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Caveman

Animal pen and pasture designs

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I'm working on designing animal enclosures for my new place and I'd like to see what other people out there have come up with. I want to mainly breed horses, but also bison, cows/bulls, and sheep/rams, I don't like the standard 1x2 jails, yes they are meta game efficient, but that's not why I play wurm. My latest draw up includes medium sized pastures and segregating horses by function and age, the other animals will be put in 3x4 pens, 6 animals per pen.

 

So here's how it works for the horses. The two stud pens are 2x2 and will have at most 1 male and 2 females. When the females get knocked up they get moved to the stable where they will have their own 1x2 or 2x2 pen. When the foal flops out like Ace Venture through a rhino, the adult female gets moved back to the stud pen and the foal gets moved to the foal pen. The workers are just extra horses paying their way by pulling carts etc.

 

All the other animals will be held in 3x4 pens, 1 pen for each animal type.

 

0vqrgET.jpg

 

So that's the system I've come up with so far. I'd like to hear from others who have put some thought into their  animal keeping. Pictures are always welcome .

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if you don't want a bunch of 1x2 pens, be sure to saddle everything you want to keep healthy.  The 1x2s are really a result of the AI driving animals in larger pens to a corner to starve and die.  Event he enchanted grass takes a beating in those big pens. 

 

Some of the most attractive pens I see now are the ones that have part of the pen under a roof, now that we can plant grass inside.

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the 1x2 isnt visually appealing but it's kinda forced by game mechanics. 6 horses in a pen will at some point congregate and trigger disease and pack tiles. perhaps 3 in a 2x2 would work. 

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I just do a pile of 1x2 pens back to back, or divided with a path up the center and go as long as I need, open pens just don't work.

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i have my sheep and rams in a 10x10 same for my cattle and pigs, horses will end up about the same I suppose, I don't really have a need for them at the present, as I do all my own cartage, the bison I haven't dared to mess with yet, but will soon I suppose.

what about chickens, can they be put in a pen or do they just run free and do what they want?

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I keep my hens one per tile ( normally in a 2x2 pen) and feed/drop them vegetables or grain.

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8 hours ago, Caveman said:

I don't like the standard 1x2 jails, yes they are meta game efficient, but that's not why I play wurm.

 

I have my horses in larger pens as well and don't use the 1x2 prison cell method. It's no problem at all. All it takes is 5 minutes of your time per RL day - when you see horses bunching up in a corner go and spread them out a bit: problem solved.

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I have some animals in an open pen and I haven't noticed any bunching up in corners. Though that might be because all of the surrounding land is mycelium and so the animals don't try to path to it.

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i can leave me animals(6-8 in a 5x5) for months with rarely a problem, if i don't want to worry about em i use 2 in a 3x3

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This is my setup:

jAwA2aT.png

I have enchanted grass in the building area as well as the rest of the pin.  Each pin contains 2 horses, sometimes 3.

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i still prefer 2x3 pens for a pair, never had an issue with the setup (disease/packing) and use it for my champ unicorns too.

and it looks so much cleaner and free compared to 1x2 prison cells!

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2 minutes ago, KaiH said:

i still prefer 2x3 pens for a pair, never had an issue with the setup (disease/packing) and use it for my champ unicorns too.

and it looks so much cleaner and free compared to 1x2 prison cells!

Interesting.  I could knock down the center walls of some of my stable pins and create 2x3's if I wanted. :)

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I have enchanted grass in everything. I have mostly 1x2 or 1x3 pens and keep breeding pairs in them. I have to keep them sorted a bit because I ground AH into the 70s so if I make bad combos I can end up with non-five speed creatures even though both parents are five speed. Then there are larger enchanted grass pens that I put the newborns into until I can sort them - five speed, five speed with bad trait(s) to take off, not five speed, etc.

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20 hours ago, Fawkes said:

I have some animals in an open pen and I haven't noticed any bunching up in corners. Though that might be because all of the surrounding land is mycelium and so the animals don't try to path to it.

 

I don't think grazers path towards anything, but they have a general drift which can change from day to day.

 

I think the strength of the drift maybe depends on the server. I am on Xanadu and I am in the camp saying there is no problem. I have always had 4-6 animals per 3 x 3 pen with enchanted grass, and now I have around 20-25 animals roaming in one herd on the whole range. They often go towards one corner together, but they don't bunch up in the exact corner tiles, so they don't get ill, and I have had no need to enchant the grass at all. 

 

To sum up, the AI works brillantly at my place. The larger you make your pen, the less the animals will bunch up

Edited by Cista

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7 hours ago, Cista said:

To sum up, the AI works brillantly at my place. The larger you make your pen, the less the animals will bunch up

 

See, I and others have experienced exactly the opposite - the larger the pen the more the animals bunch up in one corner.

 

I'm a fan of enchanted 2x2s for breeding pairs + a foal for a while if need be. 1x2 enchanted pens for sequestering diseased animals or others I want to keep separate. Otherwise I have a large pen, like 4x11, where the other animals just hang out. At the moment it's only partially enchanted. I do get some packing of tiles here and there, and definitely more bunching up then in smaller pens. I think it helps when you have crops planted in your pens as well.

Edited by Araninke

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I favor 2x3 pens ... one per pair, their foal can stay there a while too without issues, even worked in Xanadu, rarely had to replace (unenchanted) grass.

 

On WU it's 2x4's, with two indoors just for aesthetics, no issues either.  Of course there's no tile cost there ;-P

 

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Btw if packing is the most irritating problem, then I believe animals can now graze on tree tiles. If that holds, then one could simply plant something like roses, and never have a tile be packed again.

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On Thursday, March 24, 2016 at 7:13 AM, Cista said:

To sum up, the AI works brillantly at my place. The larger you make your pen, the less the animals will bunch up

 

I have a 6x6 with 10 animals. I can't tell you the number of times I have logged in to them all in the same corner.

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7 hours ago, Cista said:

Btw if packing is the most irritating problem, then I believe animals can now graze on tree tiles. If that holds, then one could simply plant something like roses, and never have a tile be packed again.

 

Whaaaat?? Is this true, can someone confirm?? This is major if it's true.

 

I forgot to mention that I had to put my chickens and roosters in 1x1 pens, one or two in each, because they were clustering and getting sick, and eating all the food in one spot and ignoring it in another spot.

 

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7 hours ago, Cista said:

Btw if packing is the most irritating problem, then I believe animals can now graze on tree tiles. If that holds, then one could simply plant something like roses, and never have a tile be packed again.

I don't think this is true.

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Ah sorry, I suppose others would have mentioned the tree thing if it was so.....   It seems the change of tree tiles (sometime in 2014) was only to make it able to cut grass from there, or forage or whaever. Not much of a gameplay change then, but I am fine with things as they are :) 

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9 hours ago, Cista said:

Ah sorry, I suppose others would have mentioned the tree thing if it was so.....   It seems the change of tree tiles (sometime in 2014) was only to make it able to cut grass from there, or forage or whaever. Not much of a gameplay change then, but I am fine with things as they are :) 

Yup.  Trees were changed to allow for cutting grass, and trimming grass into lawn.

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But we still can't make lawns on tree tiles...

 

Now to add to the subject, i keep my sheep 2 per tile in 1x1 pens on enchanted grass without any pathways between them, so it's a kind of a cellular design, i would say. Pregnant ones are being moved into 4-8-tiles pens in groups up to 4 animals and they feel alright there, even on normal grass and even those with "constantly hungry" traits.

 

Speaking about open pens, I built a 47-tile pen ~40% enchanted for about 18 sheep  4 hours ago and one of them is already diseased. Most of others gather on just 2 enchanted tiles, but they still managed to pack 2 tiles of grass somehow. At this rate they will all die in 1-2 weeks from diseases if not constantly watched over.

 

update: half an hour aster this post 6 tiles of tall/wild grass are packed. This is madness. They're so broken. Please fix. <_<

Edited by zigozag

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16 minutes ago, zigozag said:

But we still can't make lawns on tree tiles...

 

Now to add to the subject, i keep my sheep 2 per tile in 1x1 pens on enchanted grass without any pathways between them, so it's a kind of a cellular design, i would say. Pregnant ones are being moved into 4-8-tiles pens in groups up to 4 animals and they feel alright there, even on normal grass and even those with "constantly hungry" traits.

 

Speaking about open pens, I built a 47-tile pen ~40% enchanted for about 18 sheep  4 hours ago and one of them is already diseased. Most of others gather on just 2 enchanted tiles, but they still managed to pack 2 tiles of grass somehow. At this rate they will all die in 1-2 weeks from diseases if not constantly watched over.

Yes you can.  I've done it several times.

Edited by Slickshot

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Oh indeed we can... Although the grass texture on tree lawn tile is too different from a regular lawn tile, hits the eye.

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