Silage - A Proposal For Animal Feed

[jackatthekilns]

I was looking over the Animagedden section on GitHub and I noticed the suggestion for replacing the placeholder desserts with actual items. I would like to propose an item called Silage. Silage IRL is almost like a compost of foliage that is especially used to feed animals over the winter when there is no pasture. I envision this item as a little more complicated. I think that it should include nearly every type of vegetation in the game, leaves, grass, straw, hemp, carrots, potatoes, even flowers. There is potential for producing silage of varying value. (e.g. using more varieties of leaves may lead to a more efficient output) This may be something that could be for all animals or just cows or whatever.

I realize that this is not fully fleshed out, and I'm sure there are things I have not considered. I hope this is enough to serve as a starting point.

[dawnraider]

Yeah I was thinking something similar. Idk what the actual recipes would entail yet, but it'd definitely be more than just vanilla's wheat. The stipulation there though is that it must be automatable.

[jackatthekilns]

For the automation part, I had a thought of the composting mechanics I've seen in some other mods. maybe using barrels for small scale and then possible a silo for large scale production. I know that is adding a whole new machine/mechanic, but it doesn't seem right for the cauldron.

[EpicAaron]

The cool thing about the breeding items being deserts is that they give you clear automation goals with complex machines. I would actually be fine with keeping them as long as we figure out a way to automate their creation. As has been discussed elsewhere, animal husbandry is a total clusterfuck right now, you can't really keep animals fed without fancy grass conveyors.

Having the breeding item be a collection of random foliage seems like a random gathering chore rather than a potential machine that could be built. If the player had a way to accumulate a lot of trash plants that could be recycled with composting, perhaps silage would make sense. Currently, however, the player doesn't really accumulate a lot of useless plant material besides hay. I have so much hay...

The raw concept, however, is great. I want to be able to feed my animals something to keep them happy and fed in a stable or breeding harness. Simply upping the food value of straw would probably go a long way toward that.

[jackatthekilns]

Simply upping the food value of straw would probably go a long way toward that.

Kind of on this front, I am a big fan of the idea of being able to put out hay bales for animals to find and then feed on over time.

[dawnraider]

Kind of on this front, I am a big fan of the idea of being able to put out hay bales for animals to find and then feed on over time.

Already have plans for doing this :)

Right now grass is the only viable way to feed animals and I'd like to diversify that.

[Hiracho]

I think straw/hay bales could work as a good base for a more fitting breeding item(cows and sheep at least). Could see processes like having to pack it, dry in the sun, grinding it up again, adding nutrients and cooking it part of some system to get their breeding item.

For additives I'm thinking bonemeal as a standard. Then plant seeds, maybe the additives decide what the breeding item is good for, like melon seeds(chunks) for cows and pumpkin seeds(chunks) for sheep..

For pigs the additive could be potatoes , carrots or cocoa beans/powder.
A mechanic for potatoes and carrots I thought would be cool: piston pack them(or cooked) into mashed potato /carrot blocks, dig those up to break em into piles of mash, and use that as an additive. Piston shovel breaking em into piles just as well, and block dispenser/silk touch making you able to pick it up and make a house out of it.


On the other side: I wouldn't mind keeping it to desserts for its historical value in BTW's development and general quirkiness :) even though FC said Desserts were temporary when he introduced them they have become their own thing now for years. It feels as if the whole premise has taken a life of its own. Maybe changing it to a more realistic item isn't the best path to take? the dessert items are currently also pretty balanced in having a lot of dependencies. It'd be hard to recreate that with whole new items and mechanics introduced for this effect.

[Gilberreke]

As much as I enjoy immersion, I'm with Hiracho and Aaron in that I'm sorta partial to desserts for breeding. They're quirky and offer some fun automation prospects. If the more immersive option is chosen, I would make sure they're at least as fun and evocative to produce/automate.

The other side of the argument for me is that I LIKE that desserts are a manual thing (for feeding Steve), like baking a cake at home is and automating cake might not be wanted either.

[dawnraider]

I think if nothing else, cake being the breeding item for cows is problematic because they don't stack, which makes them incredibly unwieldy. Like you mentioned Zhil, there is a bit of a conflict between desserts for animals and desserts for Steve, which is part of why I am leaning towards unique items (though I am by no means absolutely sold on the idea).

[Moldiworp2]

On the note Gil made about immersion and such: All other animals it doesn't make a huge amount of sense to feed them desserts to breed. Pigs though, that's practiced a lot IRL. Not for breeding per se, but to help bulk em.
I know multiple pig farmers who get the thrown out baked goods from bakeries etc for their pigs, anytime of year. Its very effective, the pigs love it and its basically free. Dunno if its much of a thing outside of Aus, but it IS a thing somewhere :) So they always made sense in my mind, the rest not so much.

[Hiracho]

There is no real world "sense" for the breeding items being desserts :P the most popular in game "sense" I've seen is a twist on the wine and dine for arousal. The point is not if it looks like IRL, but if it should. my feel for that goes mildly towards it not needing to be real life like.

Either way, them being used for animal breeding or not, I don't see a reason to force baking to stay a manual process. If you like baking cake manually, you can always do that right? So what's the problem with people prefering factory cake :P

Cake not stacking is a huge problem yeah, could be solved by just making it stack to 16, but that'd make cake insanely efficient a foodstack, even if you can't pick it back up. In FFA i balanced cake a bit more by removing most of foodvalue so its almost only fatrolls you get out of it.

[Gilberreke]

Either way, them being used for animal breeding or not, I don't see a reason to force baking to stay a manual process. If you like baking cake manually, you can always do that right? So what's the problem with people prefering factory cake :P

I don't see a reason for hardcore buckets to stay the way they are. If you like working without placing source blocks, you can always do that right? So what's the problem with people preferring placeable source blocks :P

[jackatthekilns]

Either way, them being used for animal breeding or not, I don't see a reason to force baking to stay a manual process. If you like baking cake manually, you can always do that right? So what's the problem with people prefering factory cake :P

I don't see a reason for hardcore buckets to stay the way they are. If you like working without placing source blocks, you can always do that right? So what's the problem with people preferring placeable source blocks :P

Sometimes I don't read the quote before reading the comment. Gilbrreke's comment sounded very different before I read the context (my fault for jumping to the most recent post) This does bring up an issue though, which is should breeding items be automatable? I believe FC said he intended to build processes to automate breeding, but I could be wrong. I know we as a community are not bound to everything FC said, but I for one think our starting point should be what he indicated his intentions were, when we know.

I am not advocating for automated baking, I do see the point in keeping desserts a manual process. I think it would be best to create a new item (it doesn't have to be silage) that is locked behind the kiln and requires a significant resource investment. I would prefer that it also require a degree of exploration as well. I don't think animal feed should also be a desirable consumable for players, it makes balancing the item more difficult.

[dawnraider]

FC did say that he planned on making animals automated again.

[...] that is locked behind the kiln and requires a significant resource investment. I would prefer that it also require a degree of exploration as well.

I do want to point out that wheat technically fits this description. Wheat is unreasonable to farm without planters, and requires exploration to find, so anything which requires wheat (or the other village crops) would satisfy that.