Minecraft Forums

I am sure many of you have seen Notch's twitter post about the sheep going nuts breeding. (Link Here)
The way it appears to be set up, the animals will instantly enter "love mode" and breed if you feed them, which seems to limit animal breeding only to the amount of wheat one has.

My idea is this: Put a cooldown timer on breeding (say, 1 minecraft day per animal) that gets activated after an animal has bred. This will limit breeding so that it cannot be completely spammed and fill the game with these passive mobs, although it still leaves open the potential for exponential growth (increase the number of your animals by 50% each day, and you will soon have a huge hoard of them).

Minecraft community, what are your thoughts? Is there a better solution?

Make it so that each animal can only enter "love mode" ONCE,
but a pair can produce two offspring, who cannot breed with each other.
This way, if you start with four animals, you can sustain a farm.

(I'm sorry, but I really do NOT want exponential resources, just sustainable ones.)

Quote from Fresh Cow

Minecraft community, what are your thoughts? Is there a better solution?

I'd have to see the final state of breeding before really having an opinion on it. Obviously 'spray wheat at cow gives every cow' is not a good idea, though.

I think breeding should just be animals near one another will sometimes breed. Feeding them like this might as well be cheating given how plentiful grains are..

Still, I want a chicken pen so I can make arrows easier..

My hope is that by feeding animals they will follow you, allowing you to pen them if you need.

It all really depends on how they handle persistentcy.

It sounds like the way Minecraft is headed like they want to spawn X animals per world and no more from that point it is handled by natural breeding etc. If they go that way then it is a lot more complex than simply making sure a farm population doesn't explode.

A farm can be handled easily with four mechanics
1) If there are X animals of the same type within Y distance, do not breed further.
2) If there is sufficient food where food is wheat
-each domesticated animal has a natural hunger meter and a hunger for wheat, if that hunger bar is not filled they will not even enter a breeding cycle.
3) If there is sufficient food where food is grass
-animals will graze naturally over the day but once a cycle starts they will need to consume 1-3 blocks of grass per, so 2-6 per couple. If they can not within some time limit then the cycle will fail.
4) Time, there would obviously be some time delay after an animal has bred or had a failed breeding cycle before it would enter another cycle regardless of its hunger status.

Wheat is still requires as both a tool for domestication and for overall sustenance.
All animals that resulted from breeding would instantiate as domesticated.

The problem is none of those would address any situation outside a small confined environment. In the open world assuming that animals didn't just continue to use the existing spawning method you could easily either run out or encounter massive populations (of course assuming what wouldn't be a factor in natural breeding).

I would personally stick with the traditional spawning method unless the animal was "domesticated" with wheat (at which point it becomes persistent). It would then need to be given wheat to survive (I would suggest a trough of some sort where hungry animals could take what they needed without having to click each and every one) then the other mechanics keep farm populations in check.

Much like sprinting, breeding would not commence if the animals were under a certain hunger level. That also helps mitigate wild populations of domestic animals because they would instantiate below that hunger threshold. Without wheat or a wheat trough to replenish their hunger there is little danger of a wild domestic population exploding.

Quote from Zaibach

Wheat is still requires as both a tool for domestication and for overall sustenance.
...
I would personally stick with the traditional spawning method unless the animal was "domesticated" with wheat (at which point it becomes persistent).
...

I loathe the idea of being forced to grow wheat in order to raise livestock. This model forces feedlots and negates ranching.

Let there be grazing to refill their gonads.

Breeding could possibly work like this:

- When fed wheat, heart particle effects will occasionally float from the animals.
- When 2 of the same type of animals are in love, they produce 1 or more regular animals of the same type.
- After breeding, the parents will gain a bell collar around their necks (similar to cow bells), which indicates that they can no longer breed.

- Chickens can perhaps be an exception, they can still be lured by wheat but they will produce eggs like currently.

Quote from Dragonid

I loathe the idea of being forced to grow wheat in order to raise livestock. This model forces feedlots and negates ranching.

Let there be grazing to refill their gonads.

It does both really.

Can't blame you for being apprehensive, but the problem that without wheat as a check and or balance, you are looking at what would easily become a hyper population (remember the mushrooms in the nether). Wheat is a balance outside the natural order of the game just as grass is used as a balance outside the players ability to control.

You can still have a population of persistent cattle that will graze naturally, they simply wouldn't breed without a source of wheat. conversely you couldn't simply toss cattle into a small pen, flood it with wheat and expect a population explosion if the grass available to them wouldn't support it.