single player. We will have to take care of magic, smithing, mining, cooking, harvesting. exploring, killing mobs, and also take care of animals once a day. If animals required to get fed so usually it would be simply impossible, so I am with the feeding station that can hold several rations. It will save time. Also, for multiplayer servers you could always make things like "sheeps fed by natural tall grass give more wool", so farmer is actually a rational job, but making such things mandatory is just too much. For what the animals may eat, I think that thatch would be a possibility but they need to eat a lot. Grains and vegetables could also be a good. As they mentioned alfalfa could be an interesting crop which provides more nutrients for animals than other grains does. Finally, I think that getting a subproduct when cooking (like fruit peelings) could also be an animal food.

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I am with the idea of making animal husbandry "faster". Just looking at the forum and the ideas we give, it seems like tfc will be impossible in single player. We will have to take care of magic, smithing, mining, cooking, harvesting. exploring, killing mobs, and also take care of animals once a day. If animals required to get fed so usually it would be simply impossible, so I am with the feeding station that can hold several rations. It will save time. Also, for multiplayer servers you could always make things like "sheeps fed by natural tall grass give more wool", so farmer is actually a rational job, but making such things mandatory is just too much. For what the animals may eat, I think that thatch would be a possibility but they need to eat a lot. Grains and vegetables could also be a good. As they mentioned alfalfa could be an interesting crop which provides more nutrients for animals than other grains does. Finally, I think that getting a subproduct when cooking (like fruit peelings) could also be an animal food.

I hear all your arguments.

Now one thing to consider is that animal husbandry is not really necessary for survival. There is plenty of food in tfc.

So you do not really need to have animals. They are more like an upgrade to the food system.

The truth is that there is no way to develop a game for multiplayer and expect someone in single player to do everything. And they shouldn't. And I don't see a problem with that.

Actually what we have aimed is to have as much depth in Animal Husbandry as we have in Smithery.

To be honest all other areas of the game could have as much depth also.

That would not make the game impossible to be played in single player. It just would just mean that the player would have to choose paths to fallow.

To this day there are players that never evolve past bronze. They do not like to work in the anvil and that is OK. They play the game and have fun. That's all the matter.

The same thing would be with a well developed Animal Husbandry. 

You do not want to raise animals? Don't do it. Just eat soy beans.

Please. Is very hard to convey intonation on written language. I do not mean disrespect or to start a fight. Just exposing my views on the subject.

Peace and Love.

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I hear all your arguments.

Now one thing to consider is that animal husbandry is not really necessary for survival. There is plenty of food in tfc.

So you do not really need to have animals. They are more like an upgrade to the food system.

The truth is that there is no way to develop a game for multiplayer and expect someone in single player to do everything. And they shouldn't. And I don't see a problem with that.

Actually what we have aimed is to have as much depth in Animal Husbandry as we have in Smithery.

To be honest all other areas of the game could have as much depth also.

That would not make the game impossible to be played in single player. It just would just mean that the player would have to choose paths to fallow.

To this day there are players that never evolve past bronze. They do not like to work in the anvil and that is OK. They play the game and have fun. That's all the matter.

The same thing would be with a well developed Animal Husbandry. 

You do not want to raise animals? Don't do it. Just eat soy beans.

Please. Is very hard to convey intonation on written language. I do not mean disrespect or to start a fight. Just exposing my views on the subject.

Peace and Love.

I undersand that the game is focused to multiplayer, but if no animal could be developed in singleplayer in orden to focus in, lets say, magic, the player could not:

Have meet, have dairy, have wool, dont have reliable leather source, have feathers, dont have a good transportation animal (which may seem necessary with the encumberance)...

What I want to say is that if you dont develope that branch you will lose imporant resources for many other branches, like the leather for more bellows, feathers for arrows or magic, transport... So you will be forced to have animals.

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I hear all your arguments.

Now one thing to consider is that animal husbandry is not really necessary for survival. There is plenty of food in tfc.

So you do not really need to have anima.

  

We can't assume the same will be true in TFC2.

I undersand that the game is focused to multiplayer...

This it's why I think there should be two modes. One geared toward single player and the other toward multiplayer. Same content in each, but values tweaked and certain mechanics enabled or disabled to keep a similar degree of challenge across both modes.

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Please remember that a lot of people like single player. I would hate it for the devs to make a game solely for multiplayer.

 

As for what you say IJuanGB, i've always played single player, and i'm at red steel age, with a big farm and a huge house. I have so much food I don't know what to do with it. I feel that even if they added magic and specializations, I'd still have time to do the same in TFC2. It's just a question on what you'll focus the early game on. You don't have to try and do everything at the same time. Having a viable animal farm is like steel, it's an end game thing.

If you need wool, just take care of a single sheep and go hunting venison for leather. Or focus on farms first. Once you have heaps of food you can then focus on magic.

Anyway, I'm not trying to sound aggressive at all, I just hope the devs take into account us single players, but (for me at least) the more content, the better.

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I'm pretty confident the game will be playable single player - it may take a bit more time, but it benefits the game to stay reasonable for single player.  For one thing, lets-plays are a big part of advertising for this mod I think, and you'll have many, many fewer lps if single player isn't viable.  I personally would like to see it so that a player cannot reach the highest tiers of all the major trades, to increase replay value, and making reaching the top of a trade a distinct achievement on smp servers.  Differentiate players.   But I would not consider animal husbandry a major trade.  There may be a 'fancy' top tier that allows extraordinary things - exotic mounts for instance, maybe flying mounts - but as far as raising a herd of standard animals, that should be within reach of everyone I'd say.

Edited by Darmo
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Um, um, um, would there be some kind of helper for single player? Obviously no one would do all trade by themselves without grinding every day.

 

I was thinking about NPC that also lives its own life and might trade with you, and so on.

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Could I suggest animal husbandry with genetic mutations? IE: when you breed a larger bull with a small cow the offspring has a punnett square chance to be a big cow or a small cow.

This could also have a extremely small chance to produce a cow that has neither of the mutations and is much smaller or larger but due to mutation wont be as healthy.

 

A unhealthy animal could have lower health or be slower or whatever. Just my Forestry mod loving two cents

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Could I suggest animal husbandry with genetic mutations? IE: when you breed a larger bull with a small cow the offspring has a punnett square chance to be a big cow or a small cow.

This could also have a extremely small chance to produce a cow that has neither of the mutations and is much smaller or larger but due to mutation wont be as healthy.

 

A unhealthy animal could have lower health or be slower or whatever. Just my Forestry mod loving two cents

 

Please see the topic specifically about genetics to discuss that. Any further discussion of genetics in this thread will be considered off topic and breaking rule #4

 

http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/8573-domestication-through-mendelian-inheritance-revisited/

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Time to revive this thread with more ideas.

My goal is as follows.

  • Limit size of herd based on continued player involvement.
  • Deal with people leaving a server and then coming back.
  • Make it as resource and code friendly as possible without getting into specifics. 
  • tie various aspects to an animal skill.

Some of these goals will be met based on certain assumptions that may or may not be true. One such assumption is that you are working on a server in a group and that if you are gone, another player can do some quick maintenance. Another assumption is that mods will come along to make certain aspects easier for those who don't fit in the previous assumption. I am going to try and leave animal AI out of this because AI isn't easy, and doesn't work well with time simulation though hard to avoid when adding mechanics to animals.

As a reference point, in TFC 1 right now you have a couple steps. Gathering the animals, taming them, collecting the goods. Certain servers have made this a little more difficult by making untamed animals not drop anything when you kill them. The only two times you can fail is not being careful when collecting and they die some how. The second is forgetting to feed them when in the process of taming. Otherwise you can have a herd of 50 + crowded in a pretty tight area, leave for a month, come back and still have a huge herd. 

The hardest part about the gathering is the distance and landscapes you have to bring them through to get back to your place. Since TFC 2 is island based I am going to assume that won't be too hard. I am going to also assume that if not in the base game, a mod will come out for to make animal transportation easier like the tucker bag for TFC 1. I don't see a way to make that more difficult without changing animal AI. Since Bioxx is keen to add transportation mechanics, I do think this is a good way to do it. Lead an animal to a train. For transportation between islands you could have ports. Lead the animal up to the docks and tether it to a certain block and then when you traveled to another place the animal would get transported as well. Maybe make sure a certain amount of food is in each transportation method so animals don't die during transportation.

On 1/5/2016 at 1:41 PM, dunkleosteus said:

Taming an animal does take a while, but the feature is designed so that a player who really cares can do it in one sitting (about an hour or two of real time for wild animals, and not to fully tame).

Taming is a good way to introduce some skill by making taming go quicker based on players animal skill. If players had an animal skill that went up each time an animal is tamed then you could require at low skill levels it takes longer to tame animals because at higher skill level it becomes much quicker. 

On 1/6/2016 at 5:09 PM, TonyLiberatto said:

I think the way to go would be to tie animal production to a minimum of 5 day feeding.

After taming there needs to be some form of maintenance that grows as the herd does or having 3 animals is not bigger of a task than having 100 animals. One of the ways of doing this is taking Tony's suggestion with a configuration option that if tamed and not fed they will die of starvation. (Directly feeding animals could raise your animal skill). Issues with this is things such as sleeping, and wild animals. The sleeping issue can be solved by a feeding block. You'd be able to add food to the feeding block, each animal would use a different feeding block. Food does expire in these feeding block but with a higher tech level you could connect these to food silos so they are auto filled by the silo. The wild animal part can be solved by having unfed animals dropping less meat which makes sense. It could also take more effort to kill wild animals through a number of changes involving, health, damage, hunger, and AI. The simplest way to do this is making knifing an animal to death costs more hunger than the food from the animal provides. Also because we are on islands it may be pretty easy to kill off all the animal populations on an island if you kill each one you come across. While this would limit the size of the productive part of the herd it doesn't limit the herd it's self. While filling up 20 feeding blocks does take a little time and a scalable amount of resources, people typically already have more animals then they actively use. 

On 1/5/2016 at 1:41 PM, dunkleosteus said:

based on proximity to other animals

Another mechanic to help curb animals populations is sickness. If x many animals are within Y distance of animal it could have a chance to get sick which if not treated can lead to the animals death. During testing you could modify the three values to what made sense for each animal and even allow each server to tune these options in a config file. This would encourage players to not put all their animals in the same pen and to spread them out more, you could also have someone with sufficiently high animal skill to identify and treat the illness. Also sickness should have a chance to spread to nearby animals. 

On 1/5/2016 at 2:52 AM, Donjons said:

I just like the idea of building barns

The last mechanic I am going to propose is something I would say is on the bottom of my list. Skeletons already had a behavior that allows them to look for cover. That could be retooled to make animals occasionally seek shelter from the elements such as rain and snow. If not provided shelter, be it trees or barn, they will take minor damage. Animals can heal this back by eating grass or being fed. This would mean animals need to be provided with enough shelter, again this could be trees, so that they don't take damage from the weather, and don't crowd and become sick. Now I am not suggesting that one rain storm can kill off unprotected animals, but I am suggesting that if you leave your animals without shelter and it rains for two nights in a row, that your weaker animals would die off. 

On 1/6/2016 at 7:59 PM, subarctic_guy said:

I'd like at least an option to enable animal death through starvation and old age.

For added difficulty I'd include a configuration option to have animals die of old age and untamed animals that would have died in an unloaded chunk instead wrap back around. Meaning if you had a wild animal that would die in two years and you come back in 6, you find an animals that's 4 years old. 

 

With these ideas implemented it means that people could choose the difficulty of their play. If people left for an amount of time they would just have to at the very least make sure their animals had shelter and were spaced. At the most difficult they would have to have the previously mentioned requirements as well as, make sure the feeding stations were full, and that they had young animals that weren't going to grow old and die by the time they came back.

Edited by Stroam
sickness addition
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Good ideas.   I do think it'd be especially good to have considerations for SMP gameplay.  Especially in the form of animals perhaps being able to starve to death in single player, while in SMP they won't starve to death, but only perform more poorly.   Because in SMP you sometimes have to leave for extended periods, and it's not going to encourage people to stick around if an extended absence results in all their animals dieing.  But even in single player, I'd suggest that your grazers should be able to survive on grass.  But quite simply, if your cow is only surviving on grass, it only produces milk every 10 days.  Whereas if you've been feeding it grains and vegetables for a time, if produces every day.  Sheep the same.  And all animals, if slaughtered, give much less meat if not kept well fed.  Disease likelihood would also increase with hunger.  They could also have a reduced chance of becoming pregnant if not well fed.  Your pack animals will carry less, move slower, and not jump as high.  Additionally, they become more aggressive to each other if not well fed, and predators especially, even if tamed, could attack other tame animals.   So this way if you're on SMP, and know you'll be gone for awhile, you can know that you need to separate your animals and leave them with good access to grass.  Meat eating animals either simply don't starve to death, or perhaps as long as they are within 10 blocks of small animals like rabbits or something, it can be assumed they catch a stray every so often.  The reasoning here is that in SMP, even though the owner of a town may be gone, you can have other players wander in and load the chunks (accidentally, or as a form of griefing).  If meat eaters starved without stockpiled meat or bones, a player could troll absent town owners by hanging around till their animals starve.  Similarly, it's probably not a good idea to have disease outright kill animals.  Or at least have that option.  For the same reason.

Salt blocks also could be another health improving factor, btw, and provide another use for salt.

For gathering animals, I'd guess that the player-pulled cart would be able to carry medium animals in a cage, such as sheep or pigs.  Mayyybe cows, but I'd agitate for not.  Cows would be minecart-able though.  Anything larger than cows I'm fine with the player having an incredibly hard time transporting them.  I think it'd be good if players had to deal more with what they're given on an island, rather than trying to gather every single crop and animal in existence to their island (at least, if they're not willing to put in the effort).  This would aid replay-ability in single player, and give distinct character to towns in SMP.

Sickness should definitely be a thing.  It could be a skill tie-in, similar to the agriculture thread.  And also a climate-limiting factor.  I would suggest that animals have a significant increase in disease chance when not in their preferred climate.  The farther removed from their native climate, the greater the increase in disease.  Furthermore they could also have higher disease if the temperature, moisture, and maybe even terrain are not their preferred, though these should perhaps have less of an affect than climate.  None of these factors would be 1-per-animal.  Some animals would be more adaptable.  So pigs would be fine anywhere from tropical to sub-arctic, perhaps, and similarly cover a host of the other conditions.  They might suffer in mountains or swamps, or at 8k+ rainfall.  But otherwise be fine.    Alligators on the other hand might suffer in sub-arctic or arctic islands, at rainfall of less than 1000, temperature below 20c, and any terrain *other than* swamp.  It might be better to leave out temperature, if possible, since it can swing quite a bit with seasons, and most animals native to a climate have adaptations for seasonal extremes (hibernation, brumation), plus, the island climate already deals a lot with temperature I think.

By making these factors cause disease, you allow the player to mitigate it with effort.  So a player with really good animal husbandry could in fact create a zoo with exotic animals.  They'd have to spend a lot of time treating them for diseases, but that's the price they pay for having an amazing menagerie.  On the other hand, a player that just wants to have some basic animal supplies could get by easier by only having animals native to their climate. 

The shelter idea as given doesn't seem like much of a logistical hurdle, unless the requirements are more than just a few covered squares.  I mean, you can do that with a stone axe and some logs, so that would not be a meaningful requirement I'd say.  And honestly most wild animals can deal with some rain.  Cold and lack of water are the real enemies, so I'd say some sort of water trough would be most appropriate.  This could actually be depleted slowly over time, and not risk griefing too much, if TFC2 rains with a frequency similar to that of TFC1.  The rain would refill the trough, and the griefer would be foiled.  Perhaps in extremely dry climates it might become a factor, and there could be a special craftable well or windmill to provide for trough filling. 

The old age config I'd see as being mostly for single player.  Even with the wrap-around age, there's that chance of griefers or tourists loading the chunk long enough to kill an animal.  However, what if instead animals aged based on the number of times they'd had resources removed?  So a cow (after becoming an adult) would not have a numeric age, but simply a descriptor, such as young, mature, old, and wizened.  Or for more energy-based descriptors; spry, energetic, strong, plodding, and decrepit.   They move through these categories based on how many times the player milks them.  In that way, for SMP servers with town protection, the animal ages as town residents use the animal.  Tourists and griefers can do nothing to advance the age, because they cannot use the animal as long as it's in town borders.  That of course does not address animals that do not provide a product.  Mounts and pack animals could age whenever the player gets on them.  Other animals become more problematic.   Breeding could also increase the age, and provide a little bit of a brake on populations.

Another suggestion would be the ability to neuter animals.  This would be purely to aid server economies, so maybe better as a mod, but the idea would be that specialist animal handlers who manage to breed some really good animals, could protect their market by ensuring customers can't just buy one or two excellent animals, and then start breeding their own.

ANIMAL HANDLING SKILL
 

Spoiler

 

So to focus specifically on uses of the skill, I'd say it could affect the chance of successfully applying a lead/saddle/other gear, the speed of taming, chance to get product, the chance that breeding is successful, ease of identifying disease, and chance that disease treatment works.    At Master the player might get tool tips regarding any special genetic characteristics.  If animals could be taught tricks (i.e. dog scares pheasant from bush, pig digs up truffle), it could also affect the chance of successful performance of said trick.

It could also provide a hard limit for the types of animals that could be tamed.  So novices can only do simple stuff like birds and rabbits.  Adepts can do pigs and sheep and cows.  Experts can do wolves, and Masters can do the wild stuff like elephants and alligators. 

Or for a softer system, animals have on them the chance for successful tame by a person of a given skill level.   The format could be #/#/#/#, where each # is the percent chance of that tame contributing to the overall effort, at novice,adept,expert, and master respectively.  On a rabbit it might be 50/90/100/100.  So a novice has a 50% chance of each food given adding to the tame level.  An adept 90% for each piece, and Expert and Master always have every piece of food given contribute.  It takes multiple success to reach tame status though, just as now.  So if 10 successful tames are required, a novice would average 20 pieces of food used, while Expert+ would always be 10 pieces.  An elephant on the other hand might read 1/2/4/10.  So a novice would go through mountains of food trying to tame an elephant, but he would have a chance.  A master would still have a hard time, but not near as hard as a novice.  The number could also count as the chance of breeding being successful.  So even after that novice goes through TWO mountains of food taming a male and female elephant, they'll have to through another hefty pile to breed them successfully.  Baby animals might have double the chance, to represent their ease of taming.  Moreover, I'd suggest that really exotic mounts be almost impossible to control for low skill players.  So a novice animal handler can't just buy an elephant from another player, and then get all the benefits.  If I see someone riding an elephant, I'd like to know that they *earned* it.

 

In the end, I think it would be great if a player who wants to focus on other stuff can still have some animals, and still get some stuff out of them.  Just at a slower rate than someone who is focusing on taking care of their animals.

 

 

Edited by Darmo
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First I just want to point out that animals starving to death I suggested as a config option for those who want a more hardcore. You could have it false by default.

Animals becoming aggressive when not well fed gets into AI which I was trying to avoid changing too much. Also your suggestion of making sure to leave them with plenty of grass so they don't starve when you leave, as pointed out by Dunkleosteus, this is pretty difficult to calculate and simulate. Personally even though it makes sense I would not put the starvation grass mechanic into the game because I believe it would be disabled by most servers anyway.          

7 hours ago, Darmo said:

If meat eaters starved without stockpiled meat or bones, a player could troll absent town owners by hanging around till their animals starve.  Similarly, it's probably not a good idea to have disease outright kill animals.

Disease only happens by chance caused by crowding. If you have your animals in pens with appropriate distances from each other then there could be no accidents unless someone drives a herd of animals through your area. I'm working off the assumption players aren't actively trying to anger other players and are working together. The mindset I take away from your statement is that people will each have their own private ranch and be messing with each other, because you don't mess with people's herds if you depend on them for survival. If such a scenario does play out where one person trolls another you do the same thing you do IRL. You find an authority figure such as an Mod or Admin and they'll deal with it. Also the only possible ways for animals to die if age and starvation are not enabled is by player, animal, or sickness so I don't see it as an issue with sickness killing animals overtime. 

 

Salt blocks are something I never considered. The only use I know for them is attracting while animals when hunting.

Animals larger than a cow! Ya, I agree they should be difficult to transport on the island and maybe impossible to get it off the island. That and your comment on grazers vs carnivores makes me wonder what you expect people to be raising. 

I get animals have some protection from the rain but you do see them seek shelter. You're right in that it's not a big hurdle but if you have 20 cows in a field with only 1 tree/small barn it may not be big enough to house all of them and now you have a bunch of animals in a small area which increases the chance for sickness to happen and spread. Something I forgot to mention in the that post which I just now added is sickness being able to spread. So you want to isolate your sick animals. Having sickness chance change based on temperature and environment would be neat and add complexity to the system. 

The watering trough is similar enough to the food mechanic that I didn't know if it was needed but could be added along side it.

Since aging was more designed for hardcore players and to limit populations I wouldn't mind if it was used more like durability. In that case I'd have breeding use no less than 45% of the durability. I like the energy based descriptors. Hmm neutering would be an interesting mechanic. Can't say I've ever played a multiplayer game where something like that was an option. 

For your spoiler on animal handling skill, I like all those suggestions. 

I agree people should be able to have a small number of pets around, like 5, but I don't agree on everyone having 50 animals without some sort of maintenance involved that if isn't done starts killing off the animals. Otherwise you have 5 people on and 250 animals taking up server resources. I also hear your points on when people leave the server for vacation or something but just like IRL they could ask someone who isn't leaving to watch after their animals while they are gone. 

Edited by Stroam
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As far as the grief factor, I did also mention that it can happen accidentally, just from tourists visiting the town.  The grief thing is probably specific to only the very large servers, but if the mechanic can be arranged so that it works well for single player and large SMP, I figure it's worthwhile to at least consider.  The devs will have the final say on how much consideration they want to give to these kinds of servers. 

I'm not so much 'expecting', but I am 'hoping', that the player will be able to tame bears, tigers, and other carnivores in a way that makes them more than a sideshow.  And beyond that, with enough skill, fantasy beasts as well, such as pegasi, griffins, maybe even manticores, as flying mounts.  I totally glossed over them in my skill spoiler.  Maybe there needs to be a Grandmaster level for fantasy beasts.   I'd like just about everything of animal-ish intelligence to be tameable, really.  That's my hope.

Irl, mineral blocks are commonly placed in fields where animals graze.   This is as opposed to more tightly confined animals which are fed mixed foods.  A wild animal would normally wander far, and find places to supplement it's diet with salt and minerals.  When you confine animals in pens and don't let them wander, they still need those things (especially salt).  In a modern feedlot, animals are fed carefully mixed feed that includes those minerals in it already, right in the trough.  Field-grazed animals on the other hand, as in the old days, weren't able to wander far enough afield to find the minerals in many cases.  So the rancher would put out mineral blocks, or 'salt licks', so that pastured animals would get the minerals.  Still a very common practice for pasture raised animals.  The blocks are mostly salt, since that's mostly what the animals need.  The rest is basically trace amounts.  Though for game purposes they could require more significant amounts of minerals.  They could be depleted by rain, if not covered, which would sort of bring in the cover thing a little bit?

I guess for me, the thing about shelter is, you're not really adding much to the animal care routine.  It doesn't take any special tech, and once you've built it, it's there forever.  So why have the requirement if it's extremely simple to meet?  Players like to build barns anyway, I'd just let them do their thing.

I'd differ on disease, in that I'd have it afflict even lone animals or small herds.  I do agree the chance should increase with large tightly spaced herds.  But in order to make sure the player sees benefit from a high animal husbandry skill, I'd have their animals get sick once in awhile.  And if the animals are not native to the climate, or are packed tightly, then they get sick more often.

Ya, the watering trough was just an attempt to respond to weather other than rain.  It'd probably only be important in desert climates, if it were refilled by rain.  I definitely don't see it as a necessary part of the animal care scheme.

I could see mortal diseases coming into play for large herds, sure.  As long as the player isn't completely wiped out and demoralized, I think it'd work.

ANIMAL HEALTH
 

Spoiler

 

So an exploration of a possible scheme for animal health.   Animals might have a hidden health stat, going from 0 to 500, lets say.  There would be things that contribute, and things that detract, from this number.  The number would be incremented every so often - whatever is appropriate (I'm not a coder). 

BENEFICIAL FACTORS could be things such as keeping the animal well feed, the animal having access to water, and the animal having access to a mineral block.  Perhaps there are also special herbs or other high grade food that provide an additional boost.  So keeping the animal well fed with actual food would increase the health by 5 or something, access to water an additional 5, access to a mineral block an additional 3 perhaps, and their special food an additional 2.  We could further say that food and water only contribute up 400.  Beyond that, only mineral blocks and special foods contribute.  If 250 is the neutral point of health, then salt licks and specials provide a significant boost.  The animals have a specific 'neutral' point production amount, and rate.  But lets say for this example that only the rate is affected by health - amount is reserved for genetics.  So a neutral cow, which is basically not sick, but only has access to grass, maybe produces milk every 6 days.  Every 50 health beyond that decreases the span by a day.  At 400 health the cow produces every 3 days, and at top health of 500 it produces every day.  If genetics comes into play, then the cow may produce multiple buckets per time period (or if fractional buckets become a thing, so many tenths of a bucket). 

DETRIMENTAL FACTORS would be the corrolaries of the above (lack of food (or worse, lack of even grass), lack of water, no minerals, no special food.  And beyond that, diseases.  Diseases would have their own various contributing factors such as climate appropriateness for animal, and herd density, but those would not directly affect health.  Naturally, lack provides a negative modifier.  For food, you could either have lack of food be -5, and lack of grass be -10, or just have lack of food be neutral (-0) but lack of grass be the -5.  Lack of specials and minerals could either be negative modifiers, or neutral (i.e. they only contribute to the 400+ bonus, they do not detract).  But diseases can each have their own wildly different modifiers.  So a simple flu might be -5, tetanus -10,  while sleeping sickness may be -15.  Moreover, they can have other effects as well.  Herpes would detract from health and also apply a huge penalty to successfully breeding the animal.  Mange may totally halt production in animals that produce wool.  Something else may cut milk production in half, and/or double the production time.  There's huge amounts of possibilities. 

RESULTS There would be some general results of low health, including increased production time, and lowered yields (of both replenishables like milk and wool, but also meat).  Also lowered speed, carrying capacity, and jumping for mounts.   This may stack with diseases, so that if a disease doubles production time, you'll have a hard enough time if the animal is healthy when it contracts the disease.  But if the animal's health also falls into unhealthy ranges, you may have a multiplicative increase that extends production time into months.   Overall, I think animal diseases and health could be far more interesting and varied than plant diseases, because animals have so many other characteristics to affect.  If your animal gets extremely sick, like 0 health, maybe it doesn't die.  But with a maximum of 15 additive factors in our example, and if they're only checked once a day, it'll take at least 17 days just to get the animal back into neutral territory of 250.  So best to keep an eye on the animals.

 

 

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Yah I don't think grief protection is the responsibility of the mod maker. Flying mounts? I seriously doubt it. Kinda game breaking on a progressive island map.

The cover is a mechanism to bring animals closer together and increase infrastructure requirements. The more animals the more shelter you need. If the heat/clothing mechanic gets added it's kinda mimicking it with animals. The salt lick thing could also work though as you would need more the more animals you had, and you'd have to replace it increasing maintenance which could be considered high or low depending on how difficult the salt lick is to obtain. 

I guess if you included being out in the rain in the chance of getting sick then it does the same thing and you don't need the shelter or the animal AI. The salt lick then is then my preferred option.

I just thought of something that definitely should be combined with illness. Age. If the older the animal got the more prone the animal was to getting sick then you don't need age at all. It's what kills off biologically immortal creatures IRL. Yes there are some biologically immortal IRL. If you tie chance of getting ill with the age of the animal then you can extend it's life till the point it's more work to keep it alive then let it die. If it can infect other individuals around it it means you definitely want to keep them separate. Your animal health stuff could be used in the tolerance method and could give a value based on the animals stats and the factors listed below. 

illnessChance =( (animalAgeScaler)^(age) + tolerance(temperature, weather, sheltered, elevation, animalsInProximity, sickAnimalsInProximity) ) * (illnessDifficultyScaler)

With the difficulty scalar in the config options, that would mean each server can customize the how frequently their animals get sick with just one number. If you set it to 0, then animals would never get sick. I would set the max to 1000 and then find the best default value through testing. 

I still think illness should result in death if not properly taken care of. I'd say the animal has to be sick for 6 minecraft months before it dies which I would call grossly neglected. I think while sick they should not provide any products, and if killed provide rotten flesh or diseased meat that decays really quickly. Also diagnosing sickness should follow the same kinda mechanics as proposed for crops.

With these changes to the illness system then you really would need someone to watch your animals while you were away. Or there might be other solutions.

Consequences if these changes were enacted. Sick animals would need to be isolated from healthy ones. You couldn't stick all your chickens in a small pit without expecting them to get sick. The animals would need to be spread out to minimize risk. You would need to kill animal before they got old and feeble which means actively mating them to keep some fresh stock. Taking animals out of their natural environments means more maintenance. Caring for animals before you are skilled enough to diagnose is a risky, though the rewards are worth it if you actually use the animals. When you leave you need to find someone to take care of them, so it's helpful it another person is trained.  Pets won't last forever. You will need to make sure your animals are well taken care of such as food, water, and maybe shelter to minimize risk of getting sick.

Edited by Stroam
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