Nests, pets, eggs & breeding!

A.k.a "How would the ultimate pet system work"! Imagine a situation in which you are exploring an ancient dungeon which is crawling with extraordinary and powerful lizards. As you venture deep into the dungeon, your presence disturbs the fine beasts and they attack you! You fight valiantly with all your might and manage to kill most of them while the rest of them flee from the scene. With them gone, you start looking aroud for loot. You come across a small nest with a dozen of eggs in it. Knowing that you would find them useful, you decide to gently wrap a piece of cloth around them and take them with you.

On your way back to the nearest city you realize that you don't have any food with you! Luckily you remember the eggs which you found in the dungeon and because you have spent much time learning to cook, you manage to make a perfect omelette from couple of lizard eggs. You cheated death once again!

You have finally stumbled across a city. Seeking out a shop which would gladly change your hard earned loot for money is the first thing you are planning to do and while doing so, someone approaches you. It's an animal trainer who is rather curious about if you have anything which would interest her. You show her the eggs and she is filled with joy! Soon after you have fewer eggs and a big bag of coins.

It has been several months since you discovered the eggs. You are now a proud owner of two fully grown lizards and their offspring. As you glance over your compassionate reptiles you think to yourself how much did the exploration of the ancient dungeon affect your life.

Looting nests for eggs which could be sold, eaten or hatched would add a whole new dimension to the game. Feel free to comment and share your thoughts about this idea!

 

Because there are propably topics covering "breeding system", I decided not to talk about it in great detail. In my opinion, properly functioning eggs would add a great amount of depht into the game.

 

I don't say no to the idea.
But one thing would need to be looked at, which is : people shouldn't relying entirely on the "egg-market".
People buying eggs instead of buying real grown animals from actual tamers would kill the whole system, in my opinion.
A egg system could be nice, but it should remains secondary in the main taming market.
Maybe taking care of an egg would require some taming related skills. An unskilled character who don't know much about these would end up getting them killed against his will, for whatever reason (lack of heat, too shaky in the backpack, etc)

 

I agree, it should not be something everybody could do. There is no point having eggs which would produce pets without sufficent taming skills. If you are not good at taming and animal related skills, you could not hatch an egg and if the egg is too long in bad conditions, it could not be hatched. Having higher skill requirements for looking after eggs than taming of "fully grown animals" would balance things a little.

 

I hope you didn't tell your pets that you ate their siblings!

I generally like the idea with the extention that having looted the eggs, the odds of keeping them viable until you sold them should also (as implied) be based on your skill. Also a skills animal tamer should be able to tell whether or not the eggs are viable prior to purchase.

 

The idea is sound if used in conjunction with the animal taming skill, otherwise animal tamers become obsolete.

 

If done correctly, egg would not render taming useless.

 

In theory, pets could be a major part of the class system. So 0 points in pets nets you a non-combat pet that follows you around, and putting the majority there makes a fearsome beast where your character is merely a puppeteer.

There can be many paths to acquiring a pet, eggs and taming included.

 

I'd like trapping in the game, along with hunting. Not only for hunting and killing the animals, but also capturing them, say a bird, and then putting the bird in a cage.

Would also be fun to climb trees and steal from nests that are on tree limbs, or steal honey from a bee hive.

 

Wonderful ideas. My main concern is that the whole animal system will be too shallow.

 

Would work well if there were a reptile class available..

 

I was just starting to think about this general topic again and found this here thread with the forum search.. horray for forum search!

There still hasn't been much talk of a breeding system or animal breeding in general since this thread was started. I figured I'd just post here as my brain wandered back to the subject.

As it seems likely that we'll have some measure of farming.. or gardening etc I thought that animal farms would be a natural extension to the concept of animal taming and owning a small farm. So for example when we finally get horses.. those of us who are horse lovers will naturally like to be able to breed horses.. how about a llama farm? Sheep? Free wool anyone? Some animals can be a source of renewable resources of various kinds and it would seem odd for animal farms not to exist in a large world.

Given the size of lots I expect there's be a limit on the number of 'pets' you could own and breed.. perhaps depending upon the style of house you have also. Perhaps 4 or 6.. 2 for breeding and others to raise, train, sell & harvest.

 

If breeding is a feature it should be coupled with some form of genetics and occasional mutation. Breed a fast horse, or one that can carry more. Breed cattle for diet, meat, milk production or fecundity. Breed attack cows to protect the homestead. A Tale in the Desert had a beetle breeding system that created fractal-like patterns, combining randomness with enough player control to guide the designs in a particular direction. Let's breed some roses!

 

I don't think we need a terribly complex breeding system but some measure of influence through selection would be nice. We don't need advanced genetics here.. but I also don't want to have 2 black horses and end up with a palomino either. Breeding for color and stats should be easy enough (in theory).