Mainly Domesticated Animal Questions

Hi, I came back after taking a long break. Lots of things have changed since then including the 0.D release (yay and good job!). That being said I have a few questions about things I’m seeing. Perhaps you guys might have the answer(s):

  1. There are fewer animal spawns. I’ve only found 1 moose in about 1 year in-game time and I’ve explored a lot of area. Do they spawn in certain seasons only?
  2. I hear the longer you are in the game the more likely animals spawn as zombie variants. Can we change/disable this feature? I want animals to spawn normally but with a small or no chance of them spawning as zombies late game.
  3. Early on I found a farm that had a few cows and sheep and there were only a few zombies in the barn there. I was able to save a few of the animals. However much later on in the game every farm (barn) I found had tons of zombies in them, overwhelming the animals. There was no chance of saving those animals mid to end game. Can we reduce the zombie spawn there?
  4. I found a pair of horses but they have not produced any offspring. Meanwhile my 2 sheep and 3 cows have produced many generations of offspring already.
  5. NPC pickup is behaving strangely. I created an NPC camp and told my NPC to search/sort some items. Its possible NPC pickup became messed up after this. Whenever I enable NPC pickup they would pickup random junk even after I listed some items in the NPC pickup manager. Plus the pickup manager list would sometimes clear itself! I had to disable NPC pickup because my NPC kept on picking up useless junk like filthy clothing.
  6. Why can’t we tame animal’s offspring?
  7. Animals won’t follow you up/down z-levels. Somehow two of my animals went down in the basement of my evac shelter and I can’t get them out.
  8. How do I raise chickens? I caught a chicken but he only lays eggs and those eggs never turn into chicks. Do I need two or more or do I need to find a rooster?
  9. Are animals aware of each other between different z-levels? So if I have 2 cows and one of them is in the basement and the other is on ground will they produce offspring?

Thanks.

Build 8601. World created with build 85xx.
Mod List:
[
“dda”,
“Medieval_Stuff”,
“More_Survival_Tools”,
“nw_pack”,
“Experimental-Z-Level”,
“boats”,
“blazemod”,
“Tanks”,
“No_Fungi”,
“filthy_morale”,
“StatsThroughSkills”,
“manualbionicinstall”,
“makeshift”,
“modular_turrets”,
“Mining_Mod”,
“alt_map_key”
]

  1. Honestly I rather like see less meese in my areas, sure they’re good for food, but can kill you easily. To answer your question I think if you have a trait like smelly and animal discord, then they’ll keep moving out of your reality bubble constantly preventing you from find much if any, moving around a lot of a bike or some sorts that outruns animals should help you to find them though.
  2. Can’t confirm
  3. Yeah, I heard that was a major issue in recent releases, but then again a farm would be a prime place to move to in the apocalypse.
  4. It’s probably something to do with realism, as horses mate very rarely, maybe keep them in your reality bubble longer, or just debug one in for just a little immersion break in the beginning, but it’ll pay off later when you actually have a decent farm.
  5. Can’t confirm, as I rarely find NPC’s in my worlds.
  6. Can’t say, never really tried animal domestication yet.
  7. Yeah, they must perform like zombies and such: can move between stairs and stuff, but rarely do…
  8. Do they get cold or frozen at all? That could be it.
  9. I would think so, but that would be a question for someone else to answer with more experience.

Do you travel away from your farm constantly? It could just be a problem with the reality bubble…

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They spawn relatively low, for most of the wildlife critters.

  1. Animal spawn density got dramatically reduced because the previous density was crazy high.
  2. I have no idea how animal zombification works. There’s no individual option for controlling this feature.
  3. There is no plan to reduce the density of zombie spawn on farms. You can mod the JSON definitions to reduce or eliminate the spawns yourself.
  4. There’s no definition for horse colts/foals at this point, so your horses won’t breed.
  5. I have no idea.
  6. Random animal off-spring are assumed to not have been tamed before the Cataclysm and would have no reason to become domesticated just by giving them food. That said, I’ve always thought that the spawn of friendly animals should be friendly but haven’t added it to the code.
  7. I know I have personally led cows up 4 flights of stairs to store them on a fire hall roof, so they will if you have z-levels enabled.
  8. Animals don’t have gender and there are no roosters. Any animal has a 50% chance of reproducing in any given reproduction cycle. I don’t think eggs hatch into chickens anymore because Kevin eliminated rot-spawns just before releasing 0.D and no one has gone back and fixed it yet.[1]
  9. Animals aren’t aware of each other on different z-levels, but a single cow has a 50% chance of reproducing anyway so it doesn’t matter.

[1] In part because there’s been a huge backlog of changes that are still jamming up the merge queue, and in part because vermin spawning is weird and complicated and no one with the coding knowledge to fix it has take the time to investigate.

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Moose are hard to kill early on but are a piece of cake late game :). I just want to hunt game (animals) not ants for food. I want to breed all types of animals just for their meat/organs so I don’t have to travel far/wide to get fat (to make diesel), stomachs (for cheese), livers (for vitamin A), fur, etc.

I play on 90 day seasons. No they weren’t frozen.

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  1. I think animal spawn was nerfed too much. Barely see any game (wildlife).
  2. No config or .json files I can modify?
  3. Will do, thanks.
  4. No plans to add them in the future?
  5. Is there a way to reset that NPC? Or where can I find his saved info?
  6. Hmm, animals bred in captivity are usually people-friendly. Nevertheless, I modified the mammal.json fie to make them tamable.
  7. Weird I do have z-levels enabled. I’m in an evac shelter and can’t make a sheep or cow follow me up the stairs. Perhaps add a feature for us to drag them if they’ve been roped.
  8. I see. No problem as there are more important issues to address.
  9. All this time I thought you needed a set of animals for them to breed lol. Nice to know!

Did a quick search, and it looks like what happens for monster zombification is that the monstergroups reduce the spawns of certain animals and replace them with the zombie equivalent. So bears have 5 entries with freq 2 each at the start of the game, and on day 72 one of those entries gets replaced by a zombear with freq 1. 3 more entries get replaced over time.

Day % Bears % Zombears
1 100 0
72 94 6
168 80 20
672 57 43
2160 29 71

So you could edit data/json/monstergroups.json to change that.

If you can edit JSON, you can add horse colts to the game and submit the change to the CleverRaven repo. It’s an open source game, contributions are welcome.

Fixing rot spawn is something the C++ developers would like to fix for 0.E, but 0.D just released last week so give it some time.

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That’s very interesting. How long does it take for zombie versions to completely replace the regular versions?

zombie animals never replace the regular versions, for three reasons:

  1. standard animals don’t upgrade, so any animals already placed will stay as standard animals.
  2. for any newly spawned animals, there is always a chance (14% in the case of bears) that the new animal with be alive and not a zombie version.
  3. not all monstergroups replace living animal entries with zombie versions. The bears or cougars that you infrequently find in caves will always be bears or cougars, even on day 2161 when only 15% of newly spawned bears in the forest aren’t zombears.

That’s very noteworthy actually. Thanks for the info. So there will always be a source of fresh not NPC meat. I thought it would be a fun challenge to put the world late enough that no edible animals were spawning.

Thanks for looking into monster zombification and finding the ‘code’. I modified my local file to reduce spawn rates for zombified animals since I already have high zombie spawn rates.

So I tried domesticating a pig, it gives me the prompt that I do not have the right food so I assume domesticating it is possible, I just cannot figure out how.

Pigs are not tameable at this time.

So vermin is still broken? Also, do you know if this is just broken or removed altogether?