How Viable is Beefalo Domestication?

[Confused Rock]

beefalo taming only takes too long if you think of domestication as an end goal, where it's more just a bonus. if you can ride a beef more than 10 secs without being bucked off it's good enough to give you a huge speed boost. by the time it lets you ride for a full minute it can now do combat just fine.

[Rinkusan]

I vaguely remember a thread made by @lakhnish showing that the salt lick doesn't 100% stop domestication decay because the domestication decay rate increases over time and eventually exceeds the salt lick's decay resistance.

From personal experience, beefalo taming is a gigantic time and resource cost with an annoying maintenance cost, all with the minor (albeit super-fun) benefit of being Sonic the Hedgehog. I personally disagree with the argument that domesticated beefalo are worth it even in the long run when you're going to have every single necessary resource located near your base at endgame anyways. 

That being said, being able to run around the map at the speed of sound is honestly just straight-up fun. My advice would be that if you're trying to survive or speedrun, don't bother domesticating a beefalo. If you're trying to just have fun and/or want to try out beefalo combat for yourself, go ahead and get that glossamer saddle. 

[Monkey Cups]

Even on solo worlds I don't bother taming beefalo without mods. It just seems like a waste of time to me.

[Scarecrow0_0]

So what I'm sensing from the replies to this thread is that klei needs to dedicate an update to creatures and taming them! It'd be so cool to be able to justify taming different types of beefalo, maybe they can get certain attributes or abilities that show on the beefalo? For example, a fighting beefalo would be able to have some type of war paint on it. Maybe I can craft items such as bows or clippers that allow me to change colors and hair styles. Someone before mentioned taming a koalefant, YES! This could be amazing, because it adds even more wiggle room to allow for different looks and traits. It'd be amazing to find that perfect balance between endgame customizable aesthetic items and practical mid game boons to game play. What if klei added a way to travel through the sea on a mount? *Cough* Gnarwail *Cough* This seems like a no-brainer: similar to beefalo gnarwail's have a few uses, (with horns) but overall aren't super necessary. Now they could be! Here's a faster way to travel through the ocean that we've been craving, but it's gated by requiring a tamed gnarwail. It could re-form how annoying mobs such as malbatross are fought, no longer do I have to worry about her running away from me and the tedious raising of anchors and hoisting of sails; I can chase after her on my gnarwail and perform some type of horn attack. Heck, maybe you can use your trident while on top of animals, adding a use to an item that is not really worth it (IMO). What if super late game I could attempt to tame a hostile animal such as an ewecus. Besides steel wool I don't see any use for this animal, and it'd make going on hunts more exciting! Oxygen Not Included was a game lacking in this regard until klei put out the critters update making that aspect of the game so much more exciting, I feel as though it would make the game way more enticing if the same was done for DST. Not only would it fix a system that frankly isn't worth my time currently, it would also add great end game depth in animal taming and domestication, and would create an exciting new meta of boss fights if animal taming was an actually viable strategy. Just my two cents!

[00petar00]

I've only ever tamed a beefalo when the update came out to have fun with it. I knew when i read the patch notes that it would be something i'd never use.

Lets talk about long term worlds, even on my main world i don't have beefalo tamed because i don't like being forced to keep them from going wild, salt lick won't cut it from what i've heard it won't keep beefalo permanently tamed. That's one of the biggest issues with such a long taming process and it is not even permanent and you have no way of making it permanent without putting permanent effort into crafting salt licks and even riding them/feeding.

20 ingame days to tame a beefalo? Do you know what you can do in 20 ingame days? Also put into consideration that this will all be lost if it dies or if you don't put permanent effort into keeping it tamed.

We can all agree that taming a beefalo on a world you won't put quite a few ingame years in, isn't worth doing at all considering it takes a quarter of the ingame year to fully tame it and permanent resource usage for maintenance.

 

Considering long term worlds income from farms//setups you can make like dragonfly setup with catapults so you can farm green gems without any big cost. Varg setup to fuel your catapults so you only use cheap gem while you get the rarest gems from dragonfly or the other option of using tentacles which is even easier to setup without requiring varg farm in the long term worlds, can kill bee queen/dragonfly with no issues, only sometimes needing maintenance to replace the dead tentacles.

Using these green gems you can have unlimited thulecite crowns for armor.

Nightmare fuel farm/ birch tree farm setup for stacks of nightmare fuel and lots of living logs for dark swords, or in quite a few cases you can just use ham bat for bosses with thulecite crown and unlimited durability on ham bat makes it so cheap.

 

Can you explain how tamed beefalo would bring much more value then this with less effort? Yes, all of these farms/setups i named usually are quite painful to setup but once you do, they require little or no effort on your part to using them to their fullest permanent benefits.

[NSAiswatchingus]

32 minutes ago, 00petar00 said:

Can you explain how tamed beefalo would bring much more value then this with less effort? Yes, all of these farms/setups i named usually are quite painful to setup but once you do, they require little or no effort on your part to using them to their fullest permanent benefits.

Around 15 blue mushroom and a few toots on a panflute is all I need to kill Dfly on an ornery beef. 

Aside from beequeen, the answer to every surface boss after domestication is to just hop on and fight. No set up. No resource replacement. Very minimal upkeep costs. The trained beefalo is only non-permanent if you let it die and it's not locked to one spot like a catapult is. 

[Confused Rock]

I've never had the issue of a salt lick not cutting it, and I've left a beefalo alone for over an in game year. at that point, giving it 1 twig to reset it once a year doesn't sound like high maint costs. it's not like when you're domesticating a beefalo  you're just spending 20 days hugging it. there's plenty you can do while riding a beefalo, it's less like taming a beef is an activity that takes 20 days and more like taming a beef restricts you from performing certain activites like going in caves.

[Well-met]

2 hours ago, NSAiswatchingus said:

Around 15 blue mushroom and a few toots on a panflute is all I need to kill Dfly on an ornery beef.

a very moot point when it's the larvae walls that do all the job.

[NSAiswatchingus]

1 minute ago, Well-met said:

a very moot point when it's the larvae walls that do all the job.

Oh yeah. Add 40 rocks to the set up cost. 

[themightyone]

Not getting all the hate for Beefalo taming here . It takes 15 days with a brush ,and you can do other things during those 15 days . An ornary Beef with a stack of blue caps is a powerful ally. Imo it's best just to tame during summer , since summer isn't that fun anyway on the surface and Beefs never go redass in summer at any time. Hunt butterfly's while taming and you have enough for the glossamer saddle after 4 to 8 days as well as keeping its ornary tendency. Win win

I can see an argument against having more then 1 tamed since it can be tough on nitre if your supply is limited. But having at least 1 in a long term world is super clutch to me. Just build a pen large enough for at least 3 salt licks and you wont have to build very often at all. Also hammer the salt lick when it gets pencil thin and is about to go , and you get half resources back to build a new one. 

I would love to see Klei tweak tamed Beefs a bit by adding an armor slot for them or allowing a type to carry extra items like a pack mule. And the idea of taming koalefants is interesting too. I have no problem with the 15 to 20 days training required since I think the reward is worth it. But it would be nice if they made it harder for them to undomesticate after they have been tamed , since some long cave runs or sea exploration could risk them becoming untamed.

[Datanon]

On 4/30/2020 at 9:21 AM, Catteflyterpill said:

or just have any idea for the developers on how to make domestication better if you agree that it's too pricey

getting rid of the maintenance you have to do AFTER you domesticate it should be a good start. theres no reason for that to be there

[ArubaroBeefalo]

spring and bundle wrap exists

[Lukmendes]

14 hours ago, Datanon said:

getting rid of the maintenance you have to do AFTER you domesticate it should be a good start. theres no reason for that to be there

I can see the logic behind that, since he's still an animal for you to take care of, but yeah, there should be better ways to tone it down at least, maybe something like, after they're domesticated they start eating grass or twigs they find around, so if you put a grass field around them they'll hardly ever go hungry, meaning the domestication won't go down that fast.

Another thing they definitely should remove is the situation when a beefalo is attacked and they keep trying to kill whoever attacked them and you can't stop the beefalo, it's ridiculous since the beefalo will most likely die, and all that effort will have been for nothing.

Beefalo taming is a decent idea, but they're too high maintenance to domesticate, and still high maintenance after being tamed, reward isn't good enough for all the time they take.

[00petar00]

On 5/1/2020 at 8:29 PM, NSAiswatchingus said:

Around 15 blue mushroom and a few toots on a panflute is all I need to kill Dfly on an ornery beef. 

Aside from beequeen, the answer to every surface boss after domestication is to just hop on and fight. No set up. No resource replacement. Very minimal upkeep costs. The trained beefalo is only non-permanent if you let it die and it's not locked to one spot like a catapult is. 

I understand what you are saying but if you read my whole post, you'd see the farm setups i named and its usually better to use catapults or tentacles in long term worlds for bee queen and dragonfly as it requires less effort. I have unlimited thulecite and with that unlimited crowns, heck can even use unlmited shadow swords or just ham bat for bosses.

Beefalo taming requires 20 days, lets say we ignore this as this is not the main issue i don't get one, just keeping the beefalo tamed over 1000 days and plus, makes me not want to do it because i can't just set up 20 salt licks and never touch him for 50-100 days and come back to fully tamed beefalo. If this was possible, i'd see value in it. Depending on what you are setting up in your world, maybe you are not killing any bosses for a while you still need to take time to manage the tameness of the beefalo, if this was removed or at least made possible for a long period of time with only salt licks, i'd be fine with it.

I just don't like being forced into doing something repetitive in DST, me making a megabase is usually because you cut down time you spend on mundane tasks, its also really fun having a big base with every worthwhile farm/setup made on a world so i don't have to care about anything, basically can go watch a movie on my second monitor while casually doing things on DST with my unlimited food/armor.

The whole idea of the megabase for me is not having to care about anything and the contrast from the first ingame year where you are forced to spend such a long time gathering food/staying warm in the winter, a lot of your time is wasted in keeping yourself alive by spending resources required to do so. I am not saying that surviving in DST is hard, i've done challanges starting in winter and summer before without any help, the idea is just that you spend a lot of time managing your temperature/food that you don't have enough time to gather resources to make farms/setups. Once you have unlimited food setup or big wood farm, is the point where you cut the time required of gathering said resources and can put it into something else.

[SaphironX]

I actually really like it. A riding beefalo is extremely fast, long before you have access to the best speed gear and puts a waking stick to shame. A war beef so with war saddle was buffed a awhile back, and it;s great for moose gooses and beargers etc because they can’t knock your beefalo out of your hand.

Maybe they made it easier, it does take a few days, but domesticating one just requires twigs and dragonfruit pies mostly. You don’t even have to get him to max hunger, just brush it each day (do this, get an extra mactusk bone, it haves like 5 days off the process), remove your saddle so he doesn’t break it when you;re not going to ride him much, feed it twigs and dragon pies for about 15 days and his hair will change and so with your “investigate message”. Then he doesn’t really need food, he just needs a salt lick.

i usually grow a dragon fruit, even as Sigurd, then get a farm of 8 going like a season in advance and collect fruits and extra seeds fro my bird in a cage.

Or make a fat beefalo for sanity, but I’ve never done that.

@lukemendes his domestication won’t fall if he has a salt lick. Just never don’t have one, and they’re cheap and last a long time. I don’t find my beefalo requires much once I reach domestication.

[Bird Up]

It is a bit too costly to tame a beefalo in public servers. It takes more than 20 days without a brush, even if you're riding it nonstop. I would only tame a beefalo in a private/permanent server, and maybe only do it for practice in a public server. I've had a few tamed beefalos in public servers. Tamed beefalo are like shiny objects to new people. They'll take your beefalo and ride it into a tentacle field if you're not careful. In a private server you don't have to worry about that.

[Brubs]

Its not very viable. Never seen a tamed beefalo or even bothered to tame one myself on public servers. With the addition of Walter and Woby i guess tamed beefalos will sadly be even rarer.

[Spep]

to sum it up: HAHAHAHAHAHA no.

[Primalflower]

On 4/30/2020 at 11:41 AM, NSAiswatchingus said:

I've had the same ornery beefalo since around day 90. On day 5650+ now in that world. I have without a doubt saved time and resources by having a tamed beefalo. 

How in the absolute underwhere have you kept a beefalo in all of its fight-picking wont-let-you-on-once-its-started-fighting wont-go-into-caves nitre-guzzling glory for well over 5600 damned days??

[Steve Raptor]

In my current play through with Warly where I play with my sister (Wigfrid) we tamed a rider beefalo and it was very worth it (around day ~150).

We also made a gossamer saddle for him as well.

Only the taming process takes time and resources, after that you don't even need to feed him anymore if you keep him near a salt lick between rides.

We ride him all the time, hes extremely fast and traversing the map while gathering resources or other stuff is very helpful.

We mass farmed dragon fruit and just fed him ~3 dragon pies per day during the taming process+brush per day.

Beefo taming is very much worth it in my opinion, talking from experience.

[NSAiswatchingus]

2 hours ago, Lbphero said:

How in the absolute underwhere have you kept a beefalo in all of its fight-picking wont-let-you-on-once-its-started-fighting wont-go-into-caves nitre-guzzling glory for well over 5600 damned days?

Keep healing supplies on you at all times for the beef. Be willing to bail out of fights if its health gets low. If you're not riding it and it starts fighting something you have to immediately jump in to end that fight. And of course, if something crazy happens, just roll it back. Ain't no body got time fo dat. 

[Well-met]

if your best solution to a mechanic is "just roll back" then that probably means it's flawed.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

1 minute ago, Well-met said:

if your best solution to a mechanic is "just roll back" then that probably means it's flawed.

Mistakes are players fault so with or without rollback, if a tamed beefalo dies is players fault but yeah, using rollback as a fact that the mechanic is good is nonsense

[fimmatek]

2 hours ago, NSAiswatchingus said:

[...] And of course, if something crazy happens, just roll it back use a panflute or telelocator staff.

FTFY

[thegreatJash]

Is very expensive. Only try if you are very far in a world and have nothing better to do. Not really worth it imo.