Grass roofs are lame, but feel necessary

[dawnraider]

As it stands right now, animal feeding mechanics feel very punishing. Because of the nature of grass growth, the more grass is eaten the slower it grows back. This means that it is very easy for an animal pen to reach the tipping point of becoming barren long before it is actually evident to the player that it is happening.

A solution to this that many players have found is to exploit grass growth mechanics to make a grass roof, with a 2 block air gap for the animals to walk around in. Grass can spread up to 3 blocks down, which allows the roof to act as a reservoir of grass. This means that grass grows *faster*, not slower, the more grass is eaten as every grass block has 9 blocks above it which can spread to it.

This is clearly not intended behavior, and also tends to create eyesores for animal pens. However, because the default grass behavior is such a poor experience it feels necessary to exploit grass mechanics with the grass roof.

I think the main thing to address here then is the snowballing effects of grass. Adding a sparse grass stage should help a lot with this. Most animals eating grass will leave it at sparse grass and will not eat sparse grass except when starving. The exception being pigs, who root around in the dirt. I think they should be left as is, but have their hunger requirements reduced, since smaller pens are much easier to manage and identify problems. (Credit to Hiracho and Sarudak for coming up with aspects of the idea)

Thoughts?

Github issue: https://github.com/BTW-Community/BTW-Public/issues/39

[EpicAaron]

Grass roofs are convenient, but I've gotten by just fine by simply having a large enough pen. Animal breeding is so annoying that I don't really find myself using it much at all, and especially not at an automated capacity (besides chickens).

I think folks are trying to make the most spatially economical pastures, but I never saw that as the point of animageddon. Large animals like cows need a lot of space to roam. Unless you are actively feeding the animals bails of wheat, I think it is fair that they should burn through grass. Sparse grass, while a great aesthetic feature, seems like an excuse to just let players make smaller self sufficient pastures. To really address the problem of keeping large amounts of animals, I think the feeding system need to be re balanced. Flowerchild might have had plans for this, but he never did finish the feature... :(

Here are my proposals:

1.
Make wheat count much more toward keeping animals fed. I want to be able to keep my cows in a smaller pen and give them bails of hay to satisfy them. Bringing in fresh feed every morning would be a pleasant chore, and go a long way toward making the animals feel like real livestock that need to be cared for. In this system, medium scale animal husbandry is manageable so long as a steady agriculture is in place, and perhaps players can figure out how to scale wheat production to number of cows. I don't know the particulars of animal hunger values, but perhaps wheat can count for multiple times the hunger value of grass. This also will open up the potential to automate animals the old way, as currently it is impossible to keep anything fed without pastures and grass conveyors.

2.
Add leads to the game to make herding animals between pastures possible (well, it is possible with the current system, but it is liable to make players blow their brains out). Call it Hardcore Shepherding! I'd love to run a little ranch on rotation, the idea reminds me of the dairy farms in my hometown that would have its herd clean out entire fields and then truck the cattle to another field across town while the old grass grew back. This is very involved, of course, and not something the player will want to do forever if at all. Having to lead animals inside to a pen at night pre-torches sounds like a great way to do animal farming without needing nether access.

A note: I don't think animal farming has been fully explored. Someone on Discord mentioned the other day that pigs eat a lot of mob drops (rotten flesh and such). This is something Flowerchild never mentioned and nobody seemed to know about until very recently. This means that pigs could potentially be kept alive on a slop system whereby junk drops from a mob trap are dropped into pig pens. I intend to experiment with this when I get back to spawn on my single player world. It is possible that the incredible rate of animal starvation makes this not viable.

Generally, animals starve way too quickly, and agricultural products do not go far enough to satisfy them. I don't think adding a new type of grass will ultimately solve the problem, but I DO like the idea. Hiracho claims to have come up with it, but I had a similar idea long ago ;ppp fight me

[gaga654]

I'd say the balance feels good to me in the part of the game I've reached so far. Having a small pen with a few chickens is no problem. Building a nice big pen for cows was a pretty significant undertaking, but it felt like a nice project to work on and well worth the effort for the reward of having renewable food. Like Aaron said, if you're ruthlessly optimizing pen size then it might be hard to tell if it's big enough but if you err on the larger side then it should work out okay. I'd expect the rate of grass growth to be highest when the pen is roughly half dirt and half grass (if my understanding is correct it should be proportional to the size of the "dirt-grass interface", so to speak) meaning that you have some chance to react to excess grass consumption if you're proactive about it.

However I haven't done much automation, nor any large scale animal projects beyond my five cows and handful of chickens and pigs, so I can't speak to what changes are needed for the later game. But what we have now feels like it fits very well with BTW - that sense of, "I'd better be careful because one wrong move could spell disaster".

[dawnraider]

Yeah I really wish we could've seen FC's final vision for animageddon. It's a great idea but feels uncharacteristically unpolished right now for something from FC.

And the issue is not that I want players making smaller pastures, it's that it's almost impossible right now to tell if a pasture is too small until it's too late to fix it. By removing the snowballing effect, it would be much easier to judge the amount of grass needed for a pen. Basically, as long as you don't see any dirt patches then you're good. Balancing of food values can certainly be done to adjust the amount of grass animals eat with the proposed system as necessary, since obviously it would need different values to keep the same balance. Really the only exception to this would be pigs. I like the theming of pigs rooting around in the dirt, getting rid of any grass and loosening the dirt. The issue is that is in conflict with trying to fix the snowballing issue. And maybe the solution is to in fact have pigs turn grass to loose sparse grass or something? That way snowballing would be removed, while maintaining the unique design challenges of pigs.

I did simplify the explanation for grass growth. It would speed up as more grass was eaten to a point, then it would begin to slow down dramatically. It can be very hard to tell what point that is at though as it is an unstable equilibrium. I'm simply advocating for actually making it clear to the player when there is a problem.

"I'd better be careful because one wrong move could spell disaster".

Imo this only works when you can see the danger coming. Having your animals all suddenly be dead with little warning is not a good experience. My proposed system would keep the same idea but actually let you see there was a problem before it became catastrophic.

I do think that using items to feed animals should be more viable. Making wheat automatable I think is a requirement for that. Interesting to note about pigs eating mob drops. Makes sense but yeah I don't think that was ever noted anywhere.

I know we've talked about the idea of manually moving animals around before on discord before, and personally I am not a huge fan of the idea. I don't think such micromanaging really provides interesting gameplay and simply introduces tedium. And it especially would not be viable early game, as if you mess up and miss even a single night, all your animals are dead. This completely removes the possibility of extended caving trips (as your animals will also die if you never put them out). I don't think food is enough of a concern early game to require a solution for pre-nether animals.

Leads are absolutely on my radar though: https://github.com/BTW-Community/BTW-Public/issues/25

[dawnraider]

I also opened an issue for making feeding animals with items more viable as I feel like that's definitely something to be looked at, but is different enough from the grass issue to deserve its own issue. https://github.com/BTW-Community/BTW-Public/issues/50

[EpicAaron]

I know we've talked about the idea of manually moving animals around before on discord before, and personally I am not a huge fan of the idea. I don't think such micromanaging really provides interesting gameplay and simply introduces tedium. And it especially would not be viable early game, as if you mess up and miss even a single night, all your animals are dead. This completely removes the possibility of extended caving trips (as your animals will also die if you never put them out). I don't think food is enough of a concern early game to require a solution for pre-nether animals.

This is true in a pure progression mindset, but I have found that BTW is not always played very quickly. The more methodical chore-based design of BTW's systems lends itself to an incremental/subsistence style of play that I wish could be dipped into a little more pre-diamonds. Sometimes ingame weeks are spent just chilling at base while building, weeding, and chopping, and having some animals on the side would be nice. It is true that a single screw up may kill the animals, but this is also true with torches. If you leave during the day and return for nights beyond spawn chunks, animals will eventually consume all grass and die anyway. Working with animals outside of spawn chunks sucks, and I don't think animageddon was designed well for Minecraft's limited chunkloading. Chunkloaders at HC spawns would go a long way toward smoothing out the gameplay experience there.

I'm cooking up two ingots at my current HC spawn base for shears, which I intend to use to get some tall grass. I am going to play around with "shepherding" cattle around for their milk to try and maintain a successful renewable base without nether access. Pumpkin seeds, mushrooms, and beans will help. I'll report my findings here on the forum.

This snowballing is something I have heard folks speak about, but I have never witnessed the problem myself across many playthroughs and servers. Screwing up the size of a pen once, however, seems like a good enough kick in the pants to teach players that bigger = better when fencing in pastures.

[dawnraider]

I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect players to go through the tedium of herding their animals.

It is true that a single screw up may kill the animals, but this is also true with torches. If you leave during the day and return for nights beyond spawn chunks, animals will eventually consume all grass and die anyway.

The key word here is "eventually". That that won't kill your animals in one night, it would take a while to actually have an effect. And I think that that is also a problem, albeit a much lesser one.

Chunk loaders are 100% on the to do list, although they would be much later game than would help with HCS. Too many things in the game encourage you to both build in spawn chunks and to spread everything out, which can come into conflict.