Sundew Farms Research Division Presents: Animal Mechanics

O__o

Confirmed: CA hates animals and is hostile to the idea that they could ever be useful to humans

On a more serious note, the report I made in the bugs forum was informal, didn't have the correct [BUG] tag, and has been badly obsoleted by all of the new discoveries.

This is not even a "bug" anymore, but a revelation that a major part of the game is (and probably has been) broken in several fundamental ways, possibly since the game was published. This is, in my opinion, the largest and most important issue to surface in the history of the game. We really do need to get CA's attention on this.

If nothing else, if someone would like to be a hero and post a proper bug report in the bugs forum, and maybe bump Shiverwarp's reddit thread a few times, that might help. I would do the bug report myself, but at this point, I'm not even sure what all is going on, and I'm the guy that started this thread. I thought I was exploring a crack in the sidewalk, but it turned out to be a gigantic cave system instead.

 

I can just repost my PSA as a Bug report into the support section I guess. Not really sure the appropriate place for it. But, I believe we're better off just waiting until we know CA is checking the forums or asking for bugs, and then bringing it up. For now the PSA is enough I think.

 

It's amazing that my sheep farm works as well as it does. I can only dream of the day when these issues see a fix. Scratch that, it'd probably make so much money I'd get slammed with the nerf bat. Oh well, four more days left in spring and then I can flaunt my earnings in the "Can animals compete" thread.

Edit: Posted earnings

 

I ran another little experiment on one barn full of animals to test and see if any of my sheep were producing daily. The results confirm it can happen. I'm running larger scale tests now to confirm but here's my methodology:

Starting with shearing on morning one I added a ^ sign to the name of all sheep that produced. The following morning day two I checked each sheep that had produced to see if they had that tag and added one either way. I had two sheep that ended up with ^^ and several with a single ^. Then I started adding a - to the sheep that didn't produce who didn't also have a ^ so I can start checking to see if I have any not producing at all. I will log results up to 5 marks and canceling out a ^ or a - if it changes, sort of as a zero value.

 

Sweet spot for sheep to still get high quality products, but not get the deluxe product rolls that bug them should be having them at exactly 200 Mood but still max friendship. Which isn't really feasible consistently I don't think. Most likely going to bed at 8PM after having eaten grass outside would result in most of them getting around 195ish mood.

It's really finicky lol

 

I'll give it a shot for a few days.

 

I had my highest day ever with going to bed at 8pm. The rest of the days are pretty good too. High of 32/60 production and 28k in gold for that day.

My little experiment yielded no appreciable results. Sheep production is all over the place. I did have two sheep that scored ^^^. I intend to make them a breeding pair for a race of super-sheep. (No, not really. I am going to test the pregnancy mechanic because I've never seen a live-birth ingame.)

 

If i'm reading this correctly, then would the following general strategy work for animals OTHER then Pigs/Dinos/Sheep?

Purchase/incubate new animals by the 3rd week of Fall (it should take about 40 days of being pet and eating hay to max friendship w/o shepard/coopmaster, 25 days with)

Spend the winter maxing out friendship with each animal

let animals out to graze during spring/summer/fall, taking care to go to bed by 6pm as often as possible, Pet only as often as needed to offset mood penalties for staying up late as once max friendship is reached, the -8 penalty for no petting should be offset by the +8 friendship for eating grass, so we only care about making sure happiness is as high as possible at the end of the day.

rinse/repeat

thoughts?

 

Friendship and Mood are completely different. You gain no extra bonuses to friendship during the Winter. In fact, they lose the ability to gain friendship from eating grass outside. Unless you're trying to get animals in winter for a different reason I don't understand.

If you don't pet your animals they will also lose 20 to 40 Mood (Dependent on animal type), as well as the -5 to -10 Friendship (Dependent on current friendship). These things happen BEFORE produce is rolled, so it's definitely not ideal to not pet them.

Here's a post I made on the reddit with my opinion on the optimal setups for the current buggy animals:

IF on your farm you have no Pigs, Sheep, or Dinosaurs, then what you want to do is:
​

1. Pet/Milk your animals in the morning​
2. Let them outside to eat grass​
3. When they go to bed at 6PM, close the barn door so they can't eat grass before you pet them in the morning.​
4. Go to bed before 7PM, closer to 6PM is better.​

There are a few stipulations:
​

• If you know it's going to rain the next day, you're better off staying up late, or else you'll roll over happiness in the morning [Other option is to not pet them on rainy days, but this will hurt your friendship/mood the following day]​
• If it's winter, you want to stay up late before sleeping when you have a heater.​

If you do have Sheep/Pigs/Dinosaurs, it gets a bit more complicated, especially if you have them mixed in with the other animal types.

With Sheep/Pigs/Dinosaurs you want their Mood to be 200, or just under, so you have the lowest chance roll Deluxe produce (Which in these animals case, makes them produce NOTHING) This can be achieved by going to bed at around 8PM, or a little bit after.

Another option for pigs specifically can be to try to keep them at a low friendship value by never petting them.

Sorry that it isn't easy to make hard and fast rules, sadly the bugs make it very complicated and quite illogical at times.​

 

Is there no way to create a mod which fix some of these issues? Im not talented enough to do that, though. I think it will take long time until CA will fix it.

 

I hacked together a little mod to fix this. Please see the mod release thread for details, and please let me know if you try it out! The mod should fix both the broken happiness mechanic and the problem with animals failing to produce anything when they get too happy.

http://community.playstarbound.com/threads/happy-animals-1-0.126655/