Quick Breeding

Breed tamed animals by hand-feeding them, instead of dropping food and waiting.

Walk up to a tamed animal, look at it and press Use. It takes one item of the configured breeding food from your inventory. Feed two animals standing near each other and you get one offspring within seconds.

Ground feeding still works exactly as it always has. Dropping food on the ground tames and breeds animals at the usual pace, untouched. Hand-feeding is simply a faster, more deliberate option on top.

Features

• Hand-feed to breed, with on-screen feedback at every step — how many feeds an animal still needs, when it is ready, and when it is expecting.
• One feeding produces one offspring. No runaway pens.
• A cooldown per animal stops the same pair being fed over and over.
• The pair is left hungry after the birth, so they will not immediately breed again on their own.
• Blocked feeds cost nothing. If an animal is on cooldown, if there are already too many animals nearby, or if nothing is close enough to pair with, you are told why and keep your food.
• Hearts appear over every animal a fed one can actually breed with, so you can see the pairing range instead of guessing at it. Hearts over nothing means move them closer.
• Each animal gets its own feed, crafted at the food preparation table from something it already eats plus a yellow mushroom. Boars simply use the yellow mushroom itself.
• Feed items are inedible — they are animal feed, not meals, and do not compete with your own food.
• Every setting is per animal, including which feed works and whether its item is created at all. Animals added by other mods appear in the config too.

Settings

Settings that affect ground feeding default to leaving the game's own values alone.

Per-animal settings

Each breedable creature gets its own section in the config, listed by name:

There is no global food list — an animal is hand-feedable only if its own entry names something.

If you would rather use an item you already have, run the game once so the sections appear, set GenerateFeedItem to false for that animal and put your chosen item in its BreedingFoods. On the next run its feed item is never created, so nothing clutters your crafting menu that you do not use.

Example setups

Three settings — CheckInterval, BreedChance and PregnancyDuration — affect ground feeding as well as hand-feeding. Setting them to 0 leaves the game's own pace alone. Everything else only affects hand-feeding.

Hand-feeding is the fast option (default)

CheckInterval     = 0
BreedChance       = 0
PregnancyDuration = 2
HandFeedCooldown  = 60
FeedsRequired     = 1

Ground feeding behaves as it always has. Hand-feed a pair and the baby arrives in a few seconds, once per minute per animal. Good if you want a quick option without changing the ground feeding mechanics.

Everything is faster

CheckInterval     = 2
BreedChance       = 1
PregnancyDuration = 2
HandFeedCooldown  = 60

Animals left with food on the ground breed several times faster than normal. Be careful: pens fill very quickly, and because ground feeding has no cooldown it can easily out-produce hand-feeding, which makes the hand-feeding pointless.

Predictable ground feeding

CheckInterval     = 15
BreedChance       = 1
PregnancyDuration = 20
HandFeedCooldown  = 60

Removes the random chance from ground feeding, so animals left with food breed on a steady, knowable schedule instead of sometimes stalling for no visible reason. Hand-feeding stays clearly the quicker route. Tune CheckInterval and PregnancyDuration up or down together to set the pace.

Larger pens

MaxCreatures      = 8
PartnerCheckRange = 20
TotalCheckRange   = 15

More animals allowed in one area before breeding stops, and they can pair up from further apart so a big pen works properly. Raise MaxCreatures carefully on a shared server — every extra animal is more for it to keep track of.

Safe to add to an existing world. Nothing about your current animals changes until you hand-feed them.

Changelog

1.3.0

• The hearts marking eligible partners are now the ones an animal gives off while settling in during taming, rather than the petting hearts.

1.2.0

• Breeding now works on a server. Feeding a pair could silently fail to do anything when the animals were being looked after by the server or another player. Singleplayer was never affected, which is why it went unnoticed.
• Hearts appear over every animal a fed one can actually breed with, so the pairing range is visible instead of guesswork. An animal that has hit the population cap shows none.
• Feeding is refused, and costs nothing, when there is nothing close enough to pair with.
• Fixed being unable to rename a tame with Shift+E while carrying breeding feed.
• Feed now stacks to 10.

1.1.0

• Settings now follow the server. If the server runs this mod, its gameplay settings apply to everyone connected, and an admin can change them in-game without anyone editing a file. Your own logging setting stays local.

1.0.0

• First release.