Dog food (difficulty 4 wtf) is more complex to make than human food.
Dogs don’t like meat unless properly combined with veg to make Dog Food.
Dog Food is a fairly rare item found in single use portions.
Sometime in the future, please just let us throw some meat or a bone to the dog.
Hopefully someday in the future we could see packs or wild dogs/wolves/crows ripping apart corpses or come stumbling into a kitchen to find a bear or racoons rummaging through all those ‘savory’ good left to ferment in the refrigerator.
I think bones should be seen as dog food also. Ever seen a dog not liking bones to gnaw at.
the problem here is that no one has specifically adressed pet acquisition since whales, so what’s there is the original implementation. There are two seperate problems, on of which is having animals appreciate that you gave them food,bthe other is having them eat things at all. there’s a third problem lurking in there, which is pets needing to eat, but I’m not sure we’re ever going to want to go that far. (who knows, if someone gets excited about pets, it could happen)
anyway, the first problem is currently adressed by having you “activate” the dog food instead of just dropping it, a side effect of this is that it only works with the specific dog food item.
the other issue is a matter of adjusting some monster ai.
If it’s not too difficult, could friendly dog AI be altered so they’re just a little less murdery? Maybe they only attack hostiles that are within a certain range of you, rather than killing everything in site?
It’d probably make sense to set up an eating mechanic for wildlife in general. Wildlife predators should be eating. I dunno why that hungry Couger is coming at me when there’s a freshly killed wolf right beside me. When that’s implemented, I suppose pet dogs could feed themselves by killing when hungry.
Those are good ideas, but honestly, it’s difficult to talk about possible implementations for the pet ai when it’s already so unreliable and flawed.
It’s definitely a skeleton of what it should be, and at this particular point in time, it isn’t meant to be a focus of the game.
Having a dog isn’t any more helpful than having a small rifle with a decent amount of ammo. Dogs don’t do fantastic damage to enemies, and they are extremely unreliable. The rifle would probably last longer, in all honesty.
Having a cat is essentially useless as they are little more than a tiny meat shield, but if you’re that hard-on for pets, just use the debug menu and your imagination. It isn’t unrealistic that your character would start with a pet dog and a dog whistle, and it probably won’t even give you that big of an advantage in the long run.
Until the animal ai is significantly improved or altogether reworked, pets aren’t really a viable and consistent part of gameplay, nor can they be.
A lot of people, including myself, are looking to the devs to improve the animal ai, and until one of us goes in and does it ourselves, all we can do is wait for it to be fixed, and talking about improvements and what-ifs isn’t going to be helpful if there isn’t anyone to implement it.
Pets would be cool and add a new element to the game if they were more reliable, but they aren’t.
As far as right now, my opinion is that to sate the people who want to legitimately get pet dogs early in the game, dog food should be removed entirely (at least until animal hunger is addressed) and players should be able to [a]ctivate bones to produce a friendly dog the same way that they activate dog food on dogs, and in a minecraft-esque sense, this isn’t an unreasonable suggestion.