From A Newbie's Perspective, Some Suggestions.

[Cheggf]

14 hours ago, EighteenXVIII said:

It will be if I can give it like 5 sticks or grass per day and ride it without getting bucked off every 15 seconds.

That is literally exactly how it is right now. 

[Faintly Macabre]

22 hours ago, EighteenXVIII said:

It's really not. It will be if I can give it like 5 sticks or grass per day and ride it without getting bucked off every 15 seconds. Not needing to feed it stacks and stacks of twigs and grass.

He also suggests periodically getting off of your Beefalo, which is what I've been doing, and it's also absurd that you can and need to do that to stop it bucking you off.

You have to deal with being bucked off frequently for a while, but the upkeep isn't much bigger than you're asking for as long as you ride them continuously. And even with being bucked off so often, it's still much faster than you can move on your own. As for the bucking itself, it seems reasonable to me that things are tougher at the beginning of a long process and smooth out as time goes on. It's really a pretty mild inconvenience. And if you're not in a dangerous situation, you can just... let them buck you off if it bothers you so much. That's not a great idea because it can give the beefalo time to buck off its saddle, though.

22 hours ago, EighteenXVIII said:

This suggestion just highlights how poorly balanced the whole Beefalo taming mechanic is. I'm watching this guide that was actually somewhat recent (October 2021), and they suggest feeding light bulbs as well. However keeping its hunger up requires an absurd 32 twigs or 64 grass per day if you don't know about light bulbs. And apparently you can just tame it with zero hunger and feed it light bulbs of all things, because the whole mechanic wasn't confusing and misleading enough I guess?

The whole mechanic needs to be redone from scratch and simplified a lot. Making it as complicated and confusing as it is doesn't improve the game or incentivize people to bother with Beefalos.

I don't see how any of this is unbalanced, or what's misleading. What's wrong with there being multiple ways to achieve the same goal? It can seem a bit confusing, but that has a lot to do with how people convey the relevant information, i.e. overly detailed. What you actually need to know is fairly simple.

[EighteenXVIII]

20 hours ago, Faintly Macabre said:

You have to deal with being bucked off frequently for a while, but the upkeep isn't much bigger than you're asking for as long as you ride them continuously.

Yeah but nobody rides them continuously, you want to do other stuff in between that you can't do on a Beefalo. Everytime you get off you have to feed it. That's not a minor upkeep, especially early game when resources are necessary elsewhere. 

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And even with being bucked off so often, it's still much faster than you can move on your own. As for the bucking itself, it seems reasonable to me that things are tougher at the beginning of a long process and smooth out as time goes on. It's really a pretty mild inconvenience. And if you're not in a dangerous situation, you can just... let them buck you off if it bothers you so much. That's not a great idea because it can give the beefalo time to buck off its saddle, though.

It takes five whole days of domestication (if you know how to do it properly by watching the right guide) before you can ride for just one minute without getting bucked off. I suppose we have vastly different definitions of inconvenient.

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I don't see how any of this is unbalanced, or what's misleading.

I don't want to say gaslighting, but come on now. No player is going to figure out the domestication process on their own without actually finding a guide by a player that was able to make sense of the system. How are people supposed to figure out that hunger has zero impact on domestication? It's completely counterintuitive. And don't even mention the absurdity of feeding a beefalo light bulbs. As far as the unbalanced parts, again the bucking off is far too frequent early on, it costs absurd amounts of resources to keep a beefalo fed, they still reproduce even if it's a single bonded Beefalo away from the herd, they still go in heat and attack you even when bonded. And they still poop everywhere. Need I go on?

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What's wrong with there being multiple ways to achieve the same goal? It can seem a bit confusing, but that has a lot to do with how people convey the relevant information, i.e. overly detailed. What you actually need to know is fairly simple.

It is highly misleading and confusing. Imagine you didn't know anything you know now after consulting online guides. Could you figure out the different "methods" on your own? Again let me list two methods from the guide: one is feeding tons of dragon pies keeping the beefalo fed. one is starving the beefalo and feeding it light bulbs. The first one gave 26% domestication in X amount of time, the second gave 23%. Everything about it is absurd, unintuitive and unbalanced. I don't know how you can claim otherwise. It makes zero sense for them to be almost equally effective, it doesn't make sense that you need to feed it tons of food instead of a reasonable amount, and it doesn't make sense that you can feed it light bulbs.

And again you're missing my point as well. My point wasn't about "multiple ways being wrong". It was about the absurdity of having to feed a Beefalo light bulbs if you don't want to have to feed it 64 grass per day. In fact light bulbs are the only good way before you get a lategame Brush from Ewecus or Klaus. So there's only one good way as it stands, and I want there to be more good ways (like just feeding 5-6 grass per day). So actually I'm on your side here, but you're not. 

And you say what you need to know is simple. But you didn't figure out the taming process on your own. You only know what you know because of a bunch of data miners relaying the information to guide makers and forums like these. And it's not a simple mechanic at all. There's no way a casual player can or wants to go through figuring it out on their own. My first experience was my Beefalo shredding through my 4 pig skin saddle even though I had been feeding it sticks and grass. You vastly overestimate how good the average DST player is at figuring out mechanics. At that point I just thought: "well I can either deal with this when what I'm doing doesn't seem to do much, which would take 20 days at minimum even if I did it perfectly, so the way I'm going about it I would never get there", or I could say "well I just wasted four ham bats/football helmets. Let's not do that again and just forget about beefalo riding." The casual player isn't going to stick with option A very long when beefalo domestication stays as it is. Not to mention that that beefalo is inevitably going to die. And then you get to spend another 2 hours of your life domesticating a new one, assuming you're an expert who has a brush and knows exactly what to do. Again, if you think this is balanced then I don't know what to tell you.

[Faintly Macabre]

8 minutes ago, EighteenXVIII said:

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Lots of people ride them continuously? Lots of players use their first so many days just edging out or filling in the map, keeping fed with roughage. No, you don't have to feed it every time you get off. Yes, it is minor, especially since YotB made it possible to scoop up its food while you're on it. All the while you're still moving substantially faster than you would be without other speed modifiers, most of which are out of reach in the early game. Yeah, I suppose we do have different ideas of what constitutes significant inconvenience.

The fact that it's not intuitive does not make it counterintuitive. The fact that you're not led does not make it misleading. And annoying or expensive does not mean unbalanced. Words mean stuff. I'm not gaslighting because you use a bunch of words incorrectly and I call it into question.

Hunger does not have zero impact on domestication. It's just not strictly necessary to get the job done. Also, what is it with you and light bulbs? I appreciate that a lot of this process is not intuitive, but why are light bulbs more egregious than anything else? It doesn't feel the slightest bit more ridiculous to me than feeding an animal sticks. Light bulbs are actually food!

FYI, I've never fed a beefalo light bulbs. They spoil, I have to go out of my way to get them, and for the purpose of obedience, the stuff that's everywhere on the overworld works every bit as well.

No, I didn't figure it out on my own. Again, we can talk about it being unintuitive, but that wasn't what I was arguing. I also didn't say it was simple, I said what you need to know is simple.

There are plenty of things that aren't great about beefalo taming. It's a good thing I didn't say everything about it was fine and instead just responded to some specific criticisms.