Animal Branding / Tagging

[ArtiKs]

I am aware that animal husbandry has yet to go through some changes. Getting a herding mechanic implemented seems to be on the horizon since the higher the generation is, the harder it gets for the player to move them around, but that is not the issue I would like to address today.

First, the reed basket trap was a fantastic addition because separating the offspring without having to design fancy builds to sort and cycle animals around was made easier (in the case of pigs). But one problem persists: How hard and annoying was it to differentiate animals in their pen from the earlier generations to the later ones if they are mixed in a pen? Everything looks the same.

Killing most of the parents as they reproduce helps preventing both gens mixing. And sure, Ewes are easy to get close to (and check their gen number), or even be easy to separate into other pens, but what about boars when their offspring is running around? (Bye-bye armor durability) Or even worse, chickens that gather and clump together and make it impossible to identify? Getting close to them to check a line of text with no alternative is a problem if you ask me, because there must be ways to make the player recognize things without always having to resort to the text displays. For now, the simplest solution is introducing a method to mark animals.

I suggest the following ones:

 

Paintballs:
It is a mixture of tree resin, lime water or fat and maybe some dye that must be heated in a pot. Can be used for color branding but it disappears after a long time (due to in-game months or faster, due continued exposure to the weather). They can be thrown or applied to animals so that their skin could get some sort of a colored slash, splash, stripe, or anything really that helps identifying an assigned gen.

This is the method I like the most. Not permanent, does not stress the animal and by the time it disappears, it has already served its purpose.

Branding metals:
A harsh but effective solution that requires a heated iron stick to mark bigger animals forever (omg this souns horrible). This method affects their animosity against the player, so they stay stressed and aggressive for a couple of days, and even after healing, they might randomly get away from the player for a long time.

This idea was meant for the “feverstone’s horses” mod that I tried in my world a long time ago in its early iterations but I ended up not liking it. Now that riding will be implemented in the base game, I got it out of the trash can and here it is. In a single player world, I do not see a use for metal branding, but if this is too cruel for you, let us move on to the next one:

Leather Tags:
Requires dyed leather and metal clips to attach to their ears, legs / shanks, especially pigs and chickens. We could even throw in the Ink and quill for an optional renaming of the mob in question.

To make things clear, the color is there for the player to know what generation a particular mob is from afar, and in turn they could also be targeted from a safe distance and killed when away from the rest (even if they try to run, because now they just stay there). It doesn’t even have to be dyable color stains as long as marking is a thing. Besides, maybe for some reason there is attachment to a particular mob and we want to keep it alive? Yes, chickens. I am talking about chickens . 
I want to have a late gen pet rooster, but isolating them is a struggle. They keep running away from me and gathering in the corners with others that are there for poultry purposes. I see the one that must perish, the falx slips and… ups, I just killed the wrong one… again (¬_¬). Am I that clumsy?