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[Berzerker Jay]

n/a

[Vandala]

Animals are totally worth the price, they are more then pack animals.

They are far better at combat then your normal characters, so good in fact that I think they are over powered, especially the bulls.

I know that it can seem like they suck since they can't seem to block attacks, but just give them time, raise their stats a little bit and you'll see how insanely strong they are.

[Hatsune_Neko]

breeding is not currently in game.
the idea was the hatch from eggs.
but this was dropped in favor of other features like crawling, bleeding, limbs being cut off.

[Berzerker Jay]

I get the combat advantages to animals, but I don't know that it makes much sense that animals are purely of combat value and that you actually take a significant loss butchering an animal like a bull for meat.

I want to play a herdsman and run a dozen head of Garru across the desert.

Now consider the implications in the game -- this means I have to supply all twelve of those Garru with a lot of food. They will likely consume more food than they produce for me, so even comparing their loot to their purchase value is a moot point.

Reproduction would greatly expand the playing options. I don't know that eggs are a necessity, and that may actually be more of an ordeal to code. Wouldn't it be easier to just mark an animal as "Pregnant" and then after a certain amount of time the code would spawn a new animal at Pup (0.00) level? Would be cool if the Pregnant animal had to stop whatever it was doing for a short animation before the Pup is spawned, but I'd be satisfied without.

[Vandala]

Even if animals reproduced I can't see them producing enough meat and leather to offset their costs though, they eat about the same as two people, more if they carry a lot of weight. You'd have to have some silly high birth rate to make that worth it.

[Berzerker Jay]

Potentially, though in that case I think it would be easy to fine-tune the hunger rate just the same as we've done for characters.

[Vandala]

I doubt that's possible.

Just googling the pragnancy duration for goat (150 days) or for cows[garru/bull] (283 days) or even dogs (58 – 68 days), I don't think you can tune hunger rates to such a degree that the birthrates aren't going to be rather silly while still offsetting costs. I don't think these kinds of things are possible at the same time, either the hunger rate will be silly or the reproduction rate will be silly.

The game doesn't have to be perfectly life like, but I'm not sure how far you can push this kind of thing before it becomes laughable or unbelievable.

You could also change the costs of meat and skins but I don't think this will have a positive result for the game, they would become far to expensive.

[Shafrazad]

I too feel a feature like that would be adding a lot to the game. Or precisely speaking both breeding and taming animals (however there is a mod allowing you to tame animals already, it's a really fun feature, would be nice to see it implemented as an official thing).

Kenshi have a great replayability, because when you get bored with your current characters, you can always start a new game and play other game fantasy that came up to your head. Bored being cannibal hunter? Play a farmer this time or try setting a bar in town.

It's a sandbox game after all, so you need to find what to do on your own. In case of breeding it would stimulate your imagination to play as a nomad, traveling with the whole tribe and it's herds or having a farm, looking after your livestock and crops or being a beastmaster type of adventurer, traveling with your trusty animal companions. You name it.

Either eggs or pregnency seems fine, and the long time of the latter doesn't seem like a problem to me, after all it gives you a long term goals to strive for, so the event of getting a newborn pup/calf/etc. after all this waiting should be more satisfying.

I can't wait to see it implemented at some point.

[Berzerker Jay]

Okay -- I think if we're to talk about real-world times for a goat to carry a pregnancy from conception to birth, we might acknowledge that the real-world time for a goat "pup" to become an "adult" really has no in-game relationship to the actual time necessary at all.

So I think the pregnancy time would be in scale with the maturation time of the animal, and that would be reasonable.

[Berzerker Jay]

By the way, that goat can take up to a year to mature (and in-game I'm fairly sure they mature sooner than 365 days) and that cow can take more than 500 days to reach maturity.

In game you can buy a "pup" of either animal and have them mature far sooner than that, so I don't think a pregnancy for either animal should need to be any more restricted to the biology of the real-world equivalents of these animals.

I do think that the pregnancy could affect the animal's stats, potentially. Maybe slow the movement rate, too, until the birth happens. This could complicate things for the player and make it so they might bunker down until after the birth.

[Vandala]

Fair points, I hadn't considered that yet. XD

But that just makes me feel that the game probably should not bother with maturing animals in the first place, unless of course it somehow will get a purpose at some point.

[swillo]

Fair points, I hadn't considered that yet. XD

But that just makes me feel that the game probably should not bother with maturing animals in the first place, unless of course it somehow will get a purpose at some point.

Maturing animals is the same as leveling up their fighting skills. The older they get the more powerful they are.
I like the idea of being able to mate animals but the over head to the game would be massive. Say we need a special pen for them to make that happen. You could them put in a couple goats or a cow and a bull and get kids and calves. But we would also need a way to feed them, to kill and butcher them. Cause the only reason to raise them is to get more food. I think buying them from the nomads is easier.

[Vandala]

Maturing animals is the same as leveling up their fighting skills.

I know, I just don't see increased stats are a justifiable purpose for having aging animal characters. If we want to raise their skills we can just do what we do with all characters, which is what you need to do anyway.