This is what I've been reduced to

[Kolyenka]

I didn't realize how complacent I'd grown about fencing when the bug that prevented wild animals from going after crops was in affect. But now that it's fixed these goats are decimating my crops, and nothing seems particularly goat-proof, so here I am... in a creative world covered in goats, trying to figure out how the hell they've been getting in.

Apparently a fence/wall is enough to stop them even if there is a block at the same height 1 block away (like upper right fence area) but in my actual world I could have sworn I saw one walk right over that, so I'm dubious. I think part of the issue is that they love throwing themselves off mountains, and with enough momentum they can definitely get over. I also have seen them climb 2 blocks up when being hit, in some situations--mostly if they are trying to jump at the same time that you jab them with a spear. But I was doing that in my animal trench around the farm and they only climbed up in certain spots along the trench.

I did try going into survival mode here and chasing them around but I don't think I achieved anything doing that. Anyway. Much to think about...

Edited May 16 by Kolyenka

[Zane Mordien]

It's time to dig pits around the garden again to catch the free food. I didn't even know it was a bug, I thought they changed it to stop people from just trapping free food in pits. It's been "bugged" for about 2 years?

[Kolyenka]

10 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

It's time to dig pits around the garden again to catch the free food. I didn't even know it was a bug, I thought they changed it to stop people from just trapping free food in pits. It's been "bugged" for about 2 years?

It's been bugged since 1.19

From the post on 1.22.0-pre-1:

Quote

Nibblers: We've discovered a bug that prevented animals like hares from eating player-planted crops since 1.19. This is now fixed. Make sure to protect your crops!

I'm not sure if goats were included in this bug or not but this is my first time living in a goated area, and the measures I had been taking to keep rabbits out had gotten increasingly lax because they pretty much weren't eating any of my crops no matter what !

I have been trapping lots of animals in the trench and eating them, but that's not going to get me through the winter.

[Maelstrom]

Use wood fences.  Certain goats and big horn sheep can climb stone and dirt blocks up to 2 blocks high.  Nothing can run over the top of fences, even seraphim.

[All Mat]

You can also use this to your advantage, setting a fenced area with crops or a trough inside and placing a "stair" of dirt blocks right next to the fence from the outside.

This allows any animal to get in, but none will be able to get out.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

1 hour ago, Maelstrom said:

Use wood fences.  Certain goats and big horn sheep can climb stone and dirt blocks up to 2 blocks high.  Nothing can run over the top of fences, even seraphim.

I did it once. And then I divided by zero.

Turns out anything is possible when the world has already ended.

[Maelstrom]

I put a block next to the fence and slab on top of the fence to chase some sheep into my pen back in 1.19.  Not even I could walk over the slab into the pen.

[Lithembia]

Sheep can definitely parkour up two blocks. I've had them climb out of pits to try to kill me. 

In the json files it looks like goats, like most bears, should be able to climb 3. I haven't seen them do that but perhaps the pathfinding wasn't right in the instances I've seen (i.e. climbing out of the pit would mean going closer to me while I threw spears at them, so they didn't). 

Fences should block any entity. I don't believe there's anything in the game that climbs fences. A fence with a 2 block flat radius outside it should do it, maybe 3 if there's a dropoff. 

[Zane Mordien]

3 hours ago, All Mat said:

You can also use this to your advantage, setting a fenced area with crops or a trough inside and placing a "stair" of dirt blocks right next to the fence from the outside.

This allows any animal to get in, but none will be able to get out.

You don't even need to be that complicated. I had a stack of animals at the fence to my farm so I just dug a hole to see what would happen and they just hop right in. It's only a small hole on one side of my farm and it has collected way too many animals in 7 game days. 

 

 

 

On 5/17/2026 at 8:11 AM, Kolyenka said:

It's been bugged since 1.19

I saw that in the patch notes during the release candidates, but I didn't know it was bugged until they said something. They should set it back to bugged, because it is just to easy to catch animals this way. It's really simple to create fences so the cost of the fence vs all the free meat is out of balance. You could easily abuse this as well by setting up multilpe crop areas and having animals traps at each one. 

Edited Friday at 05:43 PM by Zane Mordien

[Kolyenka]

3 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

They should set it back to bugged, because it is just to easy to catch animals this way. It's really simple to create fences so the cost of the fence vs all the free meat is out of balance. You could easily abuse this as well by setting up multilpe crop areas and having animals traps at each one. 

I have mixed feelings on this.  On the one hand, i agree that its too easy to get tons of meat and hides this way, but you can also get the exact same result by, for example, digging a trench around a trough with feed. My chicken pit is always swarming with outside chickens, i could put a trench around it have infinite chicken meat. Exact same with goats and sheep. 

On the other hand, you don't HAVE to do any of these things.  I don't want or need infinite chicken meat, so i don't have a trench around the chicken pit. 

Edited Friday at 09:11 PM by Kolyenka

[Zane Mordien]

5 hours ago, Kolyenka said:

digging a trench around a trough with feed.

True, but at least you need to have copper technology to do this.

[Andael]

8 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

They should set it back to bugged, because it is just to easy to catch animals this way.

I kind-of agree -- or rather that a new bug be tracked: animals should avoid ledges which they cannot traverse back from. Less stuff falling from cliff edges, into vertical shafts, and into simple player-created pits (intentionally for animal-trapping or not).

Additional nuance would be panic (fleeing) or desperation (starvation and perception of food) overriding this ledge-avoidance -- allowing for natural ways to exploit pits, without every hole becoming a den of trapped wildlife.

Also, this would imply only sufficiently starving or angry(?) bears might succumb to a simple pit... otherwise taking a path around which might not gain its' quarry so immediately. Making it less of a guaranteed way to trap bears.

Edited yesterday at 02:06 AM by Andael

[LadyWYT]

8 hours ago, Zane Mordien said:

They should set it back to bugged, because it is just to easy to catch animals this way. It's really simple to create fences so the cost of the fence vs all the free meat is out of balance. You could easily abuse this as well by setting up multilpe crop areas and having animals traps at each one. 

I'm not sure they need to set it back to being bugged. As @Kolyenka noted, the player doesn't have to use exploits like this. I'm guessing the reason that some players resort to it, is that they don't like hunting in the current state of the game, and can't be bothered with livestock. Thus tweaking hunting(probably via status effects) to allow blood trails, reduced speed from injuries, bleedout from wounds, or situational "clean kill" shots would probably be enough to get more players actually hunting instead of doing the "food farms".

 

20 minutes ago, Andael said:

I kind-of agree -- or rather that a new bug be tracked: animals should avoid ledges which they cannot traverse back from. Less stuff falling from cliff edges, into vertical shafts, and into simple player-created pits (intentionally for animal-trapping or not).

Better pathfinding would also help, and could be applied to more things than just keeping critters out of obvious traps. But I'm not really sure how easy it is to get code like that to work efficiently.

[williams_482]

In my experience, the boon you get from a trench around your fields is fairly temporary. Everything that lives nearby will wander in, you kill them and harvest stuff, and then you'll have many months of nothing new showing up for a while. Occasionally freshly spawned animals will wander close enough to be caught in your turnip patch tractor beam, but not enough to maintain your protein sat without help from fish, active hunting, or conventional livestock. 

Animals should be smarter about pits, but as things are right now isn't terrible and it does force you to fence off your fields. 

[Andael]

32 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Better pathfinding would also help, and could be applied to more things than just keeping critters out of obvious traps. But I'm not really sure how easy it is to get code like that to work efficiently.

I have no familiarity with VS's codebase. And given that fleeing creatures will easily corner themselves... that might hint that pathing is fairly limited and unaware of traversability... or it could be intentional behavior regardless, so that animals aren't frustrating to corner!

I'd say that supporting ledge-awareness when it doesn't already exist could be more difficult if there was already a pathing system in-place which didn't support it (existing systems would be made with assumptions, often complicating such unplanned changes)... but my guess is that VS doesn't really have much... if it is relying on a more immediate bump-and-go solution, this would be easily adapted to treating ledges as non-traversable.

 

Edited yesterday at 02:57 AM by Andael

[Kolyenka]

4 minutes ago, williams_482 said:

In my experience, the boon you get from a trench around your fields is fairly temporary. Everything that lives nearby will wander in, you kill them and harvest stuff, and then you'll have many months of nothing new showing up for a while. Occasionally freshly spawned animals will wander close enough to be caught in your turnip patch tractor beam, but not enough to maintain your protein sat without help from fish, active hunting, or conventional livestock.

I don't think this is the case any longer. I have been manually hunting the native goats and sheep and chickens on my island for a full in game year and there are ALWAYS more. They are spawning in (there is nowhere to wander in from) regularly enough that my 300x100ish island always has multiple herds and flocks despite me constantly killing them off. 

[hstone32]

Yeah, fences are kinda funny the way they're implemented. I was doing testing in a creative world and laughed out loud when I saw bears (who normally can climb 3-block high walls) absolutely incapable of jumping an ankle-high fence.