My cook made plenty of poyo and rabbit feed, yet most of my chickens and rabbits are hungry. Is there something I’m supposed to do to get the food to the animals? I assumed the shepherd handled this but now I’m not so sure. I have one shepherd. Maybe I should promote another because maybe he’s overworked and can’t get to all the animals?
The livestock food is crafted by the cook now. You have to prepare it and then the shepherd will feed them, I think.
Mhmmmm and I think there is a kind of bug at this level because I too get sometimes some starving cattle with plenty of food in stockpile. Could be related to the AI problem Tommy is working on…
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I’ve noticed this but only if the shepherd is busy with trying to return animals to their appropriate place all the time, it seems that gets prioritised over everything else… even letting the poor animals starve.
That’s bad… 
Let’s turn this into a bug report while we wait for more confirmations…
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I can confirm this!
But it’s not only that for me…
My SHepard let’s my animals starve, but luckily he very very very rarely feeds them. Now the thing is the only pen that the shepard feels like using is the rabbit one and thus the rarely feeding only happens for them…
For some reason he doesn’t care about chickens and sheep… All he does is go to the rabbit pen and call stray animals back to the pen until he gets hungry and goes to eat or goes to bed. After that the loop repeats…
Yes this bug really hampers down the farming of animal meat in game, also I’ve noticed that shepherds will always prioritize the Poyos over anything.
Also was just wondering if different farm animals will be implemented into the game etc. horse, cow or if charmable animals like wolves or hounds that help with trapping is a possibility?
Yeah, what seems to generally happen is
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Rabbit population explosion
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Rabbit population explosion means at least two or three rabbits will always be outside of their pasture
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Shepherd returns them to pasture over all other jobs, including feeding
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Rabbits continue to starve and therefore numbers increase further because they cannot be slaughtered
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Go to 1 and repeat cycle, infinitely
Part of the issue seems to be Shepherd’s glacially slow movement speed.In my last game the Shepherd never even captured a first initial Poyo until Day 29 because he got stuck in a rabbit loop (and that was even with me slaughtering a lot of rabbits).
I think there are a couple of things that could be better about Shepherds.
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Do they really need to chase down lost sheep and drag them back at the slowest possible speed? It was a nice idea, but now that animals need feeding (and someone needs to make that food!) it seems a bit like overkill. Without a farmer, a cook and a shepherd, you can’t have a poyo dinner. Having a second shepherd spending all his time chase down strays seems like overkill and takes away from the original idea of each Hearthling feeling valuable.
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Rabbits should not be able to breed if they haven’t been fed. In fact, rabbits should be “well fed” before they can breed. A breeding rabbit should not be well fed unless the shepherd has had a chance to feed it. To ensure that, a rabbit that has grown up from a baby rabbit should never be “well fed” and able to breed. That’ll close off a loop-hole and ensure that rabbits can’t breed exponentially without the shepherds doing a thing.
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Agreed, the system is a fantastic base but needs some tweaking. The game I’m currently working on, the Shepard rounded up two sheep and one chicken and then got busy rounding up strays. Only one chicken after several game weeks and the Shepard still won’t go round up a second one so they can breed. Chasing strays would be better if it was harder for the animals to escape the pens, right now they just walk out the gate as soon as they are herded back to the pens.
I can confirm that this is an issue, the shepherd definitely “seems” to prioritize herding animals over feeding.
And with the issue of animals being able to get out of gate…
This is also an issue. I understand the initial reason for the speed before feeding was introduced, but now it does not work.
@sdee & @8BitCrab: Is this still a thing in the latest build? Because I was just playing for several consecutive hours today (with crafter log detail enabled), and toward the end of the night began noticing my poyos were starving (with food available in storage), but my shepherd was only choosing to feed my rabbits and sheep. Watching his work pattern, he was acting as if the poyos didn’t exist at all (resting by the fire, sleeping, feeding other animal types, eating, etc) and very little idle time.
For a second I thought maybe my stonehearth.log file had grown so large that it was bogging down the game, and while it was 245mb, and the game had begun to lag pretty badly, the bad shepherd behavior was persisted after removing the log detail and rotating the log file. It was still there after reloading from my save. Want to have a look?
I didn’t want to submit a duplicate ticket for it, if this one is still a problem. Please advise?
Edit: I found a work around to the gate pathing problem that allows livestock to escape pens: don’t use fence gates. Then add a two-high ladder on both sides of the fence. Animals will follow the shepherd in, and any animal type in tow that doesn’t match the pasture she’s in will follow you back out, but the rest will stay in.
So, whatever is causing my shepherd to ignore my poyos is not related to the constant corralling problem brought on by escapee livestock.
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hmm… i don’t know, but its not in [res]… or even [Ack] so i’m going to say that it isn’t. i’ll page @yshan @Albert to see if they know if it should have been fixed.
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FYI: On a whim I thought maybe there was a problem with the pasture definition itself. I removed it and recreated it, and while the shepherd rehearded them into the new pasture (even though 3 out of four poyos hadn’t even left yet), she still didn’t feed them.
So then I thought maybe this is an inventory glitch. Maybe I don’t actually have 1 poyo feed. So I special ordered one, and they were immediate fed!
My cook has a maintain order to keep 1 animal feed of each type on hand at all times. The cook would have replaced it if it’s been fed, and apparently had done so, but no one could use it.
Only thing I can think of either someone claimed the feed and then never acted on it, marking it as ‘spoken for’ and then never releasing it, or there is some other bug causing inventory items to become unusable.
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is the feed in crates? because that could potentially cause problems, same as it did for pets here,
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Hmm. Yes, it is. And if this is the problem, good catch.
Though, in the Dev 2630 ticket, that was a fox unable to find its own food in crates. In this case, we’re talking about a Hearthling unable to find food. If these are related, it suggests there’s a larger, more general “crates are causing item location problems” kind of issue. Yes?
If so, then I think we’ve moved from Suggestion/Omission territory into Bug land.
Thoughts?
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[quote=“megashub, post:16, topic:16877”]
it suggests there’s a larger, more general “crates are causing item location problems” kind of issue. Yes?
[/quote]well, crates have always been slightly problematic ever since they were added, so i wouldn’t be too surprissed if that was the case.
would you be able to quickly remove the food from the crate and then see if they get fed?
For the record, I did test this and they do get fed.
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