animal husbandry Taming — NOT Domestication

[lobotorny]

I love the domestication feature in this game!! I noticed a lot of people want wolves to be domesticate-able as well, which I completely understand and partially agree with, but… I think it should be more complicated than that.

My suggestion is the ability to tame individual animals. When I say tame, I mean the actual definition of tame, not the one typically thought of in games. Not like giving a wolf a bone in Minecraft and magically getting a dog.

For anyone who doesn’t know the difference:

Taming is the process of training and desensitizing an individual, usually wild-born, animal to tolerate humans and/or perform certain tasks.

Domestication is what is currently present in the game— an evolutionary process where through successive generations, a species becomes more docile or friendly towards humans. In real life, this is through certain selective traits and has a genetic factor.

While I think domestication works great for livestock, I think for predatory animals that a taming system would work better— something to begin with before the process of domestication. It makes it more complicated to domesticate wolves into dogs, but I believe it’s much more rewarding. To get a companion, a hunting buddy, a guardian, it should probably be more difficult than domesticating a chicken or a goat.

On top of that though, I want to suggest taming as a mechanic for predatory animals because I absolutely adore spotted hyenas. While wolves should probably have taming be a pre-requisite to domestication, I’d love for other predatory animals to be tame-able even without the option for domestication.

I want to clarify that a tame animal isn’t necessarily a safe animal— even in captivity, tamed animals that have lived their entire lives with humans are still capable of harming and killing their owners, and I believe that if taming were ever a mechanic, this should be true in-game as well. Taming shouldn’t be an equivalent to domestication. There is still a present danger. But there are great rewards to having powerful allies— as long as you keep them well fed.

 

I’m at work right now, so I can’t dive further into how I think taming as a mechanic might work, but I’d love to hear other’s thoughts on this. For a game that prides itself on meticulously recreating the mechanics of the natural world, I feel that our potential interactions with animals should be just as equally fleshed out.

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, lobotorny said:

I’m at work right now, so I can’t dive further into how I think taming as a mechanic might work, but I’d love to hear other’s thoughts on this. For a game that prides itself on meticulously recreating the mechanics of the natural world, I feel that our potential interactions with animals should be just as equally fleshed out.

Overall, I think a combination of both is ideal. The player shouldn't be able to just trap wild animals and turn them into completely domesticated farm animals, but the wild animals also shouldn't just remain as wild as the day they were caught either. I think the framework of such a system is starting to be put in place with the new elk taming mechanic, in that the player can perhaps trap the baby animal in the wild and raise it to adulthood to get a semi-tame adult. To get fully tame domesticated animals though, the player will still need to breed at least a few generations of animal in order for the livestock to fully lose their fear(this also depends on the animal in question).

[lobotorny]

43 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Overall, I think a combination of both is ideal. The player shouldn't be able to just trap wild animals and turn them into completely domesticated farm animals, but the wild animals also shouldn't just remain as wild as the day they were caught either.

Absolutely! I think taming and domestication as mechanics would work best hand-in-hand.

Since it’s difficult to study how domestication as a process occurred in the modern day, I think that a prospective taming mechanic separate yet intwined with the domestication mechanic would help bridge the gap between feral animals to the behavior of animals entering early domestication— in a way that makes it feasible in a playable time-frame, at least.

The distinction between taming and domestication is really interesting to me and I’ve never seen a game really explore such a thing! Usually taming is just a one-and-done mechanic— think like in ARK: Survival Evolved. Once you tame a creature, that creature and all of its offspring are tamed unless you unclaim them. There’s never any emphasis on domestication. This game has the beginnings of domestication, and part of it certainly resembles taming like with the elk as you said, but I’d love for that to be expanded upon.

Just rambling though! It’s difficult to put my ideas into words. Thank you for humoring my thoughts however!

[Bruno Willis]

On 1/3/2026 at 8:06 AM, lobotorny said:

While I think domestication works great for livestock, I think for predatory animals that a taming system would work better— something to begin with before the process of domestication. It makes it more complicated to domesticate wolves into dogs, but I believe it’s much more rewarding. To get a companion, a hunting buddy, a guardian, it should probably be more difficult than domesticating a chicken or a goat.

This is really interesting as well because taming a single wolf could happen relatively early in your game - an early intro into animal husbandry, where domesticating takes many generations. I love the idea that a tame animal is still a dangerous one if not fed regularly. That fits right in with how scary semi-domesticated big horns are, and makes the idea of keeping wolves so much more exciting. They're still wolves, they should still be scary! 

It'd also be really neat to see your crazy friend taming wolves and always stressing about providing enough meat for them, and getting devoured every now and then, until one day they've domesticated the wolves enough, and they've got lovely loyal dogs.