Livestock grazing & herding.

Thoughts on the further development of Haven & Hearth? Feel free to opine!

Livestock grazing & herding.

Postby Drakemoore » Tue Apr 05, 2016 8:58 pm

So, one of the beefs (pun intended) I had in legacy was the fact that livestock was a very tedious mechanic. Yes it meant that you had to login and maintain your troughs, otherwise they'd all starve to death. So I don't want to see the activity requirement become entirely mute. I also understand that if animals run out of food in troughs they'll still consume grassland like they did in legacy. One thing that bothers me is that in real life herding animals across large pastures is a viable way to grow livestock for human consumption and in reality, it tends to be industrial farming where we have large amounts of food input.

What I would like to see is an improvement to grazing and possibly the addition of some herding mechanics, the purpose of this post isn't to remove feed troughs or change them in any way. Here's some thoughts I have:

[*]Feeding livestock with grass terrain should be a viable option as long as the area is large enough and there aren't too many livestock. Not only would this justify some of the large areas that some villages take up and never use, but it would also give more reasons to actually plant grass as a renewable source of food for livestock.

[*]Livestock should be able to go up in quality eating just grass in place of fodder providing the grass quality was higher, perhaps we could have the grass quality be based on some formula relating to soil quality & seeds planted with. This means still that if you want the best livestock that you need to feed them yourself with high quality fodder or have a good grasslands for them.

[*]Perhaps to still maintain the 'activity' portion of this type of grazing, we could have weeds that need to be removed or increased grass regrowth when there aren't any animals present, so herding animals to a different pasture would be useful and serve a greater purpose. Perhaps add in some way to move tamed livestock in larger numbers while on a horse.

Just some thoughts, would be interested to see what other people think.
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Re: Livestock grazing & herding.

Postby Ysh » Tue Apr 05, 2016 9:27 pm

This seems to me like some fluff mechanics. Quality takes crops and soil instead of just crops. Still active components. Needs more space. It's not necessary to be bad, maybe some player like the role play, but how is this better than the current system? Why would I have my animal to graze if I could pick to feed him myself? If there are two system to do the same thing, it must be a trade off I think.
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Re: Livestock grazing & herding.

Postby Drakemoore » Tue Apr 05, 2016 10:02 pm

Ysh wrote:Needs more space. It's not necessary to be bad, maybe some player like the role play, but how is this better than the current system? Why would I have my animal to graze if I could pick to feed him myself? If there are two system to do the same thing, it must be a trade off I think.


Because you could have a small herd of animals roaming on a pasture and still get quality levels (dependent on grass quality) without having to fill feed troughs constantly. I'm not saying you would remove feed troughs and in fact they'd still probably be better in the end. Unless it was made so that animals can get quality levels faster from grass.

In any case it's just an idea really, it bothers me a little bit that the only viable mechanic is feed troughs when in reality animals herd and graze. Even the wild aurochs and mouffons in the game can be assumed to be grazing.
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