Husbandry

Six animals can be kept: the sheep, the goat, the chicken, the horse, the aurochs and the cattle its tame line becomes. Every other creature is wild only. You tame an animal by feeding it from your hand, keep it behind fences, feed it again to breed it, and take its wool, milk, eggs and manure.

All the times below in days are world days. A world day lasts 1200 real seconds (20 minutes), and the husbandry follows the world’s day even while the place is not loaded: a young grows up and wool grows back while you are away.

What each animal eats

Hold one of its foods in your hand, aim at the animal and press the interact key (E by default). The animal must be within reach. In survival, each meal eaten takes one item from your hand; a meal refused (the animal is not hungry yet) takes nothing.

Animal	Foods	Seconds between meals	Lure radius
Sheep	Plant Fibres, Berries	15	10 m
Goat	Plant Fibres, Berries	15	10 m
Chicken	Berries, Plant Fibres	10	8 m
Horse	Berries, Plant Fibres	20	12 m
Aurochs	Wheat, Barley, Oats	60	10 m
Cattle	Wheat, Barley, Oats	20	10 m

Holding its food within the lure radius changes how the animal behaves: a wild one stops fleeing you, so you can walk up to it, and a tame one follows you.

Taming

Each meal a wild animal eats adds to its trust. At full trust it is tame, and you, the feeder, are its owner. A tamed animal leaves its wild herd and makes its home where it was won over.

Full trust is 1. One meal gives the species’ base trust times the animal’s temper, a heritable trait (see below) whose range depends on the species:

Animal	Base trust per meal	Temper range	Meals to tame at average temper
Chicken	0.5	0.6 to 1.4	2
Sheep	0.34	0.6 to 1.4	3
Goat	0.26	0.5 to 1.3	5
Horse	0.2	0.5 to 1.3	6
Aurochs	0.08	0.4 to 1.2	16

A calm animal needs fewer meals, a nervous one more. The meals cannot be rushed: between two of them the animal waits its seconds between meals. The aurochs is a wild bovine of the steppe and the plains that fights back when hurt, and it is by far the slowest to win over. Cattle are never found in the wild: they only come from tame aurochs (see Domestication).

A tame animal never flees, does not look up at its keepers and is never taken back by the world’s spawning.

Pens

A tame animal strolls around its home, within its home radius: 6 metres for the sheep, goat, chicken and horse, 8 metres for the aurochs and cattle. Its home is where it was tamed, or where it was last led.

To bring animals into a pen:

1. Build the pen with Oak Fence and an Oak Fence Gate.
2. Hold one of their foods. Every tame animal within its lure radius walks after you and stops a short way off (1.5 metres for a chicken, up to 3.5 metres for cattle).
3. Walk into the pen through the open gate. The animals follow, and their home moves with them.
4. Put the food away and close the gate behind you.

Fences and closed gates are walls for animals, a block and a half tall: they neither walk through nor jump over them. An open gate lets through the bodies that fit between its posts.

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3

3 × Oak Fence

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Oak Fence Gate

Both are made at the workbench.

Breeding

1. Feed a tame adult one of its foods: it is ready to breed for a while (30 seconds, 40 for the aurochs and cattle).
2. Feed a second tame adult of the same species close to it. Two ready animals within the partner radius (4 metres for chickens, 6 for sheep and goats, 8 for horses, aurochs and cattle) pair up.
3. A young is born beside the mother. It is tame and belongs to the mother’s owner.

Any two adults of a species can pair. After a birth, neither parent breeds again before its cooldown, and a young neither breeds nor gives anything until it has grown up.

Animal	Cooldown after a birth	Days to grow up
Chicken	1 day	2 days
Sheep, goat	2 days	3 days
Horse	4 days	7 days
Aurochs, cattle	5 days	8 days

Inherited traits

Every animal carries three genes, read as traits:

• Size: how big it is drawn.
• Yield: a factor on how much each product gives (more wool, more milk). For a sheep it ranges from 0.6 to 1.6 times the base count.
• Temper: a factor on the trust each meal gives, so a calm line tames faster.

Wild animals are born with varied genes. A young takes the mean of its two parents’ genes, stepped by a small random amount either way (at most 12 points out of 127, 10 for horses). Pairing your best animals together therefore drifts the herd toward bigger yields and calmer tempers over the generations.

The colour of a young is the colour of one of its parents, picked at random; now and then (10% for cattle, 5% for sheep, goats and chickens, 3% for horses) it is drawn afresh among the colours of the species.

Domestication

The aurochs is the wild ancestor of cattle. The young of two tamed aurochs is the first generation of the line; when the generation of a young reaches 3, it is born as cattle instead of an aurochs:

1. Tame two aurochs and breed them: their calf is of the first generation.
2. Raise two first generation aurochs and breed them: second generation.
3. Breed two second generation aurochs: their young is born as cattle.

Cattle come as oxen, pied oxen and cows (drawn 2 to 1 to 3). Only cows give milk. Calves of both species look like calves until they grow up.

Products

Animal	Product	How	Every	Count
Sheep	Wool	Interact with a knife in hand; the knife wears by one use	3 days	1 to 3
Goat	Bucket of Milk	Interact with a Wooden Bucket; the bucket becomes the milk	1 day	1
Cattle (cows only)	Bucket of Milk	Interact with a wooden bucket	1 day	1
Horse	Bucket of Mare's Milk	Interact with a wooden bucket	2 days	1
Chicken	Egg	Laid on the ground	1 day	1
Chicken	Manure	Left on the ground	3 days	1
Sheep, goat, horse	Manure	Left on the ground	2 days	1
Aurochs, cattle	Manure	Left on the ground	2 days	1 to 2

The count is multiplied by the animal’s yield trait. Only grown animals give anything. Every product is for tame animals only, except wool: a wild sheep can be sheared too. Shearing works with a Flint Knife, a Copper Knife or a Bronze Knife. The first egg or manure comes one full interval after the animal was tamed.

A harvested product goes into your inventory, and what does not fit falls at your feet.

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Wooden Bucket

The bucket is made at the workbench from any planks and a Withy.

Using the products

• Bucket of Milk and Bucket of Mare's Milk are drunk: 2 health and 40 seconds of Nourished; mare’s milk also gives Hardy for 120 seconds. Both spoil after 1.5 days.
• Egg is eaten (1 health, 20 seconds of Nourished) and keeps 10 days.
• Wool makes a Bed at the workbench, three wool over three planks.
• Manure is a farmland amendment: 30 nitrogen, 5 phosphorus and 5 potassium. See Farming.

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Bed

See Food and preservation for keeping food longer.

Beehives

Honey and Beeswax are in the game, and the server has the rules of beehives, but the current world has no hive block to build and generates no wild bees’ nests, so there is no way to get them yet. Beeswax is used by the herbalist in the healing salve.