Animal breeding?

[mr peeps]

Something ive always really liked in this game is how the environment evolves itself. Though, I believe that if there was some kind of animal breeding system it would help out a lot. Maybe make it so that animals HAVE to eat or they'll die, maybe they just die over time, and maybe, if they overpopulate (for instance, theirs only 1 plant somewhere as a food source, and if they overpopulate the plant and die?), similarly to germs, they will steadily die off? Something like that.

[ImpalerWrG]

Meat based recipes clearly seem to imply an eventual animal breeding possibility.  I think you need to do several things to let it come into being.

Establish a type of food that makes an animal breed (I'm fine with them just reproducing asexually like yeast), this should be different from the conversions that all our animals currently do, so for example Hatches eat rocks but maybe when they Eat Algae they will multiply because that's a finite resource.

Second some kind of reasonably convenient to use feeder, Dups load stuff in it and it makes it available for animals to eat, much better then loading a compactor and dumping it's contents manually.  Third some kind of building that creates a room that is a focal point for controlling animal count and automatically creating jobs to slaughter them when the population grows above a certain amount.

[mr peeps]

Yeah, all of that. Though I realllllly think that if those let's say that shinebugs would eat, I dunno, mealworms. There was only one plant in its spawn place. It would breed (asexually/sexually I dunno) and then, let's say there were 5 for 1 plant. The plant cant sustains them, so they sadly die of starvation. Also for farming purposes, but I think something like that would be pretty cool.

[ImpalerWrG]

Sounds like your actually looking at an ecology model which operates to maintain all the animal populations before players even interact with them.  That's certainly more challenging because any player action is going to be to have the possibility of starving the animals if we upset the delicate balance of nature!

A true ecology would require more work what I described mainly because a lot of the existing critters are in really very simplistic settings, how would slickster ecology work, they are the only living thing in their biome, not much of a food-chain for them to be in.  I'm all in favor of more animal and plant types mind you, that fish from the loading screen should be in the game, maybe in the ice biome.

[InternalScreing]

I think that the Breeding Idea is a really good one (especially scene there are only two hatches in my entire base, making coal production a big issue!) plus it would give us a way to know how the game world came to be- through evolution (could selective breeding be a thing?) instead of, maybe this is all one social experiment/simulation for colonization captains to run to get good at actual colonizing.

[mr peeps]

20 hours ago, ImpalerWrG said:

Sounds like your actually looking at an ecology model which operates to maintain all the animal populations before players even interact with them.  That's certainly more challenging because any player action is going to be to have the possibility of starving the animals if we upset the delicate balance of nature!

A true ecology would require more work what I described mainly because a lot of the existing critters are in really very simplistic settings, how would slickster ecology work, they are the only living thing in their biome, not much of a food-chain for them to be in.  I'm all in favor of more animal and plant types mind you, that fish from the loading screen should be in the game, maybe in the ice biome.

Ok thinking about it again, maybe not so good. I still think that ALL creatures should have to eat something. Maybe not as like, drastic as I was saying.

[Tonywolf1997]

I think breeding should be done after a specific building is built and then the creature is relocated into that area, after that dupe can periodically feed them to have more productivity as well as more meat. We don't really need slaughter house or anything but instead, combat should be made relevant 

[mr peeps]

21 hours ago, Tonywolf1997 said:

I think breeding should be done after a specific building is built and then the creature is relocated into that area, after that dupe can periodically feed them to have more productivity as well as more meat. We don't really need slaughter house or anything but instead, combat should be made relevant 

Thats a pretty good Idea!

[server075]

+1 on that

i like the idea =)

[BlueLance]

Well there you go, breeding it out.

[Tonywolf1997]

That was fast consider this post timing 

[mr peeps]

15 hours ago, BlueLance said:

Well there you go, breeding it out.

OMG that is some impeccable timing. I really like what they're doing with the update; its like all our ideas mixed together!