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DemonaNightshade

Valrei International: Feeding time!

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valrei_barnyard.png

 

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!

 

feeding_time.png

 

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.

 

HorseShapeAnimation.gif

 

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:

 

ingame_wiki

 

It scales nicely as well!

 

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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!

 

donkeys_mules

 

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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! 

Edited by gnomegates
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WOW 😮

This is awesome many things we have been requesting for years and some beyond what we had hoped possible.  Really great work!

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4 minutes ago, gnomegates said:

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?

 

All animals will be effected due to the fact that our current "5 speeds" are a mix of speed and draft traits. You'll want to work toward breeding draft traited hell horses for hauling carts, and speed traited mounts.

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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?

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So by theory, if you gather a few negative traits to increase the traits you can have due to the negative points, you can then breed the animals further to get all the positive traits you want, and then remove the bad traits with Genesis? Or will you not be able to remove the bad traits if it means the "Points" goes over the max?

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1 minute ago, Cecci said:

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?

 

Yes, Genesis will still be a thing. It will be harder to breed offspring with the same traits if negative traits are removed before breeding though, since removing the negative points cost could increase the points total OVER your animal husbandry skill.

 

And currently, 5 speed horses/animals have 3 speed specific traits and 2 draft specific traits. So they will technically be a mix. But, because they have a majority in Speed traits it will be easier to breed speed horses from those parents so riding horses should come fairly easily once the update hits.

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Thank you to all the team involved in this update.

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

 

Excited for the update!

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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?

 

Edited by Grumpled
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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?

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Would the steeper slope rare trait only be worth it on riding animals since carts need multiple creatures?

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This is so awesome, really good work from all involved!

 

Question: Will finally "steady full speed" be a trait that you can bread into other horses also, or will this still be restricted to only hell horses?

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Very cool. I love the new feeding options, especially the part where they return to the tile they're on. I've never been a fan of the 1x2 pens that people have, the absolute smallest pens I've ever liked using are 2x2, so I really welcome this change.

Also super excited about the implications that the overhaul to trait acquisition could have on creating herds, potentially making it more streamlined/easier to get creatures bred for a particular role, as well as negative traits now being beneficial in some circumstances.

My concerns at this point are
i) if the max number of traits is based on values on the traits compared to your AH skill, does that mean that current 5 speed horses  (if the traits themselves aren't dramatically changed, which I suspect they will be, given the speed/draft distinction) will potentially require 90 or even 100 skill after the changes to get the same thing again?

ii) If vehicle weight affects speed of the vehicle, or rather how fast creatures can pull it, how are volumetric or numeric storage options going to figure into this? Is the game going to treat a crate just as one given weight value? is a crate full of cotton going to way the same as a crate full of logs? What about a bsb full of wool vs a bsb full of logs? 

 

Big thanks for the update :)

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

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This is going to kill a lot of animals that are alive today as people get the new traited stuff. R.I.P.

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I have been excited for this animal update. I fear this is going to be as convoluted as the fishing update. I sure hope I'm wrong!

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4 minutes ago, ChampagneDragon said:

I have been excited for this animal update. I fear this is going to be as convoluted as the fishing update. I sure hope I'm wrong!


the aged diseased rolfrolf and the adolescent diseased sadsweet begin to get intimate
the aged diseased rolfrolf tramples your foot
Ow, that hurt!
75 damage foot wound

1f60b.png

Edited by Arronicus
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27 minutes ago, Grumpled said:

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?

 

1 hour ago, DemonaNightshade said:

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!

 

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2 minutes ago, ChampagneDragon said:

I have been excited for this animal update. I fear this is going to be as convoluted as the fishing update. I sure hope I'm wrong!

I feel the same! It is way too much to add 23 traits and some players think this will bring in an exodus to WU.

 

But as someone said in another topic, there is always something painful in those big update that they wont tell us and that will upset people.

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I wonder if any of this will tie into animal taming, or will it just be AH?

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1 minute ago, Etherdrifter said:

I wonder if any of this will tie into animal taming, or will it just be AH?

1 hour ago, DemonaNightshade said:

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.

 

Hope that helps

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