Husbandry

Keeping a lot of animals should not cost what it costs.

This does three things, and the first two are free — they change what the game spends, not what it does.

Idle tames think less often

Valheim runs every AI in the world every physics frame. Fifty tames is fifty full AI ticks fifty times a second, whether any of them is doing anything or not.

So a tame that is standing around — tamed, not alerted, nothing targeted, following nobody, and a fair distance from you — thinks one tick in four, or one in ten further out.

Three things this deliberately does not do:

• It never touches anything hostile. The test is the game's own tamed flag.
• It never touches anything busy. Alerted, in a fight, or at your heel means full rate.
• It does not slow animals down. UpdateAI decides; Character moves. A throttled wolf walks, falls and stands on the ground at the full physics rate — it just changes its mind less often, and the time it skipped is handed to the next tick, so every timer inside it still lands where it would have.

Breeding stops asking the same question sixty times

The single most expensive thing a large herd does is count itself. Vanilla's breeding check walks every AI in the world, comparing object names as strings and doing a GetComponent per match — up to four times per animal, per round. That is the only cost in a tame that grows with the square of the herd. Thirty wolves is about three and a half thousand string compares a round; sixty is fourteen thousand.

Husbandry takes one shared population count for everybody, buckets it by species, and puts a cap check in front of the expensive part. At the default settings the cap is the game's own cap, so nothing about breeding changes — a full pen just stops paying to rediscover that it is full.

Nothing is ever culled. The cap stops births; it never causes a death.

Animals you left somewhere get looked after

Tames in zones nobody has loaded slowly heal, and pairs slowly get on with it.

The breeding here does not spawn anything. It sets the same pregnancy stamp the game sets, and the game itself gives birth — right level, right tamed flag, its own cap check — on the first frame somebody loads the zone. So the herd grows while you are away; it just comes through the front door. A pen left a long time delivers when you arrive.

Worth knowing: unloaded tames already get hungry in vanilla, because the feeding timer is a world-time stamp rather than a loaded timer. That is not something this mod adds. It only honours it when deciding whether an unattended pair may breed.

This half runs only where the whole world lives — a dedicated server, a host, or single-player. A plain client is only sent the animals near it, so it could not do this if it wanted to. On a server, nobody else needs the mod.

Console

husbandry

What it thinks it is doing: ticks thought and skipped, the census, rounds skipped at the cap, and what the offline sweep is up to.

Settings

Everything is in BepInEx/config/dafini.husbandry.cfg. The ones worth knowing:

If something behaves oddly, ThrottleIdle = false turns off the only part that changes timing, and CheapCensus = false returns breeding to vanilla's own counting.