Hi, made an account just to say this. I feel like the shepherd could use the functionality in the title. Currently they only harvest wool and eggs, but it would be nice if they also automatically killed the rabbits and excess animals as they are born.
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Hey there @Nos, welcome to the forums 
! I think this is a great suggestion. I’d love to see something like the way Banished works with pastures, very similar to what you suggest here.
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I would love to be able to automate shepard to automatically harvest animals once they reach the maximum allowed.
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Maybe this could be something, the shepard learns to do on a higher level?
I think if this was added the shepard would actually be useful 
Autokilling animals would be a very good idea, but you’d have to be able to select how many animals you want to keep. I don’t want a herder killing all my (his?) chickens, since that would kinda minimize my chances of getting eggs.
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I think the idea floating around is that instead of stopping new poyo/sheep/rabbit from being born as currently happens, animals that are born over the zone limit will be automatically queue up to be killed.
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I see what you mean. What I’m saying is like what jomaxro mentions. Some of the eggs you produce could be fertilized, so that new poyos come from there, while others aren’t which you then eat. When new poyos are born, some grownup poyos then get tagged for harvesting, keeping the number of overall poyos at max. Theoretically there would be a way to make it so that egg production isn’t affected too much, but I’m no game designer so I can’t say anything about that. It would help if pastures took into account animal size when you make your pastures for animal density. I get that only so many sheep fit in a 15x15 grid, but I should be able to fit at least twice as many poyos in that same space.
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it would actually be really easy, you’d just need an object that checks to see if the pen is full, if it’s full it just selects one of the fully grown animals to slaughter.
This way you’ll end up with a lot fully grown animals a couple of baby ones and then a space for another to be born.
You could have it run once every 3 hours of hearthling time and not run for a field if there is already an animal set to slaughter in that field. This will stop the game checking your fields constantly and it taking up a lot of processor power.
So, is this feature still up and coming? I would love having the sheperd kill excess animals automatically. This would allow for a steady feather, poyo meat and mutton supply instead of having to manually kill animals every now and then.
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@jomaxro Just a note to please also leave a way to automatically exclude specific animals from slaughter, such as Bluebell the sheep. 
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I’m hoping this idea is still on the table with the developers. With all the other manual things a player has to do (keep on constant lookout for enemies, managing storage, adjusting crafting queues, designing structures, etc) having to manually keep track of your animal fields can be a little time consuming. Not that I’m complaining. I just think part of a shepard’s job would be to know when to cull their field.
My idea is a slight modification to what Jomaxro stated though. I think allowing births above the pasture limit would open up a possible exploit that players could use to their advantage. Think of it, if you start a pasture and then block off all access to it, without a limit, it will just continue to grow animals until it explodes. Yea, you’ll have an animal die here and there from starvation, but I think the births will far outweigh the deaths and you’ll have a huge way to exploit a massive amount of meat.
On the other hand, if you set it so the population is kept exactly 1 animal BELOW the pasture limit then you would close off such an exploit. Let’s take a pasture with a limit of 8 Poyo, for example. In this pasture life would continue normally up until the birth of Poyo number 7. When the 8th is born it would queue one of the adults for harvest, but also stop any new births just as it does now. In the event the player has the area blocked off so the population can’t be culled back to 7, this will prevent any more Poyo from being born.
In addition to this, perhaps an option (On/Off Toggle) can be implemented on the pastures so you can enable or disable this automatic harvesting, as some players might want a field of sheep (for example) specifically just for the wool and not the meat. In addition, fields with less than a 3 animal maximum would have the automatic harvesting disabled so the population of the field can’t be dropped below 2 without the player actually killing them off themselves.
When it comes to Eggs, I think Nos hit the nail on the head there. Just adjust the egg drops from Poyo so that only a percentage of eggs are fertilized, say 60-70%, and the rest go straight to the kitchen, as it were. I could see this as a fairly simple code adjustment.
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