Operation: Dairy Farm was a definite success.
A little background: around day 14 or so, when my survivor was still roaming around in the APC he found early on, he spotted a dairy farm. Unfortunately, the dairy farm was immediately next to a mall and my survivor didn’t have a home base that would protect a bunch of cows, and obviously the dairy farm itself wasn’t viable. So he just stayed the heck away from all of that, figuring the cows would survive outside the reality bubble but would die when he got close.
A few weeks later, he found a ranch about 100 tiles away from the farm and set up shop there. He found a trencher and with the help for some friendly NPCs, he set up a double row of pits and barbed wire which looked sufficient to hold off most zombies. So it seemed plausible that he would be able to keep the cows safe, if he could just retrieve them from the dairy farm.
Walking them 100 tiles past a mall and through two forests was obviously not plausible: it would take too long, the cows probably wouldn’t survive the experience, and it would be hugely tedious and annoying. So I wrote the code for livestock stalls so people (me, in this case) could transport cattle in their vehicles.
I got distracted by the faction camp stuff, which got added to the code base about the same time, and then I was busy writing some more stuff. I finally got some time to play this morning. I built and installed some livestock stalls in the APC, made some cattle fodder, and drove over the dairy farm.
As I expected, zombies were swarming the farm when I arrived. I climbed the fence, fed two of the cows, smashed the fence so they would flee, and then beat off the zombie hordes for a bit. The zombies killed another cow and a fourth cow escaped. I got back in my APC, drove up to the friendly cows, loaded them in, and drove back the ranch. Everything worked perfectly!
Then I rediscovered how annoying milking cows is, now that cows have 10 units of milk. Time to go fix that I guess.
