Animals and food balancing

[JohnyDL]

There's no differenced between the animals other than how good their foods are and this kinda sucks from a gameplay aspect it's a problem of Vanilla Minecraft but it's even worse in your Tektopia

There's no real reason to consider what animals to get other than 1) I need leather for books 2) I have too many seeds I need to be rid of them 3) I can sell all 4 meats, eggs and wool. 4) I need milk for cooking 5) I only have X animal available to me, or I don't have Y crop.

Yeah not very interesting. Cows then Chickens then Sheep then Pigs unless you don't have one of those right now and you skip it.

At least Vanilla has the choice between auto cooked chicken and manually farmed beef

I'm not sure there's any other way at all to think about the order you buy the pens. Animals take the same amount of time to grow up and be ready to breed, sure they have food values and happiness values but anything is better than nothing, some diversity is better than no diversity and there are more important factors than strictly the food values at that point in the game since you won't buy them unless you have ample farming supplies to sell to the merchant, even the space constraint doesn't really require much thought,

So I'd like to tweak these things a bit

Rabbits breed like crazy so rabbits get two or maybe three babies for two carrots instead of one, they bring you rabbit meat which can be cooked and turned into rabbit stew, rabbit hide that can be crafted into leather and rabbit paws (super low chance) maybe for future potions? In all this looks pretty valuable, they even grow fast so maybe it should take 1 day to grow into adults but the cost would be that they're a bad food for happiness and hunger as cooked rabbit at least maybe between carrots and baked potatoes, but rabbit stew I'm not sure, I feel like this should be more than beetroot stew in value,

Chickens are small so you can fit a lot in the same space they have eggs for sale and feathers for name tags they actually grow a little faster than rabbits even if they don't breed so quick should probably take 0.75 days to grow up but maybe be better quality since they take more food to breed. And if the village has a surplus of eggs maybe the ranchers throw them?

Pigs are only pork, they're bigger than chickens and Rabbits and take longer to grow up, I actually think this should be the best meat, you don't get anything else from them and everyone loves bacon, 2 days to grow up seems right in line too.

Sheep are next like pigs they're bigger than rabbits and chickens and take longer to grow up but they have wool to spare, keeping them at 2 days to grow up I think that villager sheep should maybe only regrow their wool once per day (and not necessarily rely on grass) and their meat should be a little bit better than chicken since it takes longer to grow up and more effort is put into them.

Last but not least is the all mighty cow, they're the biggest animal, villages need leather for books and the cows make the best meat for the player but I think they should be on par with mutton for villagers maybe one gives more happiness the other more hunger, they should take the longest to grow maybe 2.5-3 days and like the sheep their living products (milk) should only replenish once in a minecraft day.

I'd maybe even like to see villagers drinking milk too (it'd be nice as a way to put out burning and remove negative status effects maybe hunger from zombies or something else from the necro?) but more generally too, children need milk to grow up (maybe they get a unique status effect like quick study if they drink milk and eat an apple before school), and other than beer villagers don't drink much, maybe milk could be the "I'm dying of starvation" ration, or the "I'm outside the pathing grid I need the mutant milk from the mutated teleporting cows to take me to my bed" cost. I just think there could be more use for it than just cakes.

The slowing down of the minecraft growing up cycle means the choices about animals becomes more interesting, and that's balanced with the meat's stats. If you villagers are starving, quick breeding rabbits or quick growing chickens depending on what farmer supplies you have on hand, seeds vs carrots, If you want happiness then pigs. If all you care about is selling stuff to the merchant maybe Cows or Sheep.

This to me adds a bit more midgame variation for 2 of the villagers and some interesting choices at least until the village has all the animal pens. I know Tango you don't think rabbits bring anything new other than yet another animal that's kinda why I want to make the animals in the village more distinct.

[LadyGwynn]

Fun fact: Rabbits can be bred with dandelions as well as carrots!

[pizzadino]

One of my main problems with villager animals and ranchers is that the breeding cycle is far too slow. Any particular animal can be bred only once a day (5 minute cool down on breeding, 10 minutes of daylight, ranchers spend several minutes in the morning socializing in their rooms with the other villagers before going to work) and it takes twenty minutes for the offspring to mature. An animal spends basically 3/4 of its breed-able time doing nothing. This causes animals to be the lowest output resource in the entire village. This is why I made an earlier suggestion that druids be given the ability to age baby animals more quickly.

[JohnyDL]

Pizzadino, I might have a different experience but bigger pens does make up for this sure any one-pair only breeds once per day but you can slaughter and repopulate 25-50% of your maximum number of animals every day, usually about 33% and this is the same for every animal there are no differences between them.

Start off with full pens Butcher comes along takes 1, rancher breeds, butcher takes a second and so on. If you have 50 animals in a pen there's no reason this shouldn't net you 12-24 dead animals per day and if you start off with 38 animals in the same 50 animal pen that's 12-19 breed/butchered per day.

Each animal gives more than one meat on average, I think it's close to 2 on average, so it's not a stack per day, but per villager? I think this is more emeralds per day than farmers and lumberjacks, 3 villagers can make 32 cooked meat each day, meat sells in stacks of 16 to the merchant, while 3 farmers or 3 lumberjacks can't make 2 stacks of any of their products in a day. Sure your villagers prefer eating the meat over farm products so you might need to micromanage a little to grab the meat to sell (I do this by turning cooking meats off on my chef for a while and then making him only cook meat for a day or two while watching him like a hawk)

So I don't think it's inherently unbalanced that they only breed once per day and faster grow timers doesn't make them better breeders anyway

I think maybe there's a case though for ranchers being able to fast track the animal growth like the player can by giving them food if there's plenty of food in the village for them (something I'd certainly like to see my ranchers do with my excess of seeds)

And I might actually go in another direction with the breed timer than growing them up faster: since the population in the mod is limited by space just turn off the breed cooldown/or reduce it to 10-60 seconds when villagers are repopulating animal pens, the reason the player can't be allowed to do this is they can very quickly generate infinite animals and there's no challenge in animals but the pens are constrained in other ways.