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Ideas for Beefalo Taming


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Now that Klei has thankfully added the salt lick, we can actually tame beefalos!... except that they aren't really that useful. Simply put, the amount of time, resources, and effort put into beefalo if far greater than the actual reward you get from taming them.

Rider beefalo is extremely useful in DST, as pretty much without one, the only movement speed you'll have is a walking cane. However, unlike in DST, Don't Starve has what I like to call hot bean juice, aka coffee. Unless you are playing Wx or Wilbur, using a beefalo will be faster, but only slightly. If you have a stalking stick, a sleek hat, and some coffee, you can already go almost as fast as a beefalo with glossamer saddle, both of which are hard to get, and riding a tamed beefalo can be pretty finicky, you can get thrown off, it can die, and you have to feed it food. Not only this, but they don't have a good use. In DST, beefalo can be really useful for hunting down and moving the clockwork marble pieces, but they don't exist in Don't Starve.

Alright, so maybe you've decided that rider beefalo is pretty much pointless, so better get an ornery beefalo instead, right? Well, here's the thing; ornery beefalo do 50 damage (66 if combined with war saddle) which isn't even as much as a dark sword. To put this into perspective, you can't even one shot a spider. This might've been useful in DST where nightmare fuel is a little bit rarer, and bosses have more health, but in Don't Starve, you can just exist in the ruins to get nightmare fuel, or just plain and simple go insane. There's an even easier recipe: enter the cutlass supreme. Not only does this weapon sound like god, but it does the same amount as a dark sword, and does extra damage against Sealnado. The only use I can see the ornery beefalo has, is killing Goose Goose, but it isn't something you would tame a beefalo for, it's more of like "Oh I already have a beefalo, might as well fight Goose Goose with it." 

I'm not saying we should remove beefalo taming or anything, far from it. In fact, here are some of my suggestions on what you could do to help beefalo get a little bit more love. First idea is maybe make it so that beefalo can chop down trees by like ramming into them, kind of like the quackering ram in shipwrecked. I'm thinking the beefalo would probably lose health when you do this, and the obedience goes down by 0.01 like when mobs attack them. Should probably make it so that it is equal to ten chops worth, so you can't chop down a large tree or anything, but you can get pretty close. On the topic of this, you could probably also add another saddle, and it makes it so that each time you ram into a tree, it does 15 chops, able to chop down a full tree. Now this might seem like a completely random thing to add, but think of it like this: beefalo's main use in DST is getting the marble fragments to where they should be. It's a slow and tedious process otherwise. Now in Don't Starve, unless you play Woodie or Maxwell, chopping trees is slow, and boring. You shouldn't really have to play a character just so that can be fixed, so why not this method. It should be mentioned that Woodie and Maxwell would get an indirect nerf, but only slightly. They have the advantage of chopping down trees easily without the use of a beefalo.

Here is my second idea: hats. We all saw the adorable treatment the duplicants got in ONI, so why not beefalos? Basically my thought is you can give a beefalo a hat, and when that hat is equiped, the beefalo will have the same stat bonus as the hat. Not only would this be adorable and that you could personalize your beefalo instead of just giving it the best saddle out there, but it could also be a good utility. The sleek hat provides a 25% speed bonus, equal to that of a walking cane, and when given to a beefalo, should provide the same effect. Because beefalo don't have any sanity, my thought is when a beefalo wears a sanity restoring hat, it goes straight to the player, which means that the pudgy beefalo can give 3 times the amount of a tam o shanter if you (the player) and the beefalo both wear tam o shanters. I'll bring this up later, but what about the beefalo hat? Well my idea is that it could be the kind of hat for the ornery beefalo, in that the beefalo hat gives a 44 damage bonus (specifically 44 so that an ornery beefalo can one shot a spider now if combined with war saddle). Now, this may be a little op, so maybe the hat should lose durability, but I'm thinking at a slower rate than normal, and you should be able to check the durability at all times. Like the saddle horn, there should probably also be a "hat-horn" instead of being able to just take off the hat and repairing it. If it is armor the beefalo is wearing, like a football helm, then it could just lose durability when it, and it would block damage like it normally would.

So on the topic of sanity and the pudgy beefalo, we should be able to bring the beefalo into the caves, or maybe into the other 2 dlcs. I'm not really sure about bringing beefalo into hamlet or shipwrecked, as they aren't really fit there, but the caves and ruins could totally work. If you wear a tam, you already gain enough sanity to stop the insanity from night time, so bringing a pudgy beefalo down there would double it, and if you go with the hat idea I have, you could also put a tam on the beefalo. Not only would this be making the caves easier to explore, because you could just hold out a lantern or something while your beefalo runs really fast, but you could also use it to fight the stuff in the ruins. Ruins are full of deadly mobs, but each one isn't deadly, but rather each one in a group is deadly.

Well on the topic of bringing beefalo to places they normally wouldn't be, let's talk about shipwrecked and hamlet. Both normally don't have beefalo, but could be replaced by something else. I'm talking about the Hippopotamoose and the Water Beefalo. Basically, I'm thinking that the Water Beefalo should be pretty much the same as beefalo in RoG, but they can also ride in land and water. I don't really know what should happen when they are about to throw you off, but I know you'll think of something, probably like a life-vest saddle. The hippos should be treated more like a bull than a beefalo, as in you can barely tame them and they go everywhere. Their main perk would be that they can just stomp everything, and they should feel more temporary than a beefalo. Like you can just go to the water, feed it a couple grass, put a saddle on it, and go nuts. This may seem a little op at first, but there really isn't that much to kill on the surface. Doing this would be really cool, and it would actually give some use to the saddles and stuff in hamlet and shipwrecked.

Well, that's about it, I can't think of any more ideas, the TL:DR version of it is: beefalo taming is not really worth the time and effort it takes into taming them, and my ideas are to make them chop trees down easier, giving them hats, letting them have access to the caves and ruins, and maybe some different types of beefalo, like water beefalo and the hippopotamoose.

P.S. Koalefants are cute

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I really like the tree chopping idea and the Hippotamoose idea too. Maybe for the Water Beefalo you can craft a Beefalo powered boat? A tree chopper Beefalo breed would also be interesting, make him not lose stats from chopping trees and be able to mine boulders and dig stumps and graves. Who needs Maxwell and his puny little shadow puppets when you got a Beefalo?

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