Animal herding needs to be less tedious

[Dawidio123]

Okay this one is going to be a controversial one, i hate animal herding. Back in W13 i sometimes did herding and farming for our village whenever our dedicated herder/farmer couldn't do it and i fucking loathed it, it's basically 1-2 hours out of your life every 1-4 days (depends on how efficient you want to do it, but the longer you leave it the more work it is to do all at once), and i didn't have that many animals, bigger villages have a lot more than we did.
If it was just an optional way to progress it would be fine, but after a certain point it's basically impossible to progress without cheese and pig meat (There is an argument to be made about cheese being too op and too easy to automate but eh, idc tbh). And it's borderline impossible to find someone willing to do it long-term (I'm guessing a lot of villages just bot it but idk, maybe there are some masochists that enjoy it or some people just power through it).

I've given it some thought, and afaik the best way to raise ql is to maximize the base ql and the % ql of the product you care about (so meat for pigs, milk for cows/sheep/goats, etc.).
I propose to completely remove the % quality from the equation (I know, controversial) and just make the only things that matters in an animal being it's base ql that would be softcapped (or hardcapped maybe idk, i don't think you should be able to keep on raising it through sheer amount of repetition and rng) around its food quality. This way you'd only need to raise your animals up to the ql of your farm, and there'd be a lot less stats to care about. So you'd just go into the pen and cull all the little ones with worse ql, and keep the ones with better ql, making the herding a lot more simpler and less spreadsheet-like.

But to be fair, my proposal comes from the place of ignorance as i never really herded seriously long-term, thus i do ask for people's opinions on my solution and possible alternatives to it, as i think we can all agree that herding is a tedious chore, thus it should be fixed but not necessarily in the way i proposed.

Edit: Also breeding quality seems a bit unnecessary, maybe consider it's removal too/instead.

[Sevenless]

Okay this one is going to be a controversial one, i hate animal herding.

Not sure what planet you're from if you think most people find quality grinding animals fun and easy Some villages bot them, a lot of villages just stop caring. Pig meat and cheese by no means "need" quality, many people run them relatively low Q and just mass produce while letting the other industries drag the quality up. Rennet+tub dragging milk up, frying pan+other ingredients pig meat, etc. Save yourself the trouble, breed them up to the # needed, and just keep their Q 10+. You'll do fine from a village perspective.

There is a simple (simple =/= easy though) strategy to level animals I've developed over 3 worlds seriously herding. But it's still rough on the daily time requirement because you want to have quite a few breeders for optimal quality gain. I think I was running 150 or so this world. Without botting btw. Took me an hour a day to harvest the fodder for them, another hour or two to sort/slaughter/butcher (especially after herder credo). If our guess is right about the new crop being alfalfa the foddering requirement might be much easier next world.

I want to wait and see what they changed before making comments, but right now the % bonus is the only thing that makes animals possibly relevant late game. They're extremely slow to raise in Q.

[Dawidio123]

Okay this one is going to be a controversial one, i hate animal herding.

Not sure what planet you're from if you think most people find quality grinding animals fun and easy Some villages bot them, a lot of villages just stop caring. Pig meat and cheese by no means "need" quality, many people run them relatively low Q and just mass produce while letting the other industries drag the quality up. Rennet+tub dragging milk up, frying pan+other ingredients pig meat, etc. Save yourself the trouble, breed them up to the # needed, and just keep their Q 10+. You'll do fine from a village perspective.

I mean this is what we are doing in arcanum just use lowql animals mostly and raise the ql of finished product with everything else (i think we did some herding after i quit, but i checked the "milk" cows we have near curding tubs and they are still like 14 ql or something so maybe just upkeep ). But it shouldn't require having someone dedicate hours on the daily to raise it. And yeah the new crop might help out with the time needed to harvest fooder.
And yeah i'm not really saying that herding is complicated but there is a lot of moving variables to compare each time you do it (and you do it a lot), if it was just like chickens (ie. low ql kill, hql keep) it would be a lot lot more straightforward of a decision to cull one or not, but you might be right that % ql is what keeps them relevant, maybe make the ql raise faster if you are using good ql fooder?

[Sevenless]

Okay this one is going to be a controversial one, i hate animal herding.

Not sure what planet you're from if you think most people find quality grinding animals fun and easy Some villages bot them, a lot of villages just stop caring. Pig meat and cheese by no means "need" quality, many people run them relatively low Q and just mass produce while letting the other industries drag the quality up. Rennet+tub dragging milk up, frying pan+other ingredients pig meat, etc. Save yourself the trouble, breed them up to the # needed, and just keep their Q 10+. You'll do fine from a village perspective.

I mean this is what we are doing in arcanum just use lowql animals mostly and raise the ql of finished product with everything else (i think we did some herding after i quit, but i checked the "milk" cows we have near curding tubs and they are still like 14 ql or something so maybe just upkeep ). But it shouldn't require having someone dedicate hours on the daily to raise it. And yeah the new crop might help out with the time needed to harvest fooder.
And yeah i'm not really saying that herding is complicated but there is a lot of moving variables to compare each time you do it (and you do it a lot), if it was just like chickens (ie. low ql kill, hql keep) it would be a lot lot more straightforward of a decision to cull one or not, but you might be right that % ql is what keeps them relevant, maybe make the ql raise faster if you are using good ql fooder?

The biggest flaw for animals imo is that they don't raise quickly enough to be relevant honestly. Theoretically if you do 2-3 hours/day of work you can get them to be higher quality than natural spawns after 6 months, hurray!

What I'd like to see maybe is an "always positive" animal feedback loop. +10 to +30 Q range per generation (0%->5% gains for the % stats). People would feel rewarded for slubbing on animals and they'd become relevant faster, autists like myself would gain faster and still be happy. The key imo is that raising animals lazily should still reward you, much like lazily raising crops does. Minmaxing crops definitely gives gains, but most people don't bother and still feel happy with progress.

Ever get a herder who wants to talk shop about animal strats happy to voice on discord (arthritis sucks and I already type too much). You can make the sorting process much easier on yourself with a couple tricks. Discord name is boartato.