Weirdness with Chicken food & qualities megathread.

[stickman]

we have 1 half full coop and it seems to use all our beatroot leaves just to keep the feed levels up.

My chickens also went down with the first batch we did. We then let them starve.... i am working on a new batch but they have not hatched yet. I will post if they go down.

[smileyguy4you]

10, 10, 10 wild chickens produced 6 8 6 eggs, but also wild chicken quality dropped to 8 6 8 and has dropped again next batch of eggs they layed which were 6 4 6, am now catching new 10 10 10 chickens every other day to keep egg quality around 10.....all food and water was above q 10, does the coupe quality matter? mine was still around 10 though...

[Shiala]

Been running a test in my coop. I started with 5 wild hens quality 10/10/10, food that's 15 to 19 quality, and water around 20 quality. The first hen laid an egg and you can see that it dropped the quality of all 5 hens. The egg's quality is 12/8/7. The hens are all identical at 7/8/8.

A second hen laid an egg and it is quality 8/7/11. No change in quality on the hens with that egg.

This morning all of the hens had an egg under them. The qualities on those eggs are 7/10/6, 9/8/7, and 12/4/11. The hens didn't lose quality with any of those either. I'm going to keep watching and reporting.

Ok now things get really weird. Just checked to see if there were any new eggs. No new eggs but all 5 hens had lost quality again for no apparent reason. They are now all 6/7/7. I added food today that was all 19 and 20 quality.

On a hunch, I used a bucket to pull food out of the coop to see what quality it is and that might be a big clue as to what's going on. Since they lost quality without laying an egg, I wanted to see if maybe it was because they ate some food. This is what it looked like when I scooped some out.

So I emptied the food out completely and added all new food making 100% certain of the quality going in. When I took that food out to check, it was fine so it's not the coop nerfing the food or anything like that. It was exactly the same as what I put in there. So what happened is I probably ended up with some really crappy food in there that brought the average way down and I didn't realize it. That crappy food is probably making the chickens take quality hits when they eat it.

*Edited to add quality info and more pictures.

[Procne]

Could you list qualities of egg + every chicken?

A guess: if you took qualities if the egg, divided it by 5, then substracted the results from qualities of the chickens before the egg, then rounded down, you would get the qualities of the chickens post egg ^^
As if qualities were for some reason normalized across the whole coop to maintain the same sum before and after egg (then rounding down)

[maxeusz]

I don't want to make another thread but i noticed today another weirdness about chicken coop. Even if i put out all of my chickens food goes down like crazy. It is a decay mechanics or unintentionally bug?

[Kransthow]

So I decided to do some proper testing after taking the swill out of my coop and finding the quality far lower than the food i had put in. This was all performed adding yellow onions to a coop empty of both food and chickens.

Code: Select all

Quality
25 15 12 Onion added
25 15 12 Swill removed and re-added (Expected Average: 25.00 15.00 12.00)

25 15 12 Onion added
25 15 12 Swill removed and re-added (Expected Average: 25.00 15.00 12.00)

12 15 22 Onion added
20 15 15 Swill removed and re-added (Expected Average: 20.60 15.00 15.30)

11 15 22 Onion added
17 15 16 Swill removed and re-added (Expected Average: 17.75 15.00 16.75)

11 15 22 Onion added
15 15 17 Swill removed and re-added (Expected Average: 15.80 15.00 17.20)

11 15 22 Onion added
14 15 17 Swill removed and re-added (Expected Average: 14.33 15.00 18.66)

15.80 15.00 18.66 Average of all Onions
14.00 15.00 17.00 Actual Final Swill

From these results it seems pretty obvious that the cause of the extremely low swill qualities everyone is finding is that whenever a new food item is added to the coop it always rounds down the average of the swill and the item to the nearest integer. The consequence of this is to EVER raise the swill quality of any one quality type the item being added must have quality in that type greater than (number of items in coop) + (current swill quality). To lower the swill quality an added item simply has to have a quality value lower than the current swill quality. Essentially the entire issue is caused by propagated rounding errors.

I can understand why the devs would choose to have it always round down as rounding to the nearest integer could be exploited to increase the quality beyond what it should be by calculated use of rounding errors. However the negative effects of always rounding down are both extremely punishing to players as well as fairly unintuitive (e.g. this thread). My suggestion to the devs is to have the coop "buffer" added items and then average the entire buffer with the swill and only then round down. This prevents mass propagated rounding errors from killing quality while also prevent players from abusing rounding to their own gain.

[ubersheva]

Regardless of coop or fodder quality, grown hens must not change in quality.

[Jeff]

Are we sure about that? Cause i thought they were indeed supposed to drop if the food wasn't good enough.
And given that the food gets always rounded down every time something with a single lower value than the average gets added, here we have the cause of the whole issue. Seems like i wasn't wrong when i assumed that the error was lying in the weighted average, heh.
Another solution could be to save the actual average values and round them only in the operations that use them.

[bwhite0425]

I'm having the same issues as OP.

I built a chicken coop, filled it with Q10 water and +Q20 food. I filled it with four wild 10/10/10 chickens & roosters and now all their qualities are below 8 and still dropping. My first round of eggs were as expected a +/-5 but then once the chicks have hatched their quality started going down as well. I keep putting my best food in there yet the quality keeps dropping I'm assuming after every time they eat.

My first coop I used all q10 materials except for the boards, those were q20.

Thinking it was just my first coop was mediocre and that maybe this haven coop quality was taken into account I built a second coop with better materials, filled it with q30 water and +q30 food and the same thing is occurring so I decided to check the forums. Glad I'm not the only one having this issue...

[Yasgur]

I think you must look at each quality component, not the average of them. It appears 9-40-40 (if possible) is still going to lower Essence. If mixed with 35-8-20 and 30-30-11, you're going to be a lot worse off.

So, what you called q20+ food, was it really 20+/20+/20+ ?