Feeding animals is chore

[noindyfikator]

Feeding animals is chore rather than something nice and enjoyable. Animals eat a lot, we need to have giga farms with bots running around.
Can't we have our life simple?

Animals should eat way less.

[Ukhata]

people will unfortunatly simply have more enimals >_<
better breeding methods and shorter gestation times would be more usefull even though you arent wrong.
also special feed crop would be helpfull.

[loftar]

Just out of curiosity, have you considered simply having fewer animals?

[noindyfikator]

To be competitive you have to have a lot of animals and have huge farms. I would like to be competitive with my skills and knowledge about the game not because I can run 4h farming bot to feed my animals

[Procne]

But then the people you compete against will also have even more animals, and will be further ahead. And you will demand to make animal feeding even easier.

Maybe it's an indication that animal products are too powerfull and too easy to mass produce if it always boils down to how hard can you scale this production?

[telum12]

But then the people you compete against will also have even more animals, and will be further ahead. And you will demand to make animal feeding even easier.

Maybe it's an indication that animal products are too powerfull and too easy to mass produce if it always boils down to how hard can you scale this production?

There's a limit to how much you can consume. Some people will always hit that limit, since you can self-sustain animals with botting. I believe the OP is asking for the amount of feed to be reduced so that it's easier to hit and maintain this limit if you don't want to bot.

[DDDsDD999]

Just out of curiosity, have you considered simply having fewer animals?

The only limits to cheese and meat pies (the best end game food) are amount of animals and satiations. And you need a lot of animals to exhaust all the good cheese satiations.

Also raising animal q optimally is super autistic and requires literal thousands of animals to maximize rolls. Though it doesn't matter because it takes a year to get insane animal quality, and worlds are dead in like 3 months

[Fostik]

To be competitive you have to have a lot of animals and have huge farms. I would like to be competitive with my skills and knowledge about the game not because I can run 4h farming bot to feed my animals

How many cows or sheep do you have?
Some numbers would help this thread, otherwise I don't understand core of a problem.

[Pommfritz]

Just out of curiosity, have you considered simply having fewer animals?

that's a funny question because the logic is sort of true people just want more all the time and never consider to put themselves in less tedium however if it's about maxing out the character no matter the tedium involved this question becomes sort of like "did you try to turn your computer off and then on again?" if you have computer problem xD So what I suggest to understand op a bit better (idk how easy this is tbh and you guys also have the forumulas for everything so you could also just open an excel sheet and calc it) is to create some test world give yourself some average dudes stats, idk 2k stats or something, start making a shit ton of food, spawn barrels of the drinks you need, create a table with decent symble, idk q200 gold stuff is enough probably and give yourself infinte salt. eat unless you think it's not worth it to spam more food to gain stats. come back the same time tomorrow, eat to the same point of it not being worth to spam more food for stats, keep track of how much milk / meat was used. You can use a very simple meal "plan" like:
mbc
autism steak with pork and random stuff
meatpie pork with barley, chicken egg, pepper
shepherds pie with mash from beetroot, cowsmilk, laurel and the pie made with thyme, wheat, yellow onion
BBB with pork,poplar
cow chorizo with beef,sycamore
chicken salad with cives,lettuce,chicken egg

that's sort of what I eat except I throw in some other random cheese like formaela and this agi/con/psy cheese but it's not important and also some hunted stuff (DDD, whale, grey seal, beaver dog with fairy shroom) that I use to replace some of the above foods if I have it.
It's probably not perfect at all but some solid basic foods that barely requires leaving the base except you want to cook with whale meat or eat with truffles (which you should but cba really to run around for an hour before every feast).

So this being some sort of basis you now have the data that you need to see how many animals you need per day, this also varies with qualities etc so just make some animals that are sort of ok.
now you can calc how many animals you need to produce those animals per day and then you can calculate (or test) how much swill they require per day. I haven't done the whole thing myself yet but I'm sort of in the process of doing some very general tests and seeing if it works out for me since it's hard to get very accurate numbers for every situation. I bet it will come out to a shit ton of swill needed per day and keep in mind, just for one person. In a village full of people it can easily get out of hand I think and also you programmed the game so you could probably pull up exact numbers and just open excel to save yourself a whole lot of time and figure the equibrilium and see if it's balanced way faster than I for example can.

That being said with the recent updates the tedium around that got a lot better. I used to read forum/ write posts while harvesting lmao now it got a lot easier already.

just an example from my side:
I tested a 24h time window without the herder credo
I have (might have misscounted a few so take this number with +/-3, also I didn't make a difference between pregnant, gender and maturity):
24 sheep
9 goat
3 horse
7 cows
46 pigs
3 chicken coops with grown chickens, 1 for chicks
1 rabit hutch with grown rabits, 1 for bunnies

I don't know how many I need exactly but I'll figure that out and then retest later
it came out to 172l of swill per day + 3 horses and 8 pigs outside of the testing area, I can probably assume about 200l swill used per day.
50 seeds are 1l swill so I'd need 10k/1barrel seeds a day which equals to about 550 turnip crops every day. It tbh doesn't seem so insane with the current way of farming, could easily make it 450 turnip crops and throw in some other useless stuff you harvest every day. But that being said, no idea if that's enough, I'd need to figure out how long it takes for specifically mutton and pork to reach full growth before I can make any reasonable calcs. so far I probably looted 90% of my pork and mutton tho and I barely butchered any pig or sheep unless they came out very retarded or low quality male. I might just be about to hit some critical mass where I can start butchering, without looting meat I'd probably have half my stats at least.

well idk if that helps anyone but I sort of have fun figuring those things out xd I don't even care about my stat gain at this point, I sort of just eat what I have available every day aka what I wrote up there.

[Vesena]

I'm just a lowly hermit, but from my perspective, it boils down to two distinct issues.

1: The massive amount of RNG involved in breeding and the time it takes "per roll" pressurizes you into keeping many pregnant animals.
If my numbers are correct (and if they're not, that's a problem in itself) a crop essentially boils down to a 1d8. A horse is 11d2+10d26.
2: Livestock punish you from being absent from the game in a way no other element does.
Structures eventually slowly decay, while trees and crops naturally exist forever. You can keep seeds and building materials safe in your inventory to replace any stolen by other players. But animals who starved to death are lost forever.

The first could be fixed with simple number tweaks narrowing the raw bonus and maybe applying a weighting to the higher parent's stat, for the second my idea would be that instead of dying, an animal enters "emaciated" status, where it miscarries, loses any wool and milk, refuses to breed/truffle hunt and only gives 1 meat when butchered. This status could be removed by spending ~3 days with access to a food source. Meanwhile instead of food applying a permanent quality malus, products could simply be hardcapped by average quality of food eaten over the last week.