Goats...what are they good for?

Besides "goat" being the funniest word in the English language. Once you ship the products, is there any reason to keep one?

Same for ducks. And sheep and rabbits - can't make clothing in this game, right? I mean you can hoard stuff for gifts and the animals are pretty maintenance free now (except chasing cows to milk them).

I've seen screenshots of farms with like a hundred pigs, guess truffle oil is big profit but that's too much min/max for me.

Except I opened the casino yesterday...I needs more gold for gambling!

 

I keep goats around to milk then make cheese. Once you have the cellar in your house you can age the goat cheese and it's worth a good amount. I always keep some goats and cows on hand. Actually I keep ducks so that I can use their eggs to make Mayo too. Mayo Empire!!!!

 

Duck mayo is more profit?

I just upgraded the coop and barn so will be awhile for the house upgrade. Hopefully this winter (2nd year).

 

♪♫♬ ...absolutely noth'n, say it again, y'all... ♪♬

 

I'm pretty sure it's worth more than regular Mayo. I make, sell, and gift both though.

 

Not how I figure it. With Artisan profession and gold star, which is standard after a chicken is mature, plain Mayo is 399g. Duck mayo is 525g, but you only get one every other day. In my playthroughs I always seem to end up with two chickens, a duck, a rabbit, a cow, a goat and a pig, because they are the animals I use to fill the pantry bundles. After filling the bundles, getting milk and eggs for recipes, and setting aside some cheese for gifting, I feel as if all the animals are an annoyance, but they do bring in about 30,000g a month(not counting the pig)

Every time I chase my cow across the field, trying to pull off a pit-maneuver with my milk bucket, I remind her that I can install a butchery mod any time, and she'd never see it coming.

 

And this is the response I was waiting for. =)

 

Steaks and burgers!

Got both colored eggs, basic and large products from all. Thinking of roasting the chickens and keeping 2 ducks, 2 rabbits. Piggy, sheep, goat. I'd like minimal animal interaction. They do hatch/grow quickly so not a big deal to start over if I ever need more eggs. The storage of regular, silver, gold, purple of each egg type is driving me bonkers. Should make more mayo doodads.

 

The iridium goat milk cheese sells for more than the iridium normal cheese if you have the basement under your house and a lot of casks!

 

The only reason to keep a goat after you get the bundles completed would be if you have your eye on courting Leah, who absolutely loves goat cheese. So keeping one around to keep her in goat cheese might not be the worst idea.

 

This is why I started closing the barn doors every night so that I could pet and milk the animals in peace before I let them out in the morning. 10/10, would recommend.

 

Two things... First, my ADD precludes me from anything so complicated as remembering to shut the doors in the evening. Also, I think this goes back to my "is it just a game?" conundrum. I attribute feelings to the animals that I don't think the game code really supports. I usually take care of crops first, because they're right outside of the door, and if I need to replant I've got it figured out what I need as early in the day as possible. I feel as long as the animals have access early to grass outside their mood is maxed out, all day. Then if I come by sometime later to pet and milk all is still good. I know I'm ignoring them a bit, so I feel compelled to give them the extra freedom. They've got a small-ish patch of grass so they usually stay in a small-ish group, and I use the Better Ranching mod so it's easy to see which ones still need attention. It's a bit like a mini-game chasing them around, but I'm used to it.

 

I didn't know you had to open that garage door on the barn for the cows. They stayed inside for at least 2 months and gave milk every day. I never let out my animals in some HM games since they were Much harder to milk outside. Now they come and go on their own.

They're fine being housebound in Winter so maybe I'll just leave them inside. It's called a coop for a reason, right?

 

As I understand it, animals have two stats that effect their products. They've got the hearts, plus they've also got a daily mood stat. If they eat grass outside their mood gets maxed out. I don't really understand just how it all works together but your dairy products will be better if the animals eat grass, outside.
https://stardewvalleywiki.com/Animals#Mood

 

Actually, I could have sworn I once read that one of the animals disliked sleeping with the barn door open at night but now I can't find anything on the wiki about this. I think it was the sheep. But I can't find any evidence of this, so I assume this is just a memory hiccup.

*investigates*
Aha! I am not remembering this wrong, it was the wiki that was wrong. It was about goats, it had the line "Goats may become unhappy if the barn door is left open overnight.", which was edited and corrected on the 29th of October 2016. That means I read that before that... huh. That was a while ago.

 

animals are hard to deal with..i have a full barn and coop...the best seems to be the pigs..making like 5k a day from truffle oil ( i have 2 pigs)..

 

As far as barn animals, I prefer cows. Cheese is a very respectable product, and is extremely useful when going mining. Since there's no way to age even a very small fraction of my wine, I use my cellar to age my cheese to Iridium quality (typically by the time the cellar gets unlocked, I've already got my cows to the point that they're almost always producing large milk which makes gold-star cheese, so it only takes a week) for convenience factor. And there's only four people in the whole town who don't Like cheese (the two kids, Seb, and Harvey), so it makes a great general gifting option, especially if it has been properly aged first.

 

animals require daily maintenance...

 

You're going to have to maintain them regardless of which animal you have. So of the options for the Barn, I prefer Cows for utility, since the cash you get out of it is going to be minimal regardless of what you do.

 

I kinda like ducks. I buy one and hatch the rest myself. Low investment with decent return on mayo (of all the coop animals).