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 — 10 wood at a workbench. It opens like a chest. Fill it, walk away.

What it does

Animals come and eat from it. A hungry boar, wolf, lox, hen or anything else tameable walks to the nearest trough in range, takes one item out and eats it, exactly the way it would eat food dropped on the ground. Everything that follows from a meal follows from this one too — taming progresses, breeding is unblocked, tamed animals stay fed.

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

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

A taming bar. An animal 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; this just tells you how long.

Eight slots

Four by two. A trough is a meal, not a pantry.

Any food the animal in question eats works — it is the game's own list per creature, not one written down here, so a modded animal that eats something new eats it out of the trough too.

Multiplayer

Works. The trough is a container like any other, and the feeding is done by whichever client owns it, so two players' animals do not eat the same berry twice. Nothing is taken out of a trough somebody else has open.

Requires

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

Known

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 makes the mod small enough to survive a game update.

More from Cartur: HD Blood · Map Pins · Safe Stamina · Follow Command · Flooring · UI HUD · Waste Management

Changelog

1.0.1

• Multiplayer: animals eat from a trough another player owns. Before, an animal only ate if the same player owned both it and the trough, so animals could go hungry beside a full trough. A trough that someone has open is still left alone.
• Animals try every trough in range, nearest first, so an empty trough no longer hides a stocked one a few metres further away.
• Bait stays in the bowl after the area reloads.
• Fixed a possible error in the taming bar.

1.0.0

First release.

• A buildable Feeding Trough: hammer, Furniture, 10 wood at a workbench.
• Animals walk to it and eat from it, which feeds taming, breeding and upkeep.
• The bowl shows what is in it.
• Animals no longer pick the trough as something to walk over and smash.
• A taming bar under the health bar, and the time left in the hover text.