Minecraft Forums

EDIT: After two years, this thread is no longer an entirely accurate reflection of the current state of Minecraft. The basic problem I describe here, however, still very much persists. For more current and relevant discussion of this issue, you can skip directly to page 18.

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The basic ideas of this thread are as follows:

• Leather armor is not easy enough to acquire to balance out it's inferior statistics. Leather itself should be a commonplace early-game resource.

• Cows are unbalanced, in that they make pigs redundant and irrelevant by producing the same amount of identical food that pigs do in addition to other items that they don't.

• Both of these problems can be solved by a simple tweak to the cow's item drop rates.

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I don't know about all of you, but I've never used leather armor. I always found it to be easier to go right to iron armor; taking the time to pen in cows and breed them for leather would set me back quite a bit in game progression, and you rarely find nearby the 12-24 cows necessary to craft a full set of leather armor early enough in the game for it to be relevant for you to do so. I could better spend that time setting up a mining operation.

In relatively short order you can have enough iron for not only armor, but other essential items as well. Going directly for iron armor serves multiple goals simultaneously, whereas obtaining enough leather for armor is a task you have to go out of your way to accomplish and serves only that single goal to the exclusion of all others. Therefore, skipping over leather and going immediately for iron instead is the more efficient path to take, and the one most players will be most likely to follow. I have seen this first-hand in at least 90% of cases on all servers I've played on. This clearly doesn't make sense, as it puts the lowest tier armor in an unfortunate crossroads of being simultaneously less effective and more time-consuming to acquire.

Clearly, leather armor needs to be easier to obtain in order to balance it out and make it worthwhile for the player to spend time in the early game on it. So here is what I propose: make cows drop more leather, and less steak. When you think about it, cows and pigs are currently equal in terms of food value, but cows have an additional leather drop and are capable of producing milk. This makes them the clear choice for breeding, and makes pigs redundant and irrelevant. Why breed pigs when you can breed cows for the same resource cost and get much more payback for your efforts?

If, however, cows dropped primarily leather and only dropped a small amount of steak, it would give each animal clearly-defined roles and make both important to breed. And it would make the acquisition of leather for armor easier and give leather armor back it's rightful place as the cheap and commonplace first armor set players make.

Current Drop Rate:
0-2 leather and 1-3 steak
Even with the most improbable good fortune, under these rates you will need to kill a minimum of 12 cows to obtain a full set of leather armor, and potentially as many as 24 if you get only the minimum amount of leather from each cow you kill. But cows are capable of dropping no leather at all, which means that you might even need to kill more than 24 cows to obtain the leather needed for a full set of armor, with no theoretical maximum. This is absolutely ridiculous.

Conservative Suggested Rate:
2-4 leather and 0-1 steak
Under this rate, you would need to kill a minimum of 6 cows to craft a full set of leather armor, and as many as 12 maximum. These numbers are improved, but not quite as much as I would hope.

My Ideal Suggested Rate:
3-5 leather and either remove steak, or alter it or porkchops
With this rate the number of cows killed is now as low as 5 and as high as 8. This seems much more reasonable to me, as leather armor is primarily only relevant for a fairly small window of time in the early game, so you should obtain it as soon as possible. Either the steaks or the porkchops would be altered in terms of hunger value or saturation to make them no longer redundant and give each it's own place and use.

Pig item drop rates would remain unchanged in all scenarios.

An idea from a thread contributor that I very much support:

Quote from PatDay

4) Give leather new benefits - Make leather mechanically desirable Certainly not as much as diamond, but something people would consider using. I think the best option might be to include special non-combat enchantments only leather can get such as a Speed boost or Sneaking option (players are invisible to mobs past a certain distance while crouching). It would give people a reason to make a "work" outfit out of leather. This would seem to be only a benefit in my opinion and can't think of any drawbacks.

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[url=http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1448912-cows-pigs-and-the-problem-with-leather-armor/][img]http://i158.photobucket.com/albums/t116/Ric_Adbur/LeatherArmorBanner2-1.png[/img][/url]

Actually, this sounds like a good idea. While I still would probably ignore leather armor, breeding cows does give you a large food supply. Though I think chicken might need a tweak, too, because it restores a little more then both steak and pork, as well as providing eggs for you to make cakes and more chickens, and feathers for arrows.

However now leather can be dyed, meaning any argument of "Leather armors is not useful enough" is thrown out the window faster than the LHC can spin particles. Books also provide uses to leather.

Now the pig vs cow argument is a common one. I reviewed the stats of porkchops and beef (both cooked and raw) and this is what I've found:

• Although raw beef restores the same amount of hunger as a raw porkchop, raw porkchops offer more saturation.
• Both cooked version restore the same hunger and saturation
• Pigs will now drop 1-3 porkchops on death. In other words, you are always going to get pork from a pig. A cow is the same way.
• Pigs can be ridden (both adult and the adorabable baby piggies)
• Cows can be milked an infinite number of times

Now, yes, cows offer more than pigs. However, I'd have to agree with Stravagante, although only with pigs. If pigs dropped leather, which is logical along with a reasonable buff, it would solve both the dilemma of rare leather and "usefulness" of both animals. Drop rates don't need to be adjusted; leather is meant to be somewhat difficult to get, and food isn't, much against some people's rather incorrect opinions.

Instead messing with cows, make pigs be breed with seeds instead. Now, not only they use stuff that overflows our chests, but are breedable from the very start.

Quote from Neospector

However now leather can be dyed, meaning any argument of "Leather armors is not useful enough" is thrown out the window faster than the LHC can spin particles. Books also provide uses to leather.

Making leather armor colorable in no way alters it's usefulness. It merely makes it a 'bling' item, similar to gold armor, that players will make later in the game for purely aesthetic reasons, rather than practical ones. It still does not fulfill it's proper function of being the weaker, and thus cheaper, armor option. It is currently weaker than iron armor, but as I have demonstrated it is not cheaper to obtain. Iron and leather are roughly equal in difficulty to gather (leather is in fact more time-consuming in many instances), and this clearly makes leather armor irrelevant for practical use.

It makes sense for leather armor to be the basic armor option, but as the system currently works, it is not. Iron is the basic armor, diamond is the upgraded armor, and gold and leather are rarely-used side options.

Quote from Neospector

Now, yes, cows offer more than pigs. However, I'd have to agree with Stravagante, although only with pigs. If pigs dropped leather, which is logical along with a reasonable buff, it would solve both the dilemma of rare leather and "usefulness" of both animals. Drop rates don't need to be adjusted; leather is meant to be somewhat difficult to get, and food isn't, much against some people's rather incorrect opinions.

I would also find it more acceptible if pigs dropped leather as well as cows, but the problem would then be that pigs and cows would be even more redundant to each other. There would be two animals where only one would be necessary in the overall crafting tree. In addition, it would merely cause the player to have to kill more animals in the beginning in order to make leather armor, which will not sufficiently increase the ease of obtaining it, and will force the player to unnecessarily eliminate nearby herds that could otherwise be used for breeding later on. It's not a good idea to introduce a mechanic that encourages such a self-defeating playstyle. For these reasons, I think adjusting the drop rates would be a better solution, because it would give each animal their own defined non-overlapping role while making both important, and it wouldn't encourage unsustainable gameplay practices.

There is just no reason for leather to be a rare or difficult to obtain item. On the contrary, it should be regarded as a basic crafting component in the same 'tier' as wood, and should be abundant and readily-available. Players should be able to make themselves leather armor by the end of the first day, because iron is easy enough to obtain that leather will quickly become obsolete as enough iron for armor is generally gathered within the course of the second or third days. To compensate for this, leather armor must be correspondingly much easier to obtain than iron to offset it's reduction in effectiveness. The player's leather armor would degrade just about in time for him to be able to make an iron suit to replace it.

I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks this. What I think should be done to fix this problem is this: They should make rotten flesh be smeltable into leather. It would not be overpowered because leather armour is underpowered and should be easy to get, way easier than iron, which is not the case right now.

Either that or they should make leather armoured MOBs more common and increase their drop rate of armour/tools.

I think a good way to make leather armour more useful/necessary would be to make iron armour require at least one piece of leather to craft each piece. Ideally it would use the corresponding armour type of leather armour.

Making cows drop more leather and less meat would make a lot of sense, the fact that they can sometimes not even drop any leather is very unbalanced.

Pigs are fine in my opinion, but cows should drop less meat to make pigs worth farming.

Crafting iron and diamond armor with leather armor as a base is a good idea to force the players to obtain leather armor in the first place before moving on to iron, and also makes sense since you'd assume that there needs to be some kind of padding underneath the hard shell. I would support that alteration. But that's a separate, albeit related, issue to bring up. My idea here would be a much less drastic change and would greatly improve early game balancing with extremely minimal effort on the part of the development staff.

Quote from Kingmansam

Erm chicken gives less than steak and pork...

Oh, my bad, I mixed them up when I reviewed the stats. Still, though, I do prefer breeding chickens.

Quote from flameboy99

Oh, my bad, I mixed them up when I reviewed the stats. Still, though, I do prefer breeding chickens.

Indeed, chicken giving less makes sense due to the sheer amount you can breed.
Breeding chickens while collecting eggs = OH GOD THEY'RE TAKING OVER

I find I use leather armour a LOT, but that's mostly because I play with my own house rules that kind of force me to build up more infrastructure before I can make metal armour. (Now that it's dyeable, I'll be using it a lot more on multiplayer servers, as uniforms, fashion statements, etc.

Of the ideas I've heard in this thread for adjusting cows and pigs, the one that appeals most to me is expanding the options for feeding/breeding pigs. Not just seeds, though; it should be possible to feed them mushrooms, apples, carrots, potatoes, melon, pumpkins, cane, and maybe even meat, fish and rotten flesh. (Pigs are in fact omnivores, not strict herbivores, so feeding them animal protein isn't entirely inappropriate. But their love of mushrooms is legendary.)

This all does feed into my thoughts of late about how to better differentiate the various kinds of livestock. I like that sheep graze to regrow wool, and that chickens don't actually need much feed to breed. Making pigs more adaptable in their diet would be a good step. But I'd also like to see something like that with cattle. There should be some kind of in-game mechanism that makes raising cattle and sheep on the same land difficult; they should compete in some way. (Historically, there was considerable strife between cattlemen and sheep herders in the old west, blamed in part on the accusation that sheep overgrazed.)

What if zombies dropped leather armor? They could have different colored leather armor with the new update soon to come. That would help the leather problem and not have to effect pigs and cows and all the other passive mobs.

If mojang will add more use for leather they could add another step in leather balancing.

If cow is killed make one cow skin.
One cow skin is crafted in to a set number of leathers.
One pig is killed a pig skin will be dropped.

Each cow or pig kill will always grant leather.
One whole set of leather armor shold not take more than half dozen of cow.
It take 24 leather now. In average it takes 12 cows or more.
Let it be a cow skin makes 4 leathers. 6 cows will make a whole set.

Or if adding new step is no no, just let cow drop more leather.

Making a 'cow hide' item that can be broken down into multiple leather is a great idea as well. I hadn't considered that, but really when you think about it that makes more sense, as you wouldn't get leather directly from the animal, you'd get a hide and you'd have to tan it. The cow hide item would look just like the current leather item, and then leather would get a new sprite that looks more 'processed.' That would definitely be in the crafting spirit of the game.

This would be a good solution to this problem. Leather armor is just not easy enough to acquire for it's level of usefulness, and as such players are unintentionally encouraged to skip it and go straight for iron.

Well, that also opens the door to making animals simply drop a "carcass" item, which could then be crafted (butchered) into various things.

Maybe make it 0-2 steak. Give them a chance to actually drop more meat than a chicken.

Another option is to leave the meat drop rates alone and decrease the hunger and saturation values of beef.

Finally a place to talk about the leather problem that isn't the "remove leather from books" thread.

Quote from Bumber

Maybe make it 0-2 steak. Give it a chance to actually drop more meat than a chicken.

Pigs already fulfill the role of dropping meat. In fact, it's their only role. And porkchops and steaks are identical and totally redundant items. So it seems most reasonable to allow pigs to be the primary source of what is essentially one item (and their only practical use), and have cows move to being the primary source of another item altogether (plus milk, of course). This will clearly differentiate the two animals and make both important to acquire for different reasons.

While we're on the subject of chickens, though, I think it would be better to change the chicken food item to a drumstick, rather than a whole chicken, and change the drop to 0-2. But that's a discussion for another thread, I think.

Quote from Ric_Adbur

Pigs already fulfill the role of dropping meat. In fact, it's their only role. And porkchops and steaks are identical and totally redundant items.

I'm just pointing out that it doesn't make sense that a cow could drop no usable meat whatsoever. With your suggested rate chickens on average drop more meat than cows, despite the fact that cows are bigger than chickens.

You probably missed the stuff I added onto that post so I'll restate it: They should leave the meat drops the same, but nerf the hunger values of steak. This keeps the volume of meat somewhat logical, while instead changing the nutritional values to make beef inferior to pork. This makes sense because pork is more fatty, and thus has more calories per piece.

Making steak inferior to porkchops might work, and would correct the issue of having steaks and porkchops being identical and redundant, but then cows would drop quite a lot of items upon death, up to 4 leather and 2 steak. 6 items dropped seemed a bit excessive. It seemed to me to make more sense to try to limit the number of dropped items. However I could be wrong in that regard.