Livestock farming

Craftopia allows you to capture creatures, pen them in, and continuously harvest them for resources. This page will focus on all the parts of that.

## How to make a Livestock Farm (a place that farms livestock, as opposed to the game object)

### Capture Animals

* You can craft Monster Prisms at the workbench with easily found stone and sand.
* Recommend you make a fair bit more than you intend to use, as they are hard to aim (hint, aim low on the animal) and tend to go flying off in random directions if they miss or glance off the animal.
* You can pick a missed Monster Prism up again if you get to it quickly enough, but they'll disappear before long, so if it shoots far off over the horizon... best just give up on it.
* Animals must be damaged down to red-critical health before they can be captured. If you're having a hard time weakening them without killing them, remember that a shield bash does much less damage, and also does not trigger the animal's running behavior (*possibly* not attacking behavior either for slightly more aggressive animals like buffalo -- must test).
* In theory you can grab a mix of different animals, but if you want consistent and predictable resources from them (milk, eggs, etc), it's best to stick to a single type. Making multiple separate "Pastures" for different animal types is also an option.
* I recommend you collect about 10 animals to start off your farm.
* Once captured, animals are "tamed", and will have hearts floating over their head ever after. You can re-capture them with another Prism again (**without** damaging them, 100% success rate) if you need to move them somewhere specific.

### Build a "Pasture"

* Using Fences, wall off a ***large***  flat area. You may want to use wooden floors to make that flat area artificially. (Don't worry; animals don't actually need grass to eat. There's no "feeding" mechanic.)
* Try to overlap the end-posts of the Fence segments so that there are absolutely no cracks. Animals will tend to try and wiggle out through a crack even as thin as a piece of paper... and occasionally they succeed (this being one of the better reasons to make your own perfectly flat space for this).
* You should build your other devices roughly near the middle of this Pasture area, rather than around the edges, so that your animals wander into them more often.
* Once you have the Fences up, you can technically release all those starter animals you collected, but you may wish to wait until you've placed the devices where you want them, as the animals will get in the way of placement otherwise.

### Build "Livestock Farm" Device

* I'm hoping this object gets a better name later, like "Animal Harvester". It looks like a cow-sized toaster with tanks and pipes on one side.
* This device will harvest a resource (example: Milk) from your tame animals who wander into it, by way of bouncing them up and down and shaking the byproduct out of them.
* This damages the animal over time and eventually kills them (causing them to drop their normal kill-loot). That's normal. The objective in keeping this farm is not to keep your animals alive, but to maintain a roughly consistent population (we'll get to that).
* I recommend at least two, possibly three Livestock Farm devices, to balance out the production of the Breeding Facility. You still might need to come back and make adjustments to the animal population (in either direction) depending on how large is your Pasture wall of Fences, and how often the animals inside bump into the devices.
* You can also deliberately throw captured animals into this device.

### Build Breeding Facility

* Your tame animals will randomly wander into this device, and when there are two, it will start spinning them around like a teacup carnival ride, bumping them into each other over and over (you didn't think they were going to show you random animals boning, did you? :P ) which will lead to new, lower level animals popping out of the green-bordered pipe on the side (so don't point that side at a wall).
* You can also deliberately throw captured animals into the device. You may want to throw two of your captured "starter" animals in here right away to get things moving.
* Breeding damages the "parent" animals over time, just like the other machine, but they should be able to squirt out 4-5 new animals before they drop dead (leaving behind the usual kill-drops) So it produces more than it loses.
* One Breeding Facility should be quite enough to supply two Livestock Farms, but you may occasionally need to re-balance things, in either direction.
* As mentioned, if you want predictable resources out of your animal ranch, then keep to one type of animal at a time. HOWEVER, the Breeding Facility can also combine ANY two animals to produce a new creature... which at least at present is almost certainly just a different animal you've already seen elsewhere (known combination: Cow + Bear = Mono). Apparently you can even breed people in this thing. It's going to get weird.

### Resource Collection

* Finally you will probably wish to place a box or two with Absorbers attached to gather up the animal byproducts, and the kill-drops from the Livestock Farms and Breeding Facility.
* It's tempting to squeeze all your devices close together to make sure the Absorber can collect everything into one single box, but if the devices are too close together, your animals will have difficulty getting into them, out of them, and the resources themselves may get caught around the corners of the devices. A pair of boxes with Absorbers casting a wider field of a collection zone. ...***Or***, even better: a single box with multiple Absorbers at the center. with the various devices spaced around it. You should be able to get 4 Absorbers onto one box.