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I'd really like it if the text for different traits is coloured so we can easily identify them. Green for speed, blue for draft and red for combat.

Hello, Wurmians! I'm excited to bring another sneak peak along for this issue of the Valrei International, introducing few new items being added in with the upcoming Animal Update to make feeding your pets easier. Maybe you live in a dwarven-inspired underground village, and your grazers are unable to find grass tiles to graze on and need to be fed with piles and in hitching posts. Or, if you are a creature collector like I am, you're probably tired of hand feeding your non-grazing critters or throwing their food into piles on the ground. Countless times I've been swiped at by my hostile pets (Didn't they ever hear "Don't bite the hand that feeds you?") while trying to drop some tasty morsels into their pens. I'm happy to say that those days have come to an end! Get ready for a much easier.... Feeding Time! Introducing Hay Stacks, Pet Bowls and Feeding Troughs! These handy containers are perfect for popping into pens and enclosures to make sure everyone's well fed for a longer period and (bonus!) the ground isn't cluttered with food piles. Hay stacks will be perfect for your underground and indoor stables and grazer pens. Bowls and troughs will hold any food items edible by animals, so you can feed meat eaters, herbivores, and omnivores with one container. These new feeding items also have a fancy new mechanic to keep your pets from gathering on the same tile around them. When creatures get hungry, they will walk to the food container, eat, and then return to their original position. This can be seen in the video below: Better Breeding As mentioned before, there is a rework to traits that will provide more benefits to careful breeding of your creatures. 23 new traits have been added, and traits now belong to particular categories with changes to how traits are passed on and calculated. Parents sharing a majority of traits in one particular category increases the chance for all traits in that category to be passed on. Speed trait parents are more likely to have speed trait offspring, draft parents will more likely produce draft traited offspring, and so on. The categories are as follows: Speed - Giving ridden creatures a bonus to their riding speed. These no longer increase the speed of vehicles the animal may be hitched to. Draft - Allowing creatures to carry more, and providing speed bonuses to vehicles with hitched animals. Heavier loads will slow vehicles down, but draft animals will increase speed of the vehicle they are hitched to. Bison will have a large natural bonus on top of draft traits. Combat - These traits focus on combat bonuses, reduction in damage taken, and improving taming. Creatures with these traits can be easier to tame, and stay tame longer. Resource - Effect output for things like wool and milk, as well as the quality and quantity of butchered products. Miscellaneous - General traits with a range of effects like preventing creatures to roam even without a saddle, reducing food consumption, and reducing the chance to pack tiles. Negative traits - ones which have effects that may reduce usefulness. A few rare traits have been added which won’t be seen (or passed on) as easily/often as normal traits. These have wonderful effects like making aggressive creatures permanently passive (hello, house cats!), the ability to produce twins with identical traits when bred, and riding up slightly steeper slopes. Creatures may only have one rare trait. Traits will no longer directly be capped by your Animal Husbandry level. Each trait is now worth a certain amount of points, and you may have points up to your Animal Husbandry level. Rare traits will cost no points against your total. This point system will be explained further once the update is ready to be released. EDIT: There will no longer be negative point traits as mentioned previously due to the idea that priests and inbreeding would be mandatory for breeding the best stock. Shaping Up Beautifully These trait categories bring us to the addition of new shapes for our equine friends based on the traits they posses. This will bring more variety to the look of your herds and provide visual clues to the best use for each particular animal. Malena has made some wonderful images to show the changes, and provided a great explanation of the different shapes. Hot blooded horse: These will be your riding horses, with speed traits. Warm blooded horse: This is the default that we have in the game now (an "all round" horse with no qualities that make it especially stand out more in one category) Cold blooded horse: Stronger and able to work more efficiently. These will be your draft trait horses. Below is Malena's original suggestion post explaining the thoughts behind these new shapes and images of the above body styles in each color of horse: In Game Wurmpedia Polished Remember that peek at the in game Wurmpedia a few Valrei Internationals ago? Well, it's been polished and is looking quite pretty! Here's an image of how it fits in to the look of the new UI: It scales nicely as well! Community Event: Friendship Bay Summer Impalong And last, but not least, here's a shout out for the 4th Annual Friend-a-long! Hosted in Friendship Bay on Pristine in the Southern Freedom Isles. Only players on the Southern Cluster will be able to attend. Here's a link to the forum post for more details: I would love to feature some Northern Isles community events, so if you Northerners are working on one please let me know! I've been watching, hoping to see one to feature. That's it for this issue of the Valrei International! I'll leave you with a picture of the adorable donkeys and the first sneak peek at mules! We do expect to have the animal update released by the end of this month, so be ready to plan out your breeding programs and animal living areas! Happy Wurming everyone!

I understand that this affects different people in different ways, so I can see why some people are feeling on edge about this update, but a lot of the negativity here is coming from speculation since we don't have all the details yet. I also want to point out that different people will be affected in different ways, since this is a sandbox after all with many diverse play styles and the negativity here certainly does not represent the whole community. For someone like me with a more relaxed play style who enjoys doing a little of everything and loves animal husbandry, the changes coming are incredibly exciting. If my current horses are suddenly not the fastest anymore, well that gives me something new to explore and fresh goals I'm excited to work on. I enjoy grooming the animals as part of my daily routine and look forward to doing that again. There are also a lot of significant changes in this update that have nothing to do with horses. There are some serious quality of life improvements here that a lot of people have been wishing for! Most people don't bother keeping pigs because feeding them is tedious and they eat so much compared to what they produce. Now you can breed pigs that will produce more meat while eating less! I'm not a fan of the way enchanted grass looks, but feel forced to use it because animals are constantly packing down tiles and it's tedious to keep replanting. A herd of cows on natural grass that are less prone to packing tiles and are also able to produce more, higher quality hides? AWESOME!!! Cows that produce more milk and don't run away the split second they are unhitched from the milking post? How convenient A pet bear that's actually useful as a hunting companion and can wander freely around the deed without attacking me? Yes please!!!! Any major change is going to be an adjustment and nothing the developers do will ever please everyone. Some aspects of this might suck for a while, but overall this sounds like a massive improvement to a part of the game that definitely needed some attention and I am super excited to explore the new things to come Also, can we maybe be a little kinder to the people who are working hard to build this game we all love? I can't imagine presenting my work to people and getting ripped apart for every little detail that isn't exactly to their liking. It certainly wouldn't make me want to do more for them. Of course we should voice our concerns when we have them but there's no reason to be so hostile.

I have 2 characters with Animal Husbandry. Malena on the old servers, Saphireena on the new servers. Malena started her journey in life in 2013 and once she was finally able to breed 5-speeds in 2015, she opened up her horse market on Xanadu. Everything was hunky dory until her AH skill quickly hit the dreaded 60 skill mark. Every horse breeder is faced with this dilemma before long and many solve it by creating additional alts. I didn't want to burn myself out on Wurm however, so I decided to go a different route and just sell "5-speeds with additional good traits" instead. As many of you know, I've been selling "5-speed + spark" horses on Xanadu for years now and the plan was that when Malena hits 70 (she has 69.63 now) that I'll just add another positive trait like "strong and healthy". Although choosing this path has surely lost me a lot of potential customers who go for pure 5-speeds, it's all worked out in the end because I managed to find my own niche in the horse selling business and have become known as the one selling nice riding horses with "added benefits". When the new servers were released last summer, I started up my character Saphireena and naturally wanted her to be a horse breeder as well. Once she hit the 50 mark, admittedly I did pause to think about what I'm going to do. In the end I decided to stick to the formula that was working so well for me on Xanadu, so I intentionally raised her skills to over 60 as well, so I could get spark in there. I figured that since all other breeders are selling pure 5-speeds, it would probably be wise to stick to my niche over on the new servers as well. Saphireena's current skill is 62.96. So it's just the two characters with AH. I do have alts, but they're only for digging and mining stuff. I hope you enjoyed that little story and that it that answers your question Cessi 🙂

While we're here, I'd like to propose another suggestion: Please let people who are not mayor rename branded animals via the permissions feature. Possibly as a deed permission. There are breeders who name their branded animals like "FM, CM" which can be very helpful for many people. The fact that only a mayor can do so can be very frustrating for a villager who is doing the AH stuff and things on the deed. You shouldn't need to call your mayor over every time you want to rename newborn foals.

Now I know you're trying to understand, but i have to point out that malenas suggestion was PURELY about different horse builds, zero to do about traits, and was done WELL before wurm ever thought about going on steam. Insinuating that this is some underhanded move to gain a few coins is not fair to the work and effort she put in to her suggestion about giving more variety to horse builds. 23 traits is a lot, and I'm getting the idea that genesis is going the way of the nahjo, because everyone has pointed out how easily it would allow gaming the system. Interesting developments nonetheless, kind of hoping more cow varieties or ambient sounds come with it

jesus, just grind AH over 50, its not even that hard. You don't expect person with 50 WS to sell top notch weapons, you dont expect us all to sit at 50 skill, do you? All your folks crying I have 50 AH, i'm gonna be nerfed is ridiculous. Even if old 5s is not optimal anymore so what, it's still equal start for everyone, as long as it isn't nerfed in speed compared to now. @DemonaNightshadeI belive the real question behind all this whining and concerns is, will current 5s horses be heavily nerfed in speed compared to now? or they will be of equal speed of what we have now, and new horses have potential to be faster... Because if i could ride at lets say 25 km/h and now i can ride only at 15 km/h and need to wait several months to get to 25 again then thats really bad, and people will be upset. We need more clarification about speed traits and how will they work with actual numbers

I really wish new things could come without nerfs. Im not really sure either how playing in a village/community will help when they arent allowed access to genesis... did someone forget fo is white light and the game isnt only pve

This is an important point and something that I think goes overlooked. Lots of players seem to believe that they should be richly rewarded for grinding arbitrarily high in any skill. In reality, skills where you CAN be useful or competitive or self sufficient without needing world-class levels in them are important for the game. Not only for solitary players and pvpers that just want to "check off" AH from their grind list and move to other things, but for players that DO want to specialize in them, participating in economy and/or their community, without needing to grind endlessly. When I played as a teenager, I almost exclusively did strongwall and enchanted grass casts, as those were 2 things that required no traditional Wurm grinding but let me be useful and make some money. Not all skills have to be worthwhile grinds to 90.

Not to be a party pooper, but with all the complains about huge deeds already hogging up most of animal numbers (in new servers), what do you think will happen with double the limits?

I hope some consideration will be put in to balancing this properly to possibly address some of the issues a lot of people commenting here have, such as their 50 AH skill can't compete with 90 AH skill anymore. I'm in firm belief that a higher skill should be better than a lower skill. This is how it works for more or less every skill in wurm. Let' me give a hypothetical balancing act: Let's say 50 AH can breed a full speed horse (hot blooded), with every speed trait. Or a full draft horse (cold blooded) with every draft trait. Maybe they'll need to use a few negative traits or maybe they'll need to grind to 64 AH to only need 1 negative trait or however those players would want to tackle the problem. Maybe someone will be using a ton of negatives and pull this off at 40 skill (see someone making a very good pizza at 50HFC using every ingredient vs someone using half the ingredients at 90hfc making a worse pizza, for example). A lot of people would probably be fine with their riding horse being unable to be used as a hitched animal or that their hitched animal cannot be unhitched to be ridden. Therefore, 50 AH might still be useful to provide animals for those players. I can imagine people paying more for a rare slope traited Cold blood horse than a non rare traited horse a 90+ skiller can produce. But then some people might want to be able to unhitch a single horse from their cart to use as a riding horse.. So a 90+ AH player may be able to breed a "spraft" horse (warm blooded), that could have this very niche usefulnes. They would probably end up more expensive to buy in the market, for obvious reasons. If that hypothetical scenario would end up being reality, then I don't see any issues at all. Yes, some people will get negatively affected in the way that they can't sell the very best goods at 50 skill, but honestly, they also shouldn't be able to. Animal husbandry is annoying to grind? Let's see weapon smiths complain about that and be given the ability to sell the very best weapons at 50 skill. Basically, it's too early to complain and whine. To the whiners: Can we just try the constructive criticism/suggestions/discussion approach instead? Feel free to start whining once it's on the test servers and getting dangerously close to release without improvements, such as what happened to combat.

This all sounds so needlessly complex, hopefully the reality of it in action is not as bad as it looks. At the least, it's looking like breeding without using a Fo priest, as I currently do, will not be a valid option any more. Current speed traited stock should not get any slower with these changes, if the traits they have remain, so should the benefits from them, and adding particular traits to them with ongoing breeding should have the possibility to make them faster. If it works to actually slow them down, this is not an update, it's a straight out nerf. Can we get an answer as to what the actual effect will be on current 5 speed trait horse stock? Going to be so sad that speed traited horses are going to look like the hot blooded model, they look positively sickly in the preview Can we get some transparency in this whole points system with a working list of what the traits are, their effect, and what their point value is? IE at 50 AH, is it even possible to breed a horse the same speed as you can now? Or will it require more just to get back to where we are now?

so what i'm reading is its gonna take a year+ to get a breeding stock set up (even more for pvp which would want a mix of speed/combat traits) with specific horse types and lots of negative traits (with fo global ###### this up so you have to bash any fo altars too) so you can maximize positive trait count after genesis and you kill 99% of horses because they're pulling wrong trait pools/don't have right rare trait, then you gotta throw horse color into the equation for personal horses yay or nay

Is it too late to get a bigger horse name pool too? Part of the fun is seeing what names horses are born with. Excited for the update!

I'm simplifying this a bit and liberally using wogic. You have been warned! Camellia could be converted into white, green and black tea varieties via the following methods: Camellia + Frying pan + Campfire = Camellia, white Camellia + Frying pan + Oven = Camellia, green Camellia + Acorn + Frying Pan + Oven/Forge/Campfire = Camellia, black (high tannin content) For jasmine teas; combine greenish-yellow flowers with honey to get jasmine flowers, and add to the pot with chopped white, green or black camellia. - greenish-yellow flowers, because they are relatively rare but otherwise unutilised. For coffee, combine cocoa beans with lingonberries to get raw coffee beans. (Because lingonberries look most like growing coffee fruits, they are foragable and harvestable, and turndra tiles are undervalued) These must then be roasted (roasting pan) and ground (mortar and pestle) before being brewed. I'm not even going to list what recipes coffee could be used in, because hey, you can already fill in the blanks here, right??

I'm very excited about this update. I'm wondering by the way if the feeding bowls/troughs will slow decay of food. If it's still very quick, it might partially hinder it's own goal of making it easier to feed our critters.

Also, and this will be brand new for Wurm Online, you will be able to tell by the graphics used for the horse whether it's the 'hot-blooded'. 'warm-blooded'. or 'cold-blooded' model to know if it has traits primarily for speed, hauling, or other. This goes for even if you're a brand new character without any Animal Husbandry skill gained and can be seen from a distance, not only when you're close enough to click on it to examine. I personally think this aspect of it is a very nice addition, even if there are questions about other aspects of the Animal Update.

I look forward to all the theorycrafting that negative traits/genesis and ambiguously worded traits will bring. For all those panicking about slowed horses: the draft traits didn't do a lot for speed anyway unless you were carrying a lot, from the sounds of it the traits used for 5 speed horses aren't actually changing at all! For all those worried that their 50AH isn't competitive: show me the other skill that's competitive at 50? What I am scared of is Holy Crop doing unwanted Genesis casts, now that negative traits serve a function! And praying there's a trait that stops hellhorses unhitching at old/venerable! Here's some questions that might put a lot of troubled people at ease: How do our current generic 5-speed horses/hellhorses/bison measure up when riding/hitched compared to the after the patch? Is 50 AH enough to breed our current generic 5-speeds? And a personal one: Will anything be done about the abysmal base body strength (without traits) of all varieties of horses? 25? I've seen stronger newbies than these horses.

So I am not sure what the impact will be on the total creature counts, but in the current system, most casual breeders that only care about maintaining a group of 5s horses will have a stock of cared for breeding pairs of each color, then their actual hitched and saddled horses for daily use. Probably totaling around 20-30 horses. This count fits well on a small deed and just a few free alts leveled to 20 AH to care for. Suggestion: Double creature ratio for "on deed", so people don't feel like they need to resize their deeds to handle breeding with the new system. New system sounds like it will at a minimum require at least double the number of breeding pairs, since we will now need the riding and draft horses. What impact will this have on the servers? I assume it has been looked at for performance? I imagine it is ok, since the servers are all way under their peak populations now? This would have been a terrible update to add in near the NFI launch for sure. How about the convenience of riding a cart to a hunt, unhitching one of the horses and using it for the hunt/rift etc? Will there be huge differences in speeds of draft vs riding horses? Is everyone going to lead extra riding animals to these events now? How much impact will cart/wagon load have on speeds, when rigged up with top draft vs top riding traited horses? Will we still be able to haul a fully loaded cart around at "escape agro" speeds? I am imagining how slow my alt gets when carrying 20 rocks and seeing that translate to riding/carting would be one of the worst QoL fails imaginable. I am sure it isn't that extreme, but it would be great to have some idea. Edit: After dwelling on this for a day, I am looking forward to this update. It seems like AH will be so much more interesting and honestly, it was terribly broken before. There should always be a great benefit to advancing a skill to the highest levels possible, rather than being penalized for hitting 60+

I sense a lot of negativity here, so let's try something different... Wow, this sounds amazing, this is really great work and possibly the biggest possible improvement to Wurm I can remember. I haven't played for a while, and stuff like this almost makes me want to come back! Great work everyone on the team, I hope this works out. Some of the people complaining here probably also felt bad when ?-bags had graphics added.

I see no advantage to negative traits, even if they do have a negative cost, and can allow another 'slot' for a good trait - they are still bound to impact on new players and on breeding. I don't see how negative traits can add anything to player enjoyment? We have the unique opportunity here to remove all negativity and unnecessary disappointment from animal breeding and husbandry once and for all. Why are we wasting this chance? Just my opinion.

I'm trying to be optimistic about this update but I can't say I'm looking forward to 5 speed horses being insufficient. The amount of effort required just to get the same level of functionality as I have now looks like too much.

This time rift is at southwest corner of J14. Terrain is ok, not the best, but more flat around beam than you might expect on mountain. Safe area is on south side of the rift area, but access to area is through west/northwest or north. So if you arrive after rift's opening, you will need to pass close to the beam to access safe area (which is more rideable and convenient side to do any fighting from). Map below shows the location and there is packed path you can follow from highway (blue line on map). Once packed ground ends, you have reached the rift area (can't pack or dig that) so the way to safe area is lined with felled trees. Just follow them past the beam. Big thank you goes for Jaegar for setting up the safe area. For time of the rift check: https://www.niarja.com/universes/online/rifts - Nestangol (Mayor of Northwind Cove, owner of Hermit's Rest, Maker of West Hammer Lake Canals etc.)

This looks really good, looking forward to check it out when it goies live. One thing im a bit worried about is what this will do with the animals count on the server. Seems like more animals will be stored on deed, does this effect wild animals numbers?

I agree with this, in that I hope it gets removed. The upside of having a rare color give extra performance is fun in certain aspects but it comes at the cost of min-maxers feeling like they can't aesthetically customize by using their favorite color/skin. With the new proposed changes, we will get something that fills the same niche/role/feeling that breeding a specific rare color currently fills; Breeding a specific rare trait. This is a perfect opportunity to get rid of the bonus to ebony/molten and allow min-maxers to not have to choose between using ebony/moltens to min-max or feeling bad about not using them. I love the nightshade skin of hell horses but I currently use moltens on my hell cart because, while the 2.5% speed isn't that big of a number, it still makes a difference on something that can reach the kind of speeds that my hell cart does.

More thoughts: Almost every single current well bred bison will become useless, both for pulling and for breeding - the 3 speed traits that worked will do nothing, and with 3 speed traits and at best 2 current draught traits, will breed for more speed traits via the mechanic stated thus making them utterly useless for working toward the new goals. Inbreeding for neg traits will be a desirable action. WTG! Breeders with 70 or more ah that bred 5 speeds with spark and healthy plus another non combat trait are going to have a nightmare I think. 3 speed, 3 misc (?) 2 draught - what they get pulling from the pool is going to be all over the place i think. Will having a 7 trait horse with the dominant being speed mean the foals are more inclined to replace existing traits that are currently shared, or will they continue to have majority foals with the same traits as parents? Spent my day wandering round foaling yards looking at new arrivals that I have spent months developing to be 5 speeds straight, and every one that is, is now a sadness to me. To those that say 50 AH breeders shouldn't be able to produce horses as good as 90 breeders, its not so much about that, as the fact that we used the existing mechanic in a different way to work to 5 speed horses, this was not easier than getting more AH and being able to afford spare neutral or neg traits, it's a process of strict selective breeding of clean traited horses, any horse with a neutral is essentially useless to you. In addition, these are only better to other 50 ah breeders, as a general horse they were worse than 5 speed with spark and healthy. Trust me, I could have been breeding and selling 5 speed horses much earlier on the new cluster by not stopping grooming at the points I did. I set out with the specific goal to produce 5 speed horses that others could breed their own 5 speeds from without needing higher AH. A specific niche market so to speak. Now my entire breeding stock has two traits I don't want. Imagine if you affinity food now gave a negative effect as well as a positive one on every one you have pre made, or your weapons and tools you have produced now damage more from use or something... this is where the negativity comes from. As pointed out above, the more traits you currently have bred for with higher AH, the less free traits you will have on your existing good stock. A 2 traited draught animal with a couple of negatives is now better than your 5 speed or 7/8/9 traited horses for breeding draught horses, or a 3 speed traited horse with any negatives is better for breeding speed ones. New reason to raid fallen deeds asap? To get the previously crap horses that will form the basis of your new breeding lines. Months of breeding lines, all down the drain. I just pulled my 4 speed ebony horses off the merchant - after recently clearing almost all my remaining 4 speeds, they are now my most desirable stock.

To be fair, there is pointed discussion and then there is slander and in a game where where ones reputation is all one has, I do take it serious. I appreciate the apology, though slightly back handed as it is, bringing up political correctness and different generations as if that has any factor into this debate when you don't know me, my age or what I look like or anything else out side of this and even suggesting that any of those things factor into anything outside of what I have shared with you and my motivations as to why I will defend my rep to the end. It really is as simple as that. Has nothing to do with any generation that I may or may not be a part of, it is purely from the point of view of taking such things serious in a game where ones name is all they have. I've build up my name since 2012 in this game and it means alot to me. That is my reference point and the background that I come from when dealing with these situations. The other points are all valid and I agree with them outside of your conclusion that there is no problem needing to be fixed, but that is something that we can agree to disagree on. It is very easy to tag many mobs when you have 100+ people at a rift, some of the early Cadence ones had 160 people, so ya, it was crazy. There is no way even with tagging to get high numbers when there are only 18 people, or even 40 people. My statements were always from the point of view of my past experiences on Harmony and Cadence, nothing more nothing less. The decline is there already, every rift there are less and less people, I know of 8 people who won't go to rifts anymore because there is no way that they feel they can compete against those that tag, without tagging themselves, which I will say is not fun to do. But it is a valid game system that is in place so I take no issue with those that do it. Adding in more rewards, reworking the tagging system so that those that don't go because of it may choose to go again are all things that I think are important to talk about, and that is what we are here to do, have that talk about why we think it is broken based upon our experiences and ideas on how to fix it. People should not have to cheese the system to feel like they are competing.

I not so sure that's accurate, the three speed traits should affect speed directly, and the two "draught" traits effect speed by allowing more weight. If the traits continue to do this, then the horses will not actually be any slower.... they just won't be the straight out fastest horse you can breed, and you will need to weigh (excuse the pun) up if you want a horse that doesn't slow down as much when you are overweight, or one that can be faster when it's not encumbered? It seems to be more clear that the speed traits will have no effect when hitched, but as I said, up front transparency would be greatly appreciated. On a re-read, I think what is actually the most upsetting is the fact that the ONLY way to get the best horses will involve gaming AH skill by the use of negative traits and a Fo priest to remove them afterwards. This seems to me to be vastly unfair to the majority of players who don't have a Fo priest. Imagine telling a smith or carpenter that the only way they can craft the best gear is by having a priest cast something that boosts the ql a certain percent, or that you can't create a top ql tool unless it has some other flaw that is required to be removed once you have pushed it as far as you can - this is the equivalent. On a positive note, the feeding changes look awesome, I would have said this sooner, but by the time I got to the end of the OP, the AH stuff had totally driven it from my mind.

Could it be stated the minimum AH needed to consistently breed the fastest mounts without negative traits under the new system? Currently, it’s 50. My fear is this is becoming much higher, perhaps even 90. If higher than 60, this is a huge nerf and slap in the face to those of us who chose this gameplay understanding we’d be able to compete with vets, especially those like me that have relatively small herds (30-40). AH, unlike all the craft skills that come to mind, was actually a skill that a casual player could become competitive in without having to grind high skill, given patience with the slow breeding times. I feel I know the answer: 80 if not 90 AH will be needed, meaning AH will no longer be for me and a huge chunk of the reason I play will be removed. But it would be nice to know for sure what the devs have in mind as recommended AH skill level to be a competitive and effective breeder. To me, beyond what I’m expecting to the increase in AH skill, it feels like AH is going the way of fishing, becoming an overly complicated system that suits fewer players.

It's already been answered... The current 5 speed horses have 3 speed traits and 2 of the draft traits... so will be reduced to 3 speed while riding. These 3 speed traits will not affect vehicle speed, but the 2 draft traits will. So they will be middle of the road, with an edge toward the speed traits as riding horses.

This please.

Agreed. Everyone who owns a 5-speed needs to know that their current horses will perform just as well as they do now, both for riding and driving. If they will not, this needs to be stated up front.

I'm interested, but also worried. If we have to go through all these extra traits and steps just to get new specialized horses that accomplish the same thing as current 5speeds, expect a lot of upset players; myself included. However, if these new specialized horses allow us to surpass the speeds of a 5speed, as well as mix in various traits that could let us ride up steeper slopes for an example (give us budget wetas,) then I think this update could give the game and the market a good boost in variety and rare sought after mounts.

Is it too much to ask that such a drastic change be up on the test server for long enough to test the generations out?

This update sounds amazing! It will be great to work on a new breeding project for kine - there are only so many BattleCows and AttackSheep any village needs - lol I am really hoping we get some more care-for slots though - It is already hard enough to maintain a good variety of breeding stock for all the horse colours.

fantastic i look forward to the new items looks like my fine carpentry shop will be working overtime to fill orders for food bowls and troffs for our breeder

My god. I’ve been breeding horses since October and slowly progressing to five speed horses. About a week ago I finally bred my first five speed. Today, I now have three female and one male five speed foals waiting to age so I can breed them. So you’re saying my current 5 speed horses are now going to have traits that won’t count towards speed that need to be bred out and other new speed traits that i again need to randomly breed in? Please give us some way to easily trade out ‘draft’ for ‘speed’ traits (and vice versa) for existing animals. I can’t imagine having to re-breed new traits in. Another worry I have is that this new system will require higher than 50 AH to get the fastest mounts, given talk that number of traits will be point based and some traits are worth 20 points. My primary goal the past few months has been to casually work towards selling 5 speed horses. I saw this as an entirely achievable goal as a player who’s not interested in grinding skills beyond 50. Please tell me that I’ll be able to continue to breed top-speed horses with an AH of just over 50. edit: continuing on from the last sentence: and without having to play some god-awful juggling game with negative traits and Genesis. I have a very sad feeling my time in Wurm is coming to a close.

Looks like this didn't get seen by enough eyes early enough to get the big issues (Holy Crop, basically mandatory Fo priest, etc.). Bet they'll just roll on through with it and "We'll fix it later."

Personally I love the complexity and depth of those newer systems and am super excited for this change! Animal husbandry is one of my favourite parts of the game, but when I reached the point where I could reliably breed 5 speed horses and had collected all the different colours I started losing interest in it. Nothing to discover, no new goals to aim for, just the same old thing, except maybe a new funny name showing up now and then. Breeding other animals like sheep and cows is literally just about making more of them, with no benefits whatsoever from traits. This will make it so much more interesting and rewarding, plus now there can even be different kinds of horse markets and maybe we'll start to see specialist breeders of different animals too!

Is there any change planned for the number of care for spots we get? Given that a player can't just rely on their cart/wagon team to also be their ridden mount with this update, or face not having the optimum speed/weight abilities that means they need to own more beasties. also is there an ETA for this update? Even a vague, subject-to-change one? This week, next week, next month, sometime in summer? Please?

Very interesting updates, thanks for the new info, looks exciting. I do have a concern about the speed traits and carts and the such. I use hell horses near 100% of the time, always on my cart. Many of us have invested pretty heavily into our rigs. Can you speak to how this might effect our preferred mode of transportation. With my current set up my cart goes upwards of 38 km/h and I am always looking to get the next best horseshoe or enchant to increase the speed. How do you think these changes will effect those of us that use these kinds of set ups? Also will all animals be effected with these new traits and changes, or just new ones that are born moving forward? What happens to those that are currently breeding 5 speeds and the such? Thanks again, everything looks exciting, I cannot wait to see how it continues to unfold!

What I currently see is that normal horses will completely die out on the long range if passive trait hellies will be widespread. Also if bison vehicle bonus is not set very carefully they may fully replace any horse/hellhorse driven carts which would be sad. A lot of very careful consideration of many possible scenarios are needed. There is about two weeks until live which seems... hmmm ... too soon? Juggling negative traits to breed top-top products by removing the negative ones from the "end products" seem to be quite bad. I would ask to consider to take this out from the package (yes simply ditching negative traits can work as a dirty fast solution) as if it stays I see another window of opportunity that will be changed later anyway cornering the breeding aspect anyway (something similar inbalance will happen like the pizzagate of cooking). Fo is a true PVP priest now! Genesis storm at enemy deeds! Ruin their breeder herd! So. A lot of scenarios that may bring this otherwise awesome sounding update extremely sideways. TLDR: - negative traits and using them to make topnotch endproducts seem risky at the current status - do we at all need them nega traits? - make sure friendly hellhorses will not be superior to horses or horses will die out - make sure bisons are not superior in vehicles than horses/hellhorses or the landscape will be very boring with bisons in carts only.

Wow, looking forward to this for lots of reasons. AH upgrade of course is long overdue, and while it all sounds more complex than I originally expected, I don't personally have a problem with that. I still don't fully understand all the ins and outs of the cooking and fishing updates, but I still manage to use them (combat update had even less effect on me I just turned off all the graphical and audio tweaks and hunt as I always did lol). I do know it will take time to get a herd developed of the horses I want, as it took almost a year to get a good breeding herd with all the new colors when they came in. I must admit though I am more relaxed about it since I am no longer in the horse business, and just do it for myself. I will have to do some rereading, as at this point nothing has sunk in properly for me to be able to understand all of the negative comments and concerns, so I look forward to further details nearer the time to help us all get our heads round it. I am so grateful to finally be able to be tending my animals again though since as I had to turn it all over to alts some years back now as my skill became 'too high'. I also look forward to finally having house cats, but that means I need to get off my lazy bum and skill my taming I guess! Also thank you guys for the new feed containers, an asked for improvement for many years now!

I am so incredibly excited for this update! The pet lover in me is absolutely over the moon! And I cant wait to get into breeding for more specific uses! I am curious, though, if there are any plans to make more animals tamable? I have a champion spider that I've been keeping as a pet, but she's gonna die eventually because I can't care for her. It would be so amazing if spiders could be recognized as pets. Snakes too!

With the additional traits, please add a better way to look at traits (like the animal management window system). It's not going to be fun looking through a mountain of text for animals with lots of traits.

Will the taming improvements possibly make it so we can use unicorns like horses without worrying about them getting attacked?

With 23 new traits and the traits working differently, how will the ability to see what traits an animal has be affected? Currently you need 41 AH to see all the current traits. What animal husbandry will we need to reach to see all the negative traits, as well as all the rest of the traits?

Will Genesis still be a thing? Can you be more specific on the question above if all animals will be affected or only newborns after the update?