New Skill: Husbandry (Pets)

TLDR: Pets

Wouldn’t you like your very own spitter or cuttletrunk to hunt with? After all, they say Cuttletrunks are Oortian’s best friend! :slight_smile:

I used to play a lot of ARK and I admit I probably spent half my life away capturing and breeding the dinosaurs to create my favorite color combinations.

And in many RPGs I tend to choose either a support/healer or ranger/beastmaster. One thing Boundless is missing is the ability to hunt alongside an animal companion. So here goes my thought train!

Phase 1: Tame it and Name it

In it’s simplest form we could craft something like an Oortian “poke-ball” - Let’s call it the “Oorti-ball” and once a wild animal is low on health we could throw and capture the animal to make it ours. Tame it, name it, and bring it out when you’re hunting to help with the DPS and to take aggro from those pesky spitters and trunks.

Of course our pet would have it’s own damage skill, health to manage, and if its vitality drops to 0 it would just faint and return to it’s Oorti-ball.

In a more complex form (because complexity is fun!) we might have to craft a tranquilizer augment for the Slingbow - or darts used in a new weapon like a blowgun - and hit a low health enemy with a tranquilizer knocking it out. Then we could attempt to tame it which would open up a mini-game like interface where we might have to do a few things. For example:

  1. Potency of tranquilizer combined with level of planet or amount of total animal constitution/health would give us a sleeping timer - window of time for taming.
  2. Adding certain foods or potions would increase sleeping timer, but reduce animal constitution/health.
  3. Force feeding the animal it’s preferred raw foods would increase the actual taming success bar, but reduce the sleeping timer. Meaning we’d have to feed it certain foods before it wakes up - feeding poor quality food or food it hates would drastically reduce the sleeping timer and provide net0 or negative results on the taming bar.
  4. Once tamed the animal could go into an Oorti-ball to carry around.

Essentially phase 1 is tame it, name it, and hunt. Just depends on how difficult/complex you like it.

5 Likes

Phase 2: Raise it and Train it

TLDR: Give Pets New Skills

Once we’ve tamed the animals we want we can take them home and raise them up. Provide them with advanced food items (crafted in mixer/furnace) and/or train them on new machines (crafted in workbench - requires husbandry skills/epic).

Advanced pet foods might need to be mixed and cooked. These foods could be used to alter taming effectiveness or increase skills ups during pet training. For example:

  • Noxberry kibble - Berries extracted from Rosetta Nox can be mixed with meat, shrooms, or leaves to create kibble that increases the sleeping timer during taming.
  • Salted Jerky - Meat refined with Rock Salt increases animal constitution/health during taming.
  • Glow Cap Sugar Snaps - Glow Caps refined with Sugar increase pet intelligence during training.
  • Tar drops - Refined Mottle Tar-Spot Fungus produces tar that can be mixed with Stardrop Plants to create an elixir that increases speed during training.
    I could come up with more but I’ll hold for now

Animal Training would definitely require the husbandry skill - and also would allow us to increase the wild stats of our pets.

Animals would have a base stat pool distributed among various attributes. Those attributes could be similar to ours - Vitality, Power, Control, Intelligence etc.- or more like other RPGs - Strength, Dexterity, Stamina, etc… They might also have one wild skill like laser beam, headbut, or spit.

Either way, once the animal is tamed it suffers a %based reduction in wild stats based on taming effectiveness. Training would allow us to increase those stats and/or also teach our pets new skills.

In simple form:

  • Dexterity training on dexterity machine takes X hours and increases Dexterity by Y value.

In complex form:

  • Agility training on the Oortian Elder Obstacle course take X hours and has Y% chance to increase Dexterity and reduce Power by Z value with AA% chance of Success (stat increase), Failure (No Change), Super Success (NEW SKILL!), or Catastrophic Failure (Pet Injury)

Machines to isolate different stat combinations could be crafted at the workbench. +Dex and -Power, +Int and -Vit, +Vit and -Control etc. And injuries would need to be treated with med kits (crafted at the workbench or mixer - or new herbalism machine).

This would allow us to min/max our companion’s stats as well as teach it new skills (epics) like Damage boost, Stealth, or Frost Nova - because duh.

We might even be able to teach our pet a gathering skills so that they can harvest those sweet sweet beans while we run around. <3 working pets.

Additionally we could create pet stalls where we tether our pets to a plinth and put them up for sale once they’ve been masterfully trained! $$$

4 Likes

Phase 3: Feed it and Breed it

TLDR: Sweet Sweet Lovin’ - Designer Pets

So of course, if we’re taming, training, and raising animals why not breed them for stats and/or color combinations.

Maybe I want a super swift pink and orange Cuttle Trunk named “Sherbet” that flies around harvesting sweet beans while I’m farming deco Oortian Staff plants. Because why wouldn’t I?

So breeding would be similar to how Dendrology works (see my other recent suggestion). Or for new readers - Similar maybe to how goo farming works?

Pets would have a stat allocation for those combat based skills, as well as wild or trained epic skills like Frost Nova and Stealth. They’d also have certain color combinations depending on the planet they were tamed. We could mix and match until we get what we want.

Once a pet is fully trained and fed a special aphrodisiac (refined, mixed and cooked) they enter “Love Mode” and we can put two of them together (Gender optional) to gestate and produce an offspring. The offspring’s resulting combat stats would be determined by an algorithm that considers the parents base stats and trained stats in that category. For example:

  • Parent A has 100 trained vitality with a 120 vitality cap. Parent B has 50 vitality with a 170 vitality cap. Child end up with 75 base vitality with 145 Vitality cap. So the child starts with higher-than-wild base vitality and could potentially reach higher trained vitality than Parent A.

This means that each successive generation could be modified to produce unique higher base stats than any wild-caught animal. Obviously there has to be a true cap on stats, or a total stat pool not to exceed 700 points so that you don’t end up with obscene values.

Additionally - Because super complex is the name of the game aphrodisiac foods could affect breeding chance, gestation/egg hatching time, provide stat boost to child, or affect color outcomes. Which brings us to color.

Depending on how many color zones the animal has there’s 50/50 chance the offspring would be one of the parent colors in that zone or Y% chance the child’s colors would mutate one shade/tone on the color chart - Like goo (or trees :wink: )

With this we could isolate certain color combinations to create a guild branded army of monster pets to take over the world(s)! Or to create gaggles of cute and cuddly “Sherbet” Trunks to mass harvest surface materials.

Other than the obvious buy/sell/trade pets for coin - there are also other economic stimulus boosts like med kits, additional machines, pet foods, aphrodisiacs, and Rare pet stud farms for breeding.

I could go on but I think I’ve already written enough. Like, Share, and comment below and let’s nerd out on #Husbandry!

4 Likes

This is very well thought out. I would enjoy this quite a bit!

1 Like

Very complex (i like), and very well put! Does seem to involve quite a mountain of programming though, but hey that’s what we got devs for :grin:

I just realised that pets in an “oorti-ball” would have a minter value. Spam anyone? :nauseated_face:

1 Like

No putting pets in the minter.

2 Likes

This is definitely on my top five most wanted. Meteor battles would never be the same, and this could even offer some pvp where we battle it out with your best boi.

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It would be a lot to do all at once. That’s why I tried to break it into phases. Lol I’m always getting ahead of myself at work so I’ve learned to scale back and break it down whrr err n possible.

Also please don’t mint pets! That’s so sad! And PETA may not like it :wink:

2 Likes

Had a lot of time on my hands last night… lol

1 Like