The state of Automated Animal Breeding

[EpicAaron]

As you may be aware, breeding isn't as easy as it used to be. You used to be able to dig a hole and stuff some cows in it. If you were really fancy, water flows and saws could automate the killing. Now that animals need to eat, the process is a lot more involved.

I am really curious to know if anybody has cracked the code. On the Vioki discord, we've realized that "grass conveyors" that utilize grass growing mechanics and slabs can be used to sustain animals while holding them in a single spot. I built one on my world to keep chickens alive and automatically harvest eggs:

Spoiler

Show

AUTOMATED EGGS!
It's a circle of slabs covered in floating grass blocks to encourage downward grass growth.


The chickens are locked in while pistons loop the ring of grass slabs around and around. A daylight timer feeds them every morning.


The pistons are hooked up to a simple turntable timer.

I played with the idea of having eggs automatically shoot out of a dispenser into a grassy underground space, but the chickens would always disappear. I suspect some kind of suffocation glitch because there was certainly enough grass down there. My next project (besides like 50 other projects) is an attempt to automate leather, but I'll need a water tower first.

Anyway, what solutions have you come up with? How far have you been able to push the grass conveyors?

[Battosay]

I played with the idea of having eggs automatically shoot out of a dispenser into a grassy underground space, but the chickens would always disappear. I suspect some kind of suffocation glitch because there was certainly enough grass down there.

I'm not 100% sure that's the issue here since chicken are a little different, but while automating leather farming I ran into an unexpected issue : if the newborn baby isn't moved relatively far away from its parent and is unable to reach them (no path), they'll just stand still and starve to death.

[dawnraider]

I believe I've heard people having the same issue with chickens. Not 100% sure though.

I think that behavior is worth completely removing honestly as I don't think it adds anything to gameplay and only causes frustrating issues that can be hard to track down.

[EpicAaron]

I believe I've heard people having the same issue with chickens. Not 100% sure though.

I think that behavior is worth completely removing honestly as I don't think it adds anything to gameplay and only causes frustrating issues that can be hard to track down.

Perhaps, but isn't the solution pretty simple? Take those babies far away. I'm going to try and have my newborns drop a bit and then carry them away with water flows to a grow-out enclosure.

[dawnraider]

It is a simple solution but it still strikes me as weird vanilla behavior that doesn't contribute to gameplay.

[PuddleKat]

I solved this issue
By always keeping one adult animal in the breeding pen
The babies will then track and follow this adult feeding normally
Works with pigs

I agree though that its weird vanilla behavior

[Hiracho]

The weird part is that they want to reach an adult they can't reach. That's how babies tend to starve. That and trying to reach grass they can't reach because they think they can jump 1 high. fixing these two obvious AI bugs would help a lot. :)

I had put it on the list of bugs just before reading this topic, what a coincidence! Wanted to showcase some of my animal contraptions. I've never finished a large animal breeding center in my world for the sheer fact it is absolutely not worth it and other insane ideas took priority :P with my upcoming fat add-on making which incidentally lets cake stack to 16 it turns around some of the awkwardness of cow breeding too.

So now for my showcase! Back in 2018 playing with Whuppee and Jakerman we we're struggling with animals. Suddenly all the pieces fell together; what if instead of bringing the animal to the grass, we bring the grass to the animal. That way we can still keep our animals in small confined cages. This lead to many discoveries, including finding ways to increase the grass growth rate and coincidentally how to prevent dirt patches from snowballing(as an answer to your water removes grass, well.. not if your entire ceiling can act as a seed for new grass! The discovery of grass roof made manual animal pens hold about 2 to 4 times as many animals. The main reason grass roofs are great is because they add stability. Technically grass can grow on any piece of pasture, so there is no unpredictable snowballing of dirt patches that bring grass growth to an absolute minimum.

Here's an imgur map with grass conveyors!

Here's an imgur map with a primitive chicken coup!

[Hiracho]

fixed animals following parents before eating, was a simple priority error.

[EpicAaron]

I saw it as some kind of Hardcore Baby Animal Depression. Hardcore Separation Anxiety?

[Battosay]

¤ Yeah I'll have to agree with Aaron here, I don't feel like the babies dying of separation anxiety when they are separated from their parents yet are still within earshot of them is a bug that should be fixed (at least not in the Community Patch you mentioned Hiracho), it really feels like it fits the BTW theme. I'd agree though that babies dying because their AI still acts as if they can jump 1 high block is something that should be fixed.


¤ I'll admit that I totally blanked on the grass conveyor thing, that's a pretty cool concept that I'm looking forward to play with ^^
Although I still managed to figure out how to breed all animals using large pens and water, the cost of doing so was really high and full of little annoyances, except for chicken :

With a pen that size :

Spoiler

Show

(so 5x7 inside the walls, or 7x9 including the walls) and a wall dividing the middle, you reach a perfectly balanced point between the amount of grass eaten by a chicken/the grass dying under water, the growth rate of grass and the time needed to collect the eggs with water (16sec max, perfect for a turntable timer)
Some side views :

Spoiler

Show

And if you move the water channel and the piston a bit further back, you can actually stack them, making it only use one piston and increasing the grass growth rate :

Spoiler

Show

(you can even move the top pen 1 block lower)

In my last 3 playthrough I actually built one of these as soon as I reached the nether, and so far I've yet to see them fail.
A few more pics from my current world :

Spoiler

Show

Overall they work very well and are pretty cheap to build, and the only slightly complicated part isn't actually the pen, but counting to 4 for the decay timer to feed them every day :D


¤ Now where it gets hard is for bigger animals, and since cows are the ones that require the most food and space, I went for it to see if it was doable. And it is, but oh boy is it a massive endeavor. I don't have access to the old worlds I built it on at the moment, but I still have a few pics available so that'll have to do for now :
Here the basic proof-of-concept built in creative :

Spoiler

Show

The cows spend their days on the top part above the green wool (#2 on the pic) the whole thing is 60 blocks long, and iirc they were 28 blocks large.
Once a day water would drop from both sides and the middle to carry the cows into two water channel (the drop above said channels was blocked during the day with pistons, so the entire field was available for the cows), and the cows would end up in #3; where they are fed cake, separated from their offspring based on size, and sent back up to their pen using the elevator in #4, going back to #1 ; while the babies would be sent far away to mature before evolving into meat and leather.

I did end up building one in survival

Spoiler

Show

but given 1) the absurdly ridiculous cost of time and materials required for such a low yield (the pen could hold safely a maximum 6 cows, so that's 3 cows per day max)
2) all the little annoyances, like cake recipe not being 'automatable' (I think ?), cakes not stacking, and not being able to use the increased inventory of the BD to store more (BDs can't spit out cake, they'll try to place it as a block), meaning you're stuck with using a regular dispenser + a non-full hopper on top
and worse of all 3) barely a day after I finished building it, an enderman teleported in the pen (the pen had to be 3 high at the spot where the water drop down), stole some grass and broke the whole thing ...


In the end I don't think I'd advise for building anything similar in the current BTW.
Sure, the enderman thing is avoidable (just make the whole pen on the same y=lvl, just longer) and completely random (it never happened again in the hundreds of days I played after), but the cost is so prohibitive, I believe that the conveyor grass idea is the right way to go :)
It did look fucking cool though :D

[Hiracho]

I saw it as some kind of Hardcore Baby Animal Depression. Hardcore Separation Anxiety?

Very valid point. But I feel its more like a bug, because the same problem that gives this "anxiety" also makes baby animals starve when their parent is snowballing a field. Basically when a child has a parent, it will only eat grass if it so happens to be standing on it. It tries to path to further grass but gets interrupted most of the time. So this unintended emergent feature is also breaking stuff that results in random animal deaths.

[EpicAaron]

What a beautiful beast, Batto. Vertically transporting cows using elevators? That's incredibly intricate! I wish we had prodded you to share your work sooner.

You may not have thought of the grass conveyor, but we certainly didn't think of that deceptively simple chicken coop. I could set up a ton of those in my current world and never have to worry about eggs again.

[Hiracho]

Overall they work very well and are pretty cheap to build, and the only slightly complicated part isn't actually the pen, but counting to 4 for the decay timer to feed them every day :D

We figured a way to get items in increments of 8 without anything complex ;) have a powered hopper be blocked by a piston(or a block pushed by a sticky one). upon day time, have it open for one tick by connecting a daylight switch to a pulser. Example is somewhere in the grass conveyor imgur :) no more decay timer!

And if you move the water channel and the piston a bit further back, you can actually stack them, making it only use one piston and increasing the grass growth rate :

Your picture was probably just an example, but for the grass to be growing quicker, those wooden slabs would need to be grass blocks, as it only spreads down to the third block below. Figured I'd say that for anyone wanting to copy it :D

cakes not stacking, and not being able to use the increased inventory of the BD to store more (BDs can't spit out cake, they'll try to place it as a block), meaning you're stuck with using a regular dispenser + a non-full hopper on top

We also figured out a relatively simple way to remove the obstacle of dispensers being blocked because of a powered hopper :) the same trick used above actually! you set up a dispenser with a hopper on top that isn't full. Above that you make the pulser piston "hopper opener" you only let it trigger once every 8 times the dispenser shoots (for instance a BD counter which only sends a pulse 1/8 times) and voila! you can stack infinite hoppers!

doesn't remove cakes being extremely bulky and non automatable, but at least you can fill what ever feeding mechanism you want with as much feed as you can imagine, and this prevents any automatable dispensing from overflowing. works great for splitters!

PS. That cow machine is magnificent! what a huge beast!

[Battosay]

We figured a way to get items in increments of 8 without anything complex ;) have a powered hopper be blocked by a piston(or a block pushed by a sticky one). upon day time, have it open for one tick by connecting a daylight switch to a pulser. Example is somewhere in the grass conveyor imgur :) no more decay timer!

Unless I'm mistaken I think there's a little misunderstanding, what I meant is that the chicken thingy is all pre-Soulforge tech, so you don't have acces to DB and can't make a daytime sensor, to feed the chicken every morning you have to keep track of time. To do that, since there's 20 minutes in a day and the decay timer sends a pulse every 5 when the item despawn, you have to count to 4 pulses (either with RS NOR latches or using a turntable and pulsing it so it rotates only once per pulse), and that's the only slightly complex part of the setup, everything else is pretty straight forward and should be easy to figure out.

We also figured out a relatively simple way to remove the obstacle of dispensers being blocked because of a powered hopper :) the same trick used above actually! you set up a dispenser with a hopper on top that isn't full. Above that you make the pulser piston "hopper opener" you only let it trigger once every 8 times the dispenser shoots (for instance a BD counter which only sends a pulse 1/8 times) and voila! you can stack infinite hoppers!

Man I wish I thought about that, that's exactly what I would have needed lol
Great idea :)

[Hiracho]

Oh, yeah I derped there. Didn't realize it it was pre soulforge! :)

[Niyu]

...
To do that, since there's 20 minutes in a day and the decay timer sends a pulse every 5 when the item despawn, you have to count to 4 pulses (either with RS NOR latches or using a turntable and pulsing it so it rotates only once per pulse), and that's the only slightly complex part of the setup, everything else is pretty straight forward and should be easy to figure out.
...

You can also chain 4 dispensers to make a 20 minutes delay clock, with each dispenser droping the item into a pressure plate that will power the next dispenser. With the added advantage of more item capacity, so it will work longer before you have to refill it.

[Battosay]

You can also chain 4 dispensers to make a 20 minutes delay clock, with each dispenser droping the item into a pressure plate that will power the next dispenser. With the added advantage of more item capacity, so it will work longer before you have to refill it.

Shiiiit, I spent days trying to remember the easiest way to do the timer, and I completely failed to remember that, thanks Niyu, that's indeed much better :D