Regarding Animal Husbandry.....one weird question:

Morning! So for the last few weeks I was thinking about a potential problem with Animal Husbandry, wanted to ask about it in the livestream, but decided to put it as a forum post first.

So, as far as I understand, genetics will play a big role in how the mounts/pets players will make in game. Its going to decide both the looks of a mount and its stats.

My question is this: Can we castrate mounts before selling them? I know its a weird question! However, when you have genetics involved, its quite valid.

If I spend hours to craft a mount with legendary stats and a unique look, I dont want its genome to go on the market and have someone just copy it. It's like a "recipe" i developed.

Imagine if buying a sword on the market lets to copy the sword yourself. Makes no sense right?

I think there should be a way in the animal husbandry menu to permanently "snip-snip" the mount's ability to pass its genes. What do you all think?

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Ludullu

I definitely see your point on the quality of mounts, but I think you disregard the variety too much. Even just the ones we've seen in Alpha1 were varied in their appearance and style. With husbandry potentially being as deep as character creation, breeders might want a constant flow of new types of creatures (especially if seasonal changes will have any influence on breeding), which gives work to tamers.

Yes, combining a "horse" with a "great horse" until you get a "super duper cool and fast horse" will definitely be a thing, but I'm pretty sure the majority of players won't care about a 3% boost to dashing speed on their mount. What they will care about is what animal type that mount is and how it looks with their character. And then you think about the customizability and you see potentially thousands of mounts, which all require some kind of breeding process.

That is, if Intrepid's plans work out as they want them to work out and the system is as deep as they claim it'll be.

Warth

We know little, but

In Breeding systems there usually is a max amount of times the mount can give offspring. Otherwise one player with "optimal" stats can flood the floor with infinite amount of copies. Which would break the entire mount economy. That's pretty much the only way to prevent this.

Once it reaches the legendary tier, this might be very well be 0.

Nerror

Schmuky wrote: »

My question is this: Can we castrate mounts before selling them? I know its a weird question! However, when you have genetics involved, its quite valid.

If I spend hours to craft a mount with legendary stats and a unique look, I dont want its genome to go on the market and have someone just copy it. It's like a "recipe" i developed.

Good question! It's been debated before and it's worth taking up again. I am firmly in the camp of being pro-sterilization before selling. Alternately let us have a limited amount of breeding attempts per animal, so we at least can use those up before selling it. Whether or not I go hard into animal husbandry depends on a system like that. Well, there are certainly other factors as well, but this is a major one.

Schmuky wrote: »

I keep coming back to the blacksmith argument. A blacksmith that sells their swords on the market dosent have to worry that the sword will be copied instantly. It should work the same with mounts

Other blacksmiths can buy the sword and break it down for the recipe (maybe only a chance for it) and some mats. That's going to be one of the many ways to acquire new recipes. However, I also don't think it's really comparable to the animal husbandry system.

Sengarden

Unless I’m missing something, and I very well could be, the issue with using limited breeding numbers per animal rather than sterilization remains in the form of each successive mount sale then being able to breed at least once. Then the next one can be bred at least once... etc. That is, unless the breeder out-breeds every mount they produce before selling it, which would create a quantity problem unless it’s a one for one trade off.

So even with that solution, you’re still opening up the market to an exponential dispersal of high quality genes as soon as one with breeding potential hits the market.

Dygz

You'll still have to be a high level breeder to take advantage of those high quality genes, so it's not really going to be as much of an issue as one might think. You'll also need high quality "tools" and high quality "techniques".

Just because you give someone a Legendary Sword, doesn't mean just anybody can break it down and recraft another Legendary Sword out of it.

The product is not a recipe everyone can decipher.
And even people who can decipher the recipe cannot necessarily recreate the product successfully.

Sengarden

Dygz wrote: »

You'll still have to be a high level breeder to take advantage of those high quality genes, so it's not really going to be as much of an issue as one might think. You'll also need high quality "tools" and high quality "techniques".

I haven’t done a deep dive on the specifics of the system yet, so I’ll take your word for it. I definitely hope the skill, monetary investment, and talent trees for each breeder play a large role in actually being able to do anything with high quality creatures.

Dygz wrote: »

Just because you give someone a Legendary Sword, doesn't mean anybody can break it down and recraft another Legendary Sword out of it.

This concept interests me a lot. @Nerror claimed that there was a chance of learning the recipe when you break it down and that it was a source of getting new recipes. I’d like to get some sources on that, if anyone has any. I’m not totally against it, but I think it should be something you have to spec into and should have quickly decreasing “eureka” rates as the quality of the item you’re analyzing goes up.

Dygz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMpvFgzuU64&t=4788s
mark 1:19:50

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtG9mB2bREI&t=1560s
mark 26:00

Nerror

Sengarden wrote: »

This concept interests me a lot. @Nerror claimed that there was a chance of learning the recipe when you break it down and that it was a source of getting new recipes. I’d like to get some sources on that, if anyone has any. I’m not totally against it, but I think it should be something you have to spec into and should have quickly decreasing “eureka” rates as the quality of the item you’re analyzing goes up.

Sure: https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Recipes#Obtaining_recipes

Now the text on the wiki may or may not be slightly misleading. It's not necessarily only boss drop items that players can disassemble. Listen to the two timestamped dev discussions that are linked. 3 and 10.

It's possible they make it so crafted items can't give a recipe when disassembled. That only dropped items can do that. That is certainly one way to limit recipe dissemination. But we don't actually know that for a fact.

On a tangent, they've also talked about one-use recipes. Specifically in regards to legendary items being disassembled. You can keep the item or perhaps disassemble and get 5 one-use copies of a recipe you would then need to farm mats for. But again, nothing is confirmed or anything, and they can change their minds a hundred times still

CROW3

As with actual horse breeding, I think it would a good option for the seller to determine whether the animal can be bred after being sold or not.

This could have significant increases in price either way.

I also wonder if this would establish a broker market between breeders, where a guild could swing in to establish control and a market.

Sweatycup

Not sure AoC would want to “sterilize or castrate” however i do agree with the gestation as well as after a female reaches a certain age it stops being able to produce. So give a certain amount it can be bred. Another way touched on i agree with is mount aging. However i think mounts should be able to last a long time still without dying in 6 months to a year. Maybe 2-3 years per mount. With age degradation of stats. More like hand me down clothing. In star wars galaxies genetic engineers would sell their exotic animals for beast masters in their shops. The marketplace i do agree needs to be sure the design mechanics allow the breeder to safe guard. However i also think if person buys your mount you special bred even if most people try to make money off it breeding it again the donor is whats important. I expect alot of people that buy mounts never to breed up…. Unless we create a marketplace for it like how real life sperm donors work for animals. That would be interesting in itself.

Schmuky

We do need some Dev input on this, gonna ask on the livestream, so be sure to upvote it when it pops up:))

Sengarden

Thanks to both of you, it sounds like learning via deconstruction is almost definitely going to be a feature, but the degree to which that is able to happen is still up in there air. Though they do seem to have a number of devs on the team advocating for a degree of ownership and privacy around individual accomplishments in processing professions. So I don’t think a solution to OPs concern is out of the question. Just a matter of how far and down what avenue they’ll go to accomplish the desired result.

Warth

TIL we need a butcher profession for failed breeding attempts

Schmuky

Warth wrote: »

TIL we need a butcher profession for failed breeding attempts

you know, i was thinking about it, what will breeders do with animals they don't want. I think it could be fun if they were able to release them in the world, so the area around a breeders freehold would be filled with weird animals:)))

Nerror

Schmuky wrote: »

Warth wrote: »

TIL we need a butcher profession for failed breeding attempts

you know, i was thinking about it, what will breeders do with animals they don't want. I think it could be fun if they were able to release them in the world, so the area around a breeders freehold would be filled with weird animals:)))

If movies and books have taught me anything, absolutely nothing can go wrong with having experimental genetic freaks running free in an area.

Warth

Schmuky wrote: »

Warth wrote: »

TIL we need a butcher profession for failed breeding attempts

you know, i was thinking about it, what will breeders do with animals they don't want. I think it could be fun if they were able to release them in the world, so the area around a breeders freehold would be filled with weird animals:)))

I still think butchering would fit perfectly.
Fur for tailoring,
Claws, Horns and teeth for weapons
Meat for Cooking.
Trophies, Accessoirs and Furniture.

Would also give more depth to breeding if they were able to breed towards better butchered materials rather than just mount attributes

ghostxx

I don't really plan on pursuing this path but a simple solution would to bind the animal to the original tamer. Once it's sold or traded, that pet can no longer be bred. As I think about it, I don't see the system allowing tamers to have an infinite number of animals to bred...there's going to be some sort of cap. At some point, it's not going to be worth keeping the same old animals around so they'll need to be slaughtered or released.

Halae

ghostxx wrote: »

I don't really plan on pursuing this path but a simple solution would to bind the animal to the original tamer. Once it's sold or traded, that pet can no longer be bred.

So they wouldn't be able to even sell the animal to a breeder? That'd just cripple taming's market viability as an option for money making, since processors would be forced to breed animals they tamed themselves, which they CAN'T because you're not supposed to be able to master taming, breeding, and training all at once.

ghostxx wrote: »

As I think about it, I don't see the system allowing tamers to have an infinite number of animals to bred...there's going to be some sort of cap. At some point, it's not going to be worth keeping the same old animals around so they'll need to be slaughtered or released.

Three easy ways to address this as a problem are quite simple, and can even be used in combination:
1. Limited slots in your freehold to hold breeding animals and their children, preventing you from having a massive number of them.
2. Time limits on producing new babies. Gotta bring a child to term/lay the egg, and then get healthy enough to produce another child before doing it again. Especially if the animal in question has a breeding season.
3. The new babies require resources to make them grow strong and skilled, perhaps in terms of both time and consumable resources such as food.

If this is done, I can't imagine you'd need a breeding limit, as due to the fact that you can only have one Freehold per account and the limitations of that freehold will be present, there'll be a severe practical limit to how many babies you can sell.

GethOverlord

I think it definitely makes sense to have a maximum number of breeds from an animal depending on rarity, species, also traits that can be randomized. I think this trait system can actually be the most interesting because not only can it add unique things like albinism or melanism that can shift the pallette of a creature but can also introduce sterility. Something that might also be tied to rarer traits. Maybe you are eventually able to breed wings onto horses but the resulting (gliding) Pegasus is also sterile, like a Liger or other complex hybrid animals.

I think a castration option might be a bit far for Intrepid to take, though I'm not personally opposed to it, this kind of thing happens all the time irl. Mainly I think the traits that someone can impart on their animals from the training phase can be used to mitigate this, assuming another husbander of comparable skill can't just get the complete compendium entry from simply purchasing the animal.

I think the desired effect here would be a mix of limited numbers of breeding, traits that can induce sterility, and not immediately being able to purchase an animal and getting "their recipe".

Sengarden

GethOverlord wrote: »

I think it definitely makes sense to have a maximum number of breeds from an animal depending on rarity, species, also traits that can be randomized. I think this trait system can actually be the most interesting because not only can it add unique things like albinism or melanism that can shift the pallette of a creature but can also introduce sterility. Something that might also be tied to rarer traits. Maybe you are eventually able to breed wings onto horses but the resulting (gliding) Pegasus is also sterile, like a Liger or other complex hybrid animals.

I agree that having castration would be a little... graphic.

I never thought about natural sterility from cross breeds, that’s a very good point! And it does make sense that rarer animals are rare for the primary reason that they don’t breed as many offspring per lifecycle. So there’s a natural move in the right direction as well.

I think it also needs to be said that realistically, just because you have two parents with phenomenal genes doesn’t mean they’ll always carry those genes perfectly into their offspring. So just because someone gets their hands on two perfect specimens of a rare creature (either very expensive or very time consuming) they won’t ever have a perfect chance of reproducing more just like their parents, and it’ll take quite a while between each gestation period to keep trying.

Child Item