are pre-wheat pigs worth the cost?

[ada221]

basically, what the title says. is it really worth it to go to the trouble of making chocolate to breed pigs early on instead of sticking with mushroom omelets?

I am currently in full scale chocolate production mode and I feel like it may only be useful if you don't want to expand your mushroom farm

[Taleric]

Not alone better than omelette no IMO. I think it is good to have going on the side because at that early stage you might have bad luck with diamonds and can get coca up to critical mass so it is a non issue.

[ada221]

would you say then that it's good because extra diversity in your food sources might allow you to stay fed easier?

[Taleric]

Well just more growth sources, you could do setup for coca while mushrooms grow. Then rotate between working mushrooms, coca, trees, reeds ect. The goal is to have zero down time with tasks in loaded chunks to maximize food and infrastructure.

Then at a healthy surplus travel, mine ect more option just better IMO :)

[jackatthekilns]

I think a more precise question may be whether or not pigs are worth the cost pre-windmill. Without the energy cost required to grind the cocoa and sugar, I think it is a no brainer pre-wheat. Even a modest cocoa farm can keep you in abundant food easily. That said, I still feel like it is worth the effort even pre-windmill. There is definitely a net gain in energy even when grinding the beans and sugar.

If, however you enjoy the nomadic/adventurer style of play, you may feel "stuck at home" waiting around for cocoa to grow and to build up your food supply. If that is the case then go out and find yourself a village.

In the final analysis, it is "worth the cost" because there is a net gain in energy even if you do not have a windmill. Any other consideration comes down to play style. IMO

[DaveYanakov]

Ham and eggs tend to be a much more compact food source for travelling. It's also handy for expeditions to set up an expansion base where you can take a stack of ham for every stack of eggs and then just eat the eggs which fail to hatch into new chickens. It would take twice as many inventory slots to carry mushrooms for that purpose.

[MaxAstro]

Ham and eggs are pretty much always my go-to early game renewable food source. I find them much less work than setting up a large enough mushroom farm to keep yourself fed, especially pre-crucible.

Plus there is something immensely satisfying about seeing all the disparate elements - cow pasture, chicken farm, reed farm, cocoa farm, windmill, cauldron, pig farm - all come together to provide a final product. :)

[Fret]

It is worth remembering that pigs can be fed with kibble as well. If you store the mob drops you gather when caving, this will help you boost you bacon production. You can even go a step further by building a mobfarm. While a mobfarm needs to be big to get a decent iron rate, a small mobfarm can quickly generate enough zombieflesh and bones for kibble. If you combine a small mobfarm and chocolat production you will be eaten ham & eggs 100% of the time.

Personnaly I have invested time and resources in a big mobtrap and now I don't need chocolat at all to sustain my pig production. I am still pre wheat tech, but my mainbase is now itself and three other bases with ham & eggs. This does mean however that I need to be very conservative with my leather.

So yes you do have options for pigbreeding in the pre-wheat age. I believe the most important aspect of wheat is leather production.

[abculatter_2]

In my world, I have wheat and carrots and all of the animals, yet I still use ham and eggs for my go-to food because it's just so easy to nearly fully automate. Once you have a decently productive mob grinder, you'll be getting kibble out the wazoo and even my four pigs I use for breeding seem incapable of keeping up with my mob farm, provided I don't go out and explore.
Plus, a quantum chicken farm is generally one of the first food automations I would ever think of making, and is really only limited by the number of seeds you can produce.
I'll probably switch over to hearty stews once I finally get some potatoes, though it's been proving... Difficult. And I'm already producing WAY more ham and eggs then I could ever even consider chewing through, so it's not a very high priority.

Prior to crucible tech, however, I would still say that a cocoa farm is worthwhile, if only to provide an additional source of food then shrooms, milk, and eggs. I dunno if they'd be worth it pre-windmill, however... I've never tried it.

[MaxAstro]

I got potatoes before carrots, and have completely switched over to steak and potatoes from ham and eggs. Other than the work of killing cows, it's much easier to produce in large numbers. Potatoes can be easily produced WAY faster than eggs, especially with planters. And wheat is easier to produce in large numbers than chocolate or kibble.

On the cocoa farm thing: In an older world I did start breeding pigs pre-windmill. You generate more food than you spend milling cocoa and sugar... but only barely. It will keep you alive, but it always feels like a near thing.

[Gunnerman21]

I've just started back up playing with a friend who's never played btw before. But we've been having lots of luck and have a good pumpkin farm going. Our plan is as soon as we get a windmill we'll make ham and eggs. I don't mind not automating it right away, or even at all. In the past I had none of my food automated and I did okay, especially with chocolate. We just got chocolate and planted it, we have about 10 plants right now and it'll soon be more. My strategy is to build up enough food to mill all the hemp at once, which would then give a burst of food to replenish the drained stock. Although there's still the risk of getting gold for gearboxes. There's plenty of different factors and situations that can help determine if it's a good idea for chocolate production. For example our base is in a nice flat swamp with a nearby jungle which gave us the cocoa beans and a clean line of sight around the house for easy defense and expansion. Another is my singleplayer base, not a jungle in sight and my only food source is a slowly growing number of chickens, 3 so far. My house is a dugout cave in the side of a dark hill on a peninsula far away from any more animals. Hamneggs are only a bonus in the sp base because I don't have the cocoa to breed them with. Only venturing out to find pork to bring home is the way I can make it.

off topic- i didn't tell him about hats and he ended up wearing one. LOL

[FlowerChild]

I'm not entirely certain if the relative cost between the two (pigs/mushrooms&eggs) is entirely balanced, but one point I wanted to add in favor of pigs, is that pre-wheat they're the only renewable source of meat, which is necessary if you want to keep wolves.

Having said that, I'm doing a bit of tweaking to the early game at present which will involve making both mushrooms and chickens more difficult to farm in the early game. Both of them were lingering aspects of the progression which were nagging at me :)

EDIT: Actually, no, nm, chickens give you renewable meat as well. Will ponder :)

[Sarudak]

Ham and eggs is still the highest density farmable food pre wheat. That by itself is valuable for trips both having an extra inventory slot and needing to eat less often can be a big deal when you're out exploring.

EDIT: For me generally I use ham and eggs while exploring and poached eggs at base.

[FlowerChild]

Ham and eggs is still the highest density farmable food pre wheat. That by itself is valuable for trips both having an extra inventory slot and needing to eat less often can be a big deal when you're out exploring.

Yup, absolutely. Was just on a bit of a mental tangent that turned out to be false ;)

Regardless, I do think that mushroom omelets are a tad too easy to produce, both on the mushroom, & on the egg front.

Quantum chicken farms (and high density animal farms in general) are something that's been bugging me about the mod for a long time now and which I finally decided to do something about. Mushroom farms as well are just plain dull and the growth rules for them have also been something that's been nagging at me for awhile.

Those two have probably been my two biggest remaining pet peeves about the BTW early game (few other small things as well mind you). I recently decided to start a new world so I reached the conclusion that it was a good time to address those issues while I build up in it.

[Sarudak]

I can't wait to see what you've come up with in regard to animal farms. :)

I definitely think egg production is too easy. So much so that I've never really bothered farming mushrooms (and cause I hated how wonky the growth rules are)

[FlowerChild]

So much so that I've never really bothered farming mushrooms (and cause I hated how wonky the growth rules are)

The growth rules aren't actually too bad as long as you don't try to break them down into specifics. I think Notch's intention there was to try to make it feel rather organic and random, because looking at the code is pretty "wtf?" in a way the other growth rules in the game aren't, until you really get into the fine print of it.

If you just keep in mind that they don't like being overcrowded and not try to get into the details of how that works or try to come up with an optimal layout, I find they're actually super simple to farm. So much so that when I finally understood how they worked (this was a couple of years ago) I was rather disappointed because the internal model I had built up for them was a lot cooler, and I was having a lot of fun building farms for them as a result. Instead, my "farms" eventually just became making small nooks for mushrooms spaced out along corridors (or just sitting in caves) I frequently traveled, and then just periodically scooping up the free food that would magically appear.

What I've done is actually go back to try and recreate that internal model of how I initially thought they worked. I had put off doing so for a long time because it required changes to world gen so that they wouldn't be found naturally in situations that no longer made sense for the growth rules, but I figured out a way to do that a few days ago without messing up people's existing worlds in the process.

As an added bonus, mushrooms will no longer make swamps an all you can eat buffet either, which was something else that's been grating on my nerves ;)

[dawnraider]

As an added bonus, mushrooms will no longer make swamps an all you can eat buffet either, which was something else that's been grating on my nerves ;)

Glad to hear you're looking at that with the mushrooms. In my current world I spawned just outside of a swamp, and before getting diamonds I already had a single chest full of mushrooms without farming. I tried farming a bit, but my setup was basically useless and annoying to work with.

Personally I had no issues with simply making hunting trips to get food and eating straight meat, and didn't worry about domestication until I had wheat, except for two cows I got early on for milk. It helped that from around the time I got diamonds, I built several auxiliary bases at various caves I was exploring, greatly expanding my area of control. I also got super lucky in that I found three pieces of dung from wild wolves while exploring forests and taiga, so I didn't need to domesticate wolves until I had wheat, and I've only just bothered going into a jungle post-crucible, now that I feel confident in facing jungle spiders if I run into them.

[FlowerChild]

Glad to hear you're looking at that with the mushrooms. In my current world I spawned just outside of a swamp, and before getting diamonds I already had a single chest full of mushrooms without farming. I tried farming a bit, but my setup was basically useless and annoying to work with.

Yeah, after a hardcore respawn in my current world I setup base on the edge of a swamp and noticed much the same thing. At a certain point I was totally ignoring mushrooms as I walked by them which is always a bad sign. I also only realized I hadn't been hunting hardly any animals when I noticed I was about to descend into bottom strata with zero in the way of armor :)

Made a few additional tweaks to swamps as well to make them feel a little more distinct and dangerous as befits their ambiance. Previously, the witch thing was cool, but far too infrequent to pose a serious threat, and definitely not enough to offset having food laying about everywhere. I think they should be a much more interesting starting area with the next release.

[dawnraider]

Made a few additional tweaks to swamps as well to make them feel a little more distinct and dangerous as befits their ambiance. Previously, the witch thing was cool, but far too infrequent to pose a serious threat, and definitely not enough to offset having food laying about everywhere. I think they should be a much more interesting starting area with the next release.

Definitely great to hear! I agree that the witches weren't really too much of a threat, I only ever saw a handful of natural spawns, and they were easy to skirt around. I did run into a hut witch that managed to make it down into a cave I was exploring though, those fuckers pack a punch in tight quarters.

[Gilberreke]

Those few biomes where you do encounter witches with regularity are hellish, in a good way. Some of the best streaming Sock and I did was in those biomes. Building terrain to be able to tackle them, building extra stuff to gather more arrows, etc. It still ended up with us both having half a heart, stuck in a ditch of course :)

BTW, back then, we noticed that witches in water are near invincible (eat that, Oz). If a witch is in the water, you can fire a stack of arrows into it or whatever, without killing it, it seems. Can't remember the specifics, but we died a few times because of the reverse-Oz effect.

[MaxAstro]

Glad to hear mushroom farming is being tweaked, I'm definitely in the group of not being a fan of the current mechanics. In our current world, we held off farming mushrooms until we had mycellium and then just dug out a huge room. But if I hadn't looked up the exact growth rules to determine the spacing of the "mothers", my initial inclination would have been to put them so close together that I would have gotten barely anything from the farm.

The whole bit about mushrooms growing more slowly the more of them there are feels very counter-intuitive - nothing else in the game grows like that, and there is nothing about real mushrooms that would make you think they grow that way.

[FlowerChild]

Glad to hear mushroom farming is being tweaked, I'm definitely in the group of not being a fan of the current mechanics. In our current world, we held off farming mushrooms until we had mycellium and then just dug out a huge room. But if I hadn't looked up the exact growth rules to determine the spacing of the "mothers", my initial inclination would have been to put them so close together that I would have gotten barely anything from the farm.

The whole bit about mushrooms growing more slowly the more of them there are feels very counter-intuitive - nothing else in the game grows like that, and there is nothing about real mushrooms that would make you think they grow that way.

I'm not changing any of that. I suspect Notch put those density rules in place to prevent mushrooms blanketing the world with time, and that's not something I want to have happen either :)

Don't forget that mushrooms are rather unique in MC in that they spawn naturally in the world, can grow on pretty much any solid surface, and reproduce freely. The closest thing in vanilla to them is probably grass, and the closest in BTW is probably groth or blight.

The changes I'm making are additions to the existing rule set (additional restrictions on growth) rather than a total revamp of the way they work. I think I'm rather out of practice here as I find myself being rapidly reminded of why I chose not to discuss most features ahead of release in the past ;)

[Stormweaver]

I'm not changing any of that. I suspect Notch put those density rules in place to prevent mushrooms blanketing the world with time, and that's not something I want to have happen either :)

I remember way back in an earlier version (The world I built my first auto-tree farm, iirc) I had some pretty amazing cliffs overshadowing a large, sandy bay.

It also had thousands of mushrooms growing there. Good ole pre-release minecraft.

[FlowerChild]

I remember way back in an earlier version (The world I built my first auto-tree farm, iirc) I had some pretty amazing cliffs overshadowing a large, sandy bay.

It also had thousands of mushrooms growing there. Good ole pre-release minecraft.

Hehe...yeah, you have to be incredibly careful with potentially "viral" blocks in voxel games. I still have nightmares about the release I put out where I made a mistake that caused silverfish to devour people's overworld structures before their eyes like hyperactive stone termites :)

Heck, I even learned that lesson within the first few weeks of BTW's development when cement almost paved over my world. I left the giant mountain that it created before it thankfully came to a stop in my main world for years as a constant reminder to be cautious with stuff like that ;)

[MaxAstro]

I apologize for my assumptions.

I still dislike the growth mechanic on mushrooms, but when you explain it that way I completely understand the point.