I Love the Goats! However,

[lastwazy]

I work with goats irl and I love them a lot, so seeing they were added has me super super excited, especially since they added my favorite goat breed ever (Angoras)!! Loaded up a creative world asap to spawn in a whole bunch of goats to look at, but to my horror... the female goats don't have horns! How am I meant to play my eldritch block game now?!

I am being hyperbolic of course but female goats not having horns is a bit of a pet-peeve of mine. The vast majority of goat breeds have horns regardless of sex (hornless breeds are also consistent in this regard), and yet it's so common for games to leave out the horns on female goats.

But in the case of VS, why don't they have horns? The game already tells you the sex of an animal when you look at them. & it's subtler, but for a visually differentiating them the males are already larger than the females (which is very accurate to life!). & while these details can depend on the breed, you could still accurately differentiate them by giving the girls smaller/slimmer horns and smaller (or in some cases, no) beards.

It's a small detail that doesn't matter at the end of the day, but if anyone made a mod to fix this, they'd immediately become my hero

[Venusgate]

My big disappointment only after an hour of wrangling was: goats are not domesticatable (i.e. breedable/milkable).

Sheep milk but no goat milk? What fresh hell hast we entered?

Edited December 22, 2023 by Venusgate

[lastwazy]

@Venusgate No way?! Surely it's planned to be added later, since this update was mostly about fixes & tweaks anyways? I haven't had time to play myself lately but I'll try it out when I can. But it's wild if it's not at least planned, especially bc some of the goats in the lineup are without a doubt completely domesticated breeds! (Especially Angoras, who produce fiber at an incredible rate!! If it ever becomes possible to harvest and process fiber from animals, I don't think I'd ever play another game again lol!)

[Venusgate]

We can hope - I just know as of 1.19.7, the trough stayed full :<

[redram]

Glad you're liking the goats @lastwazy!  We wanted to have horns on the females, but Tyron was already pretty overloaded with more critical tasks, so the female horns will have to come in later.  The original horn mechanic was set up for deer, who shed their horns and the females don't normally have horns.  So I had to get him to re-adapt it once to have the option for permanent horns, and it was just too much to get him to adapt it yet again for females to be able to have horns (but not as big of horns as males) so late in the update cycle.  Another day.

@Venusgate If you're having problems with breeding or milking the new goats, please do tell more details.   What breed(s) you tried, and what food you were trying to feed them,  if they were eating the food or not, etc.  The more details the better.   They should be totally milkable and breedable.  If your latest experience was 1.19.7, I do believe the behaviors were added after that version.   
Now, unfortunately - as I understand it - the legacy bighorns ended up having their breeding behaviors messed up by the new goats' breeding behavior, so if the problem was with legacy goats, that should be fixed in the next rc release.

We're not done with planned features for goats (and other animals for that matter) yet.   They will definitely eventually be able to be sheared (someday, probably not this update).  And Angoras should provide the most mohair of them all I think.  You won't see it right now because they can't be sheared so their state never changes, but their model is set up with 4 different states of hair growth, from freshly shorn to overgrown.  So eventually when you shear them, they'll look it, and if you neglect to shear them too long, they'll look that too!

[Venusgate]

@redram That's great to hear.

I don't remember hte name and I've since nuked the save and started a 1.18.15, but it was a male and female of the 3rd adult from the left. The brown with white spots

filled trough with 64 hay and they never touched it.

I eventually gave up when I noticed the tooltip didn't mention anything about "ready to mate"

Granted, it was a modded save that eventually went tits up as my regular ewe didnt seem to do anything but get angry when I milked it.

Edited December 23, 2023 by Venusgate

[lastwazy]

@redram I am once again impressed by this games attention to detail o: I did not know about the mechanics surrounding deer antlers. While hornless female goats are bothersome to a goat fan like me, I am glad it's just a byproduct of working on more important things!! As a huge nerd of fiber arts & fiber animals, I am beyond excited to hear that the game will include mohair & even the potential for animals to become overgrown (in due time of course).

[redram]

17 hours ago, Venusgate said:

filled trough with 64 hay and they never touched it.

Also just discovered recently that hay blocks had not been given the proper tag to make them fodder for animals.  So that's another slip-up that'll be fixed next rc.

[Venusgate]

6 hours ago, redram said:

Also just discovered recently that hay blocks had not been given the proper tag to make them fodder for animals.  So that's another slip-up that'll be fixed next rc.

I did mean drygrass, sorry.