Suckling's Maws, Grape Vines, Cattle, Cheese and Rings

[val]

Do you have any plans to change how the higher end tech works? Because right now, it's not working very well.

I've got a rather large-ish ranch of cattle with 12 female cows, and while it produced excess milk by the barrel, the amount of baby's I can kill for suckling's maws is so limited I'm not able to keep production of rennet for cheese going to support even one person. With how limited it is, there's no reason to make any cheese other than midnight blue. The throughput just isn't there.

I'm two or three generations deep with my cattle and their quality, despite eating q60 average feed, is still hovering around what it was a month ago with no noticeable gains in any direction (milk, meat, breeding, quality dimensions). How the Quality percentage modifiers are meant to work I have no idea, I'm just treating them as an additional stat to breed up, which is working against the other stats.

Next to grape vines, which takes weeks to grow from initial planting, really puts the breaks on trying to raise grape and thus wine and vinegar quality. It's easier to spend 6 months farming high q WWW and getting lucky to get grapes than it is spending those 6 months farming and replanting grape vines.

Silver and gold nuggets still have no quality, so even if they're not used in the quality formulas, that avenue of potentially using them to raise jewellery quality isn't possible.

You put these all together and you're faced with the situation where you need to have massive cattle farms, huge fields of crops to feed the large number of pregnant females just to pump out q10 (if youre lucky) suckling's maws. Then you need to combine it with poor quality vinegar to make poor quality rennet or goldbeaters (thank god for cauldron quality) to make poor quality midnight blue or rings. If you make anything like cutlery or another type of cheese you're only hurting yourself and I can't see anyone reasonable being flush enough in maw's to do it.

TLDR; Cheese should use normal intestines again, animal breeding needs to be looked at its too slow, grapes should level up slightly with each harvest. Otherwise a lot of the later tech is stuck in a quality hole or isn't economical to even craft.

Edit: Sorry if it jumps over too many different subjects, however they're all linked in the end, and changing even one mechanic will filter through and effect the rest.

[Ostara]

Yeah this is garbage, i need my cheese man.

[DDDsDD999]

Tuck fhese aminals.

[Garfy]

As a miner/smith, my progression has hit a stand still. Right now I do 3 things. I do nothing (as I wait for hunger to decrease), I wait for someone to do something else (plant/grow trees), and I wait for the game to do it's thing (animals to be born). Basically I do nothing, nothing and nothing. I could play for 10 minutes a week. I'll be doing this for the next month or two in the hopes that the next thing I do will allow me to make some kind of progress, if not I'll do this again for another month or two.

The problem is pretty obvious. The content we have right now has been artificially lengthened in an attempt to make the little content the game has last longer. In reality all it's done is made it last so long most people will either just quit, or very passively play (probably bot) until they can once again make some kind of progress. Essentially the content has been stretched so much it's been torn to shreds, and inbetween these little patches of things to do there is nothing.

If this is how the game is going to be now, then there needs to be a lot more content added to the game. There is so little content right now that once players get past their first month and have things set up, they're just going to stop subscribing because you only need to play for 10-20 minutes a week to keep up to date with everything.

[Sevenless]

12 cows is by no means a big ranch, even by legacy standards. But that point aside, animal breeding is proving pretty frustrating.

With a minimum of 4-5 different stats that need attention (Imo, you can ignore E quality for food related things, natural increase is fine), it's really hard to get much motion on it. The pace feels glacial. And this isn't the first time I've heard the rennet ratio being too stingy, but making it back to intestines isn't necessarily the answer. What if 1 maw could make 100x the current amount? Sufficed to say it can be balanced off suckling maws, and the quality thing wouldn't feel so punishing if breeding were somehow tweaked.

IMO, one way to solve this would be to eliminate the % stats. Although it's possible longterm they'd give a boost (if they can go over 100%), reducing one of the breeding dimensions would make it easier to get useful forward motion again.

I can't say much about the general pacing though, because the entire game moves at that speed now. You don't have any "quick cheats" (bonus quality on deeper metal, bonesaw>board for bonus kiln output quality), so everything revolves around the base increase rates which have always been slow.

[Garfy]

so everything revolves around the base increase rates which have always been slow.

They're significantly slower now, partly due to the fact that there are 3 qualities now and each one has it's own individual nodes, so you not only need to find 3 high quality nodes instead of 1, you also need to pray these 3 nodes are close together. The other reason is just that most things essentially have higher requirements now, or longer wait times until they can be used.

Most things in the game have been significantly slowed down now, and there is nothing to do while you wait. This is going to become a major problem once more people hit this standstill in progression.

[Sevenless]

Some of that could be solved, right now for example there's massive issues with tools using averaged quality. If you made tools use only the highest quality, you'd see some interesting dynamics come up. A 10/10/90 clay node wouldn't be useless anymore.

Even if I've disagreed with you over the specifics, I feel that same frustration garfy :/

Can't hunt hoping for RNG animals, I know all the nodes around me. The one good bear node I have haven't seen a bear on it in 2 weeks. I miss RNG wild animal Q. Mining? Hardness nodes slam you in the face, good luck with prospect tunneling short of large town quality/strength. Good luck with tool quality, especially for small towns or hermits. Chickens? Chickens hate the world and devour all your food and your soul. Misstreat them even slightly and they start losing weeks of breeding in hours. Rest of the animals? The rules are fair, but so stingy you'll slaughter 5-10 animals to find one that isn't terrible. Non-trellis Crops? Actually they're alright now. Using/abusing test planting is kinda annoying, but they're steadily increasing with attention.

That said, something I've been meaning to mention: Before you could advance tree quality (slowly) above your input qualities by farming the RNG. That type of advancement won't work anymore though since you need 3 different qualities, and trees getting seeds again basically never happens. As such, we're hardlocked to one generation of RNG +/- from our input materials. I suppose more generous quality formulas to account for the fact that we need 3 things to go well might be an option.

[val]

I think 12 females is quite large at this stage in the game, especially since 100% of their output is going to one person. Not trying to make enough cheese to feed 15 people here. It would have been impossible to even feed them all along with sheep and pigs even 2 weeks ago before the feeding trough patch fix.

The math on breeding animals just doesn't add up. There are 9 stats that can raise or lower each generation. Lets say you ignore meat quality %, meat quantity. Thats 7 stats. Assuming its +5 -5 in each one (its not but something like that, an equal chance to raise or lower by a set number). If on average only 50% of the stats increase, and the other 50% decrease, you would need to just get super lucky to roll higher on those 7 stats. Then you need to get super lucky again for the opposite sex animal for it to breed with. Then next generation it starts again, needing two animals with super lucky rolls with each roll taking over a week irl time.

Maybe you aim to increase only one or two stats, which is fine, but eventually the other stats you aren't breeding for will always over at or under 10q. The probability just isn't there, this isn't even napkin math, it just doesn't compute logically. The more separate independent random rolls there are, the number of 'good rolls' goes down exponentially.

I just don't want to have to tame another 40 animals in 2 weeks when animals are 'fixed' like farming was a month ago.

I agree it would be a great change if maw's made more rennet. How you actually do that change might be tricky. You could make it so 1 maw makes 10 litres of rennet in a bucket on your offhand, but even then I think it's not enough. Maybe combine that with baby cows maturing and give 3-4 maws if they are almost fully grown (4-5 days after they were born, but before they turn into an adult).

[Garfy]

Our village has extensively mapped the area around us. I think we've found one quality node that had all 3 qualities, and it's only a 40/40/40 water node. Getting an actual good quality node for anything is like winning the lottery 3 times in a row. And this system is applied to every single resource you can go out and gather in the game, so you got to pull of this miracle feat of luck multiple times (or hope someone else who did it is willing to trade with you (they're not)).

I wouldn't mind if progress was slow, but being slow and based almost entirely on RNG is just a kick in the balls. (I'm a miner, so for me the process involves stealing all of the towns resources and putting us further back so I can build 20 more supports or a mine hole and tell them once again I found more ql 10/10/10 ore, they absolutely love me for doing this every few days)

[Sevenless]

Realistically speaking, you'll need to seperate what each animal "breed" is for. You can't do everything like you said. So you need E/S/V, trait quantity, trait quality, breeding quality. I guess that only gets it down to 6 though. You could eliminate E in milk cows, bringing you down to 5. Still, more generous formulas and possibly eliminating that % trait entirely would help this I feel without needing to rework the entire system.

@ garfy I feel that argument just means we shouldn't have any system relying on the average quality. The fact that both tools and curios do is a little harsh. We also need some method of trading, the road concept is not cutting it. If we don't want to allow hearthlings to teleport everywhere, it's time to start talking some method of distance trading (aka mail). Hearthling magic it up, give it a cost, but we need it.