Cartur's Feeding Trough

A trough your animals eat out of, so you stop throwing food on the floor.

Build it with the hammer under Furniture. It costs 10 wood and needs a workbench. It opens like a chest. Fill it and walk away.

What it does

A hungry boar, wolf, lox, hen or any other tameable animal looks for food the way it normally would. If there is none on the ground, it tries the troughs in range, nearest first, and eats from the first one that holds something it will eat. The trough puts one item in the bowl for it, so the animal eats it exactly as it would eat food dropped on the floor. Everything that follows from a meal follows from this one too, so taming progresses, breeding is unblocked and tamed animals stay fed. How far an animal will look is the game's own food search range for that animal. The mod has no range setting for that search.

The bowl shows what is in it. Put berries in and you see berries. It is drawn from the items' own models and is local decoration only, so there is nothing to pick up and nothing to desync.

A buildable piece is something the AI can decide to attack, and a plain chest is on the "walk over and break it" list, which is the one thing you do not want from the object you use to lure animals in. That is turned off here, so animals won't go out of their way to smash the trough. A raid that is already fighting you can still wreck it.

An animal that is being tamed gets a yellow bar under its health bar, and its hover text gains the time left. Both read the game's own taming countdown, so the bar stalls exactly when the taming does, while the animal is hungry or frightened. Vanilla already tells you which of those it is. This only tells you how long.

Eight slots

The inventory is four by two. A trough is a meal, not a pantry. Any food the animal eats works. It is the game's own list per creature and not one written down in the mod, so a modded animal that eats something new eats it out of the trough too.

Multiplayer

It works. The trough is a container like any other. Whichever player's client is running a hungry animal feeds it from the trough. If the trough is not open, that client takes ownership of it first, so two animals do not eat the same berry twice. Nothing is taken out of a trough somebody else has open.

Settings

All in BepInEx/config/cartur.feedingtrough.cfg. Nothing below changes the game until you change it. Breeding and drops run on whichever machine owns the animal, so on a dedicated server the mod has to be installed on the server too.

Breeding (restart the game after changing)

• MaxCreaturesMultiplier (default 1, the game's own limit). How many animals of one kind breed in one spot: the game stops breeding when adults plus young reach 4 to 10 depending on the animal, which is why a well-fed pen quietly stops. 4 takes a boar pen from 5 to 20, and a hen run from 10 to 40.
• MaxCreaturesMinimum (0), TotalCheckRangeOverride (0, up to 64 m) and PartnerCheckRangeMultiplier (1) tune the same check. The count range is capped at 64 m because the game only counts animals that happen to be loaded beyond that.

Taming (restart the game after changing)

• MoreTameableAnimals (default false). The bear (Bjorn), Neck, Hatchling and Deathsquito become tameable and breed into more of themselves, eating foods the mod lists.
• ExtraTameables (empty). More animals, including ones from other mods, written Prefab:Donor:Food,Food and separated by semicolons, for example Neck:Boar:FishRaw,RawMeat. The donor is a vanilla tameable (Boar, Wolf or Lox) whose taming effects and numbers are copied. Only creatures with MonsterAI and Humanoid can eat, so deer, hares and seals cannot be added.
• ListTameCandidates (false). Writes the prefab names of every creature that could be made tameable, other mods' included, to the BepInEx log at startup.

Production (restart the game after turning it on)

• PassiveProduction (default false). A fed, tame animal periodically drops a share of what it would give if killed: hide, pelt, feathers, fangs. Meat and trophies never come this way. A few well-kept animals instead of a big farm. ProductionInterval (600 s) is how long it must stay fed between drops, going hungry restarts the count, and ProductionPercent (0.25) is the share of a kill's drops.

Reach

• ConfinedReach (default 0, off). For pens and towers where an animal sits in a tight cell beside the trough and never eats. Above 0, an animal that many metres or closer, with nothing solid between it and the bowl, is fed even when the game finds no walking path to the trough. Try 3 for a 2x1 or 2x2 cell.

Compatibility and known issues

Requires Jötunn, which registers the piece and renders its build-menu icon.

The trough is a reskinned wood chest under the hood, so it inherits the chest's build snapping and destroy behaviour. That is deliberate. It is what keeps the mod small enough to survive a game update.

Install

Use a mod manager (r2modman, Thunderstore or Gale) and it pulls in BepInEx and Jötunn for you. To install by hand, drop CarturFeedingTrough.dll into BepInEx/plugins along with Jötunn.

Discord: bug reports, install help, and mod requests. Bug reports get their own thread so nothing is lost in a chat scroll, and requests are voted on.

Free, and always will be. If it improved your game you can tip me on Patreon.

More from Cartur: HD Blood · Map Pins · Compass and Clock · Safe Stamina · Follow Command · Flooring · UI HUD · Waste Management · Combat Text