Herding livestock

[MKMoose]

Motivation

There have been numerous cultures all over the world, like the Sami or the Scythians, which often lived a more mobile lifestyle, moving seasonally between different pastures and relied heavily on a herd of animals for sustenance, resources and trade. Some tradition of shepherds and similar roles also appears in many other cultures which were otherwise less mobile. As of now, anything remotely resembling this kind of gameplay style is borderline impossible in Vintage Story, as animal husbandry practically requires a secure enclosure. But, there are mechanics in place which can be developed to implement a more flexible system relatively easily.

 

Goal

• Create a simple system that allows safely and reliably herding a group of animals, even while traveling over long distances.
• Implement mechanics to enable the player to subsist primarily if not only on the herded animals, and ideally also reward seasonal travel with the herd.

 

Mechanics

1. Animal herds - a number of animals which is recognized by the game as belonging to one group. A simple form of herds is already in the game, and some new functionality around it would have to be added. The primary realistically herded animals from among those that we already have in the game include goats, sheep and reindeer. For the purpose of increasing meaningful distinctions between animals, it would make sense to include goats, sheep and reindeer in the more complex herding mechanics, while restricting pigs to enclosed pens.

2. Herding staff (or herding crook, alternatively abstracted to just a walking stick, potentially alongside some related items) - allows to group animals into a herd assigned to this staff (e.g. assign by clicking on an animal with RMB, remove from the herd with Shift + RMB; a staff without an assigned herd could automatically take on an existing herd on the first RMB). The simplest possible implementation would have all animals assigned to the same herd loosely follow the person holding the staff and stay in the vicinity of the last position where the staff was held in hand. Some features could then be added or adjusted (especially some way to force a herd stay in a location and to call back lost animals would be useful) to allow more intuitive or more complex herd management and avoid mistakes like accidentally holding the staff for a moment and causing the herd to move. The staff (especially if named a crook) may also allow to "pick up" and move animals in a way similar to the entity mover tool available in the creative mode, although it would likely be less effective and potentially restricted to baby animals.

3. Grazing and pasture - the herded animals, in part to naturally reward travel and avoid some of the maintenance normally associated with animal husbandry, should be able to graze on most terrain with vegetation, especially natural meadows - this would mean that they would not have to be fed to multiply, and thereby could effectively serve as a mobile food source. The only restriction is that there would likely have to be some mechanism similar in some aspects to the fish depletion mechanic, potentially based on the travelled distance, which would limit the amount of food that a herd can obtain from an area and incentivize the player to travel with the herd instead of staying stationary. Additionally, making different biomes optimal for grazing at different times of year would incentivize seasonal movement.

 

Important considerations

1. Reliability - for a herding system to be remotely worthwhile, it has to be safe, reliable and practical, and frankly it would probably be the biggest implementation challenge here:

• no unannounced and nearly unstoppable predator attacks decimating half the herd or running off with it into the sunset,
• no random jumping into pits or drowning in water,
• no sprinting off the moment the player approaches,
• no having to individually bring back animals that move too far away,
• no having to babysit the animals to make sure that they don't hurt themselves or run off.

Some level of risk and complication is fine, but it has to be low enough to avoid making herding, which already starts off on the back foot by leaning into a mobile gameplay style, into a tedious, annoying and unfun gimmick that nobody wants to interact with. The goal really should be the opposite - something simple and reliable that the player can do without an excess of maintenance and worry.

2. Early-game accessibility - while it might be more realistic to require animals to be domesticated for a few generations before they can be herded, it would also render herding largely useless. It has to be relatively easy and quick in the early game, because (1) why move to herding when the player has already domesticated the animals for an extended period of time, and (2) late-game features like ironmaking and steelmaking require a more stationary gameplay style, so herding has to be introduced early to avoid a conflict of incentives.

 

Additional or future features

• Chickens could use a related mechanic to make them stay near henboxes without the need for a fence, though that could be easily done without any herd mechanics.
• Several new species of animals could make for excellent herds, especially some kind of cattle or yaks, which may also see use in transport, farming and mechanical power.
• Additional seasonal mechanics that would make the player want to visit different regions at different times of year regardless of whether they are managing a herd or not would make herding fit more naturally with the regular gameplay cycle.
• Mobile storage, portable shelters, less restrictive progression gating, less restrictive respawning mechanics and other changes to enable more nomadic playstyles would go a long way to make herding less one-dimensional, into something that actually functions within the broader range of mechanics instead of fighting against them.

Edited Tuesday at 09:46 AM by MKMoose
Minor corrections.

[williams_482]

As usual, this is a good idea that should be mostly workable. Nomadic herding probably isn't something I personally would engage in much, but there's clearly some interest for it in the community.

The hardest part of this is likely to be making the animal AI smart enough not to be constantly wandering into trouble, and that is a pretty serious difficulty. As currently coded, even animals which have lost their fear of the player make all sorts of dumb choices when trying to navigate mildly difficult terrain, and are extremely vulnerable to predators. 

As far as predators go, it's appropriate for wolves or a bear to be a serious difficulty for a pastoral nomad and their flock, but the scale of the damage a rampaging bear would currently cause is well out of whack with what a player should be expected to deal with. Bears especially are too difficult to anticipate, and a rampaging bear will happily kill an entire flock if given the chance. I have two suggestions for this:

1. Bear rampage mode shouldn't be a thing, at least not as it exists now. Bears on the hunt should kill and eat one medium/large animal at a time and then chill out for a while, giving the player and their flock a chance to escape with only a single casualty if fighting the bear is not an option. 

2. Animals should be visibly nervous/skittish when they detect a predator at a range longer than the predator's prey detection radius, and reticent or outright unwilling to get closer. This gives the player an early warning system, and creates situations where they must pick between finding and killing the bear they know is somewhere in those bushes, or leading the flock in a long arc around while risking a possible ambush

For animal grazing, animals could follow the same rules as a seraph gathering dry grass with a knife. Every once in a while they get hungry and eat some tall grass, trimming it down. If a hungry animal cannot find tall grass within a reasonable radius, they will eat short grass instead, permanently preventing that tile from regrowing more grass in the future. In this way, small groups of animals can browse an area indefinitely, but larger herds in too small a space will eventually eat all the available food and leave the area barren. 

[MKMoose]

1 hour ago, williams_482 said:

For animal grazing, animals could follow the same rules as a seraph gathering dry grass with a knife. Every once in a while they get hungry and eat some tall grass, trimming it down. If a hungry animal cannot find tall grass within a reasonable radius, they will eat short grass instead, permanently preventing that tile from regrowing more grass in the future. In this way, small groups of animals can browse an area indefinitely, but larger herds in too small a space will eventually eat all the available food and leave the area barren. 

I greatly appreciate the suggestions regarding predators, and I'm just not a fan of preventing a tile from growing grass permanently. Grass already regrows at a limited rate, so a given area would be naturally only able to feed so many animals sustainably, and no further complications seem necessary to me, especially not permanent consequences. Though it might be fine to just greatly reduce regrowth rates for overgrazed areas, achieving a similar effect while still allowing them to recover slowly.

Or if any further complications are still desired either way, then I would initially aim in three possible directions:

• with the goal of creating a seasonal cycle, just more proper seasonal growth - either something simple implemented as preventing regrowth until the next spring rather than indefinitely, or a more comprehensive rework,
• with the goal of making the effects of overgrazing more predictable and consistent, something like a large-scale depletion system - managed efficiently under the hood and not on the basis of individual plants, with long-term effects spread out over larger areas rather than concentrated on what the animals happen to eat,
• with the goal of incentivizing longer-distance travel, some mechanics which would make good grazing areas or pastures much less common and more valuable - keeping the herd constantly fed for the full benefits would require more carefully planned travel between somewhat distant outposts or settlements, not just moving the animals a hundred blocks away to another part of the same expansive grasslands.

Edited Monday at 10:05 PM by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

10 hours ago, MKMoose said:

2. Early-game accessibility - while it might be more realistic to require animals to be domesticated for a few generations before they can be herded, it would also render herding largely useless. It has to be relatively easy and quick in the early game, because (1) why move to herding when the player has already domesticated the animals for an extended period of time, and (2) late-game features like ironmaking and steelmaking require a more stationary gameplay style, so herding has to be introduced early to avoid a conflict of incentives.

This is probably the case for adding partial taming mechanics to allow the player to feed appropriate wild stock enough to make them cooperative for herding, but perhaps not much else until a few generations have passed. That kills two birds with one stone by making the traditional homestead route a little easier in regards to livestock, while also opening the door to a nomadic lifestyle.

Though I would also say that this is a good niche for traders to fill as well, perhaps. Granted, livestock would be expensive, but being able to buy the occasional juvenile animal from a trader would be nice. In keeping with an idea that I mentioned in a different thread, if traders can be befriended by completing different tasks, then perhaps nomadic players could form a symbiotic relationship with a few and earn their keep via hunting or foraging. Once they've acquired enough animals to travel around then they could operate more independently.

[The Lerf]

I like the idea, but I don't know if it's worth the full effort of implementation just for players who don't want to engage with half the game. Parts of it are great; I welcome any improvements to animal behavior, and the concept of a 'Follow Me' ability for domesticated animals, but I think there's more standing in the way of nomadic living in VS than just herds. Especially for something that is kind of just roleplay.

[MKMoose]

5 hours ago, The Lerf said:

I like the idea, but I don't know if it's worth the full effort of implementation just for players who don't want to engage with half the game. Parts of it are great; I welcome any improvements to animal behavior, and the concept of a 'Follow Me' ability for domesticated animals, but I think there's more standing in the way of nomadic living in VS than just herds. Especially for something that is kind of just roleplay.

I feel like it's pretty odd to say that herding would be primarily for people who don't want to enagage with half the game. Historically, even nomadic lifestyles didn't involve continuous movement, as movement was not the goal. Many communities would move between seasonal camps that would be visited annually, so I see no reason not to reflect that in-game. Efficient herding would necessarily require some travel, but it shouldn't be so time-consuming as to prevent the player from engaging with other features in a significant way - it would just require more planning, or a lot of work to set up multiple well-equipped outposts instead of just a single home, and could be adequately done without greatly impeding other activities.

Though I could have probably mentioned them more explicitly, secondary goals of a herding mechanic also include improvements to baseline animal husbandry to make managing animals more intuitive and less annoying. With some experience, I can gather a few goats within the first couple days, but I've seen so many newer players confused about the mechanics and struggling to contain the animals, and ultimately most people default to ugly, crammed enclosures.

I would want herding to actually serve a meaningful gameplay function and not be limited to roleplay, and I think that would be actually very easy to achieve with the herding staff and grazing once a few broad AI improvements are in place.

 

6 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

This is probably the case for adding partial taming mechanics to allow the player to feed appropriate wild stock enough to make them cooperative for herding, but perhaps not much else until a few generations have passed. That kills two birds with one stone by making the traditional homestead route a little easier in regards to livestock, while also opening the door to a nomadic lifestyle.

The exact implementation can vary greatly, but it may be worth mentioning that realistically, herding has likely originated from more or less subtly managing already existing wild herds. The process naturally wasn't as simple as "walk up to the animal and touch it with a stick", so perhaps there's space for some more complex domestication mechanisms (which have been on the roadmap for a while). Also, some animals are known to have historically approached humans first - mainly cats and dogs, but possibly also some other animals in certain cases. The idea of trapping wild animals and shoving them into a fenced-off area is arguably extremely simplistic and unimmersive, at least in the context of early domestication, so I do like the idea to make it more gradual.

 

6 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Though I would also say that this is a good niche for traders to fill as well, perhaps. Granted, livestock would be expensive, but being able to buy the occasional juvenile animal from a trader would be nice. In keeping with an idea that I mentioned in a different thread, if traders can be befriended by completing different tasks, then perhaps nomadic players could form a symbiotic relationship with a few and earn their keep via hunting or foraging. Once they've acquired enough animals to travel around then they could operate more independently.

Buying young animals seems like a good idea, though I'll mention that realistically it often worked and other way around - herders were often highly reliant on a trade network, while static settlements benefitted greatly from the animals. They would trade their livestock and related products for tools, grain, pottery and a variety of other goods, so I think it would be great to reflect that in the game and make sure that more dedicated herders can reliably supply themselves from traders, instead of just becoming independent, especially since herding would naturally involve traveling which would make visiting traders more convenient. That would primarily involve increased trader throughput and increased demand for meat, dairy, fat and hides or related products, because as far as I can find redmeat can only be sold to one trader type, fat can be sold to two (one as part of the longbow), while dairy and hides can't be sold at all (leather can be sold, but making it reliable may require some alternative method of leathermaking).

Edited Tuesday at 10:03 AM by MKMoose
Fixed the first response after realizing what I was actually responding to.

[The Lerf]

15 hours ago, MKMoose said:

I feel like it's pretty odd to say that herding would be primarily for people who don't want to enagage with half the game. Historically, even nomadic lifestyles didn't involve continuous movement, as movement was not the goal. Many communities would move between seasonal camps that would be visited annually, so I see no reason not to reflect that in-game. Efficient herding would necessarily require some travel, but it shouldn't be so time-consuming as to prevent the player from engaging with other features in a significant way - it would just require more planning, or a lot of work to set up multiple well-equipped outposts instead of just a single home, and could be adequately done without greatly impeding other activities.

Though I could have probably mentioned them more explicitly, secondary goals of a herding mechanic also include improvements to baseline animal husbandry to make managing animals more intuitive and less annoying. With some experience, I can gather a few goats within the first couple days, but I've seen so many newer players confused about the mechanics and struggling to contain the animals, and ultimately most people default to ugly, crammed enclosures.

I would want herding to actually serve a meaningful gameplay function and not be limited to roleplay, and I think that would be actually very easy to achieve with the herding staff and grazing once a few broad AI improvements are in place.

Perhaps 'not engage with half the game' is the wrong choice of words. But let me see if I can explain what I mean.

Vintage Story is not designed for nomadic life, and I don't know if herding mechanics is enough to allow it to actually be used to any effective measure beyond roleplay. People don't build a base/home because the game tells you to, but because it's the easiest, most effective way of surviving due to the ability to concentrate your resources and have structures for defense and production. To be nomadic, you have to give up your resources and defense and production until you return to that place. We don't have effective mobile storage in the game, so any seasonal move becomes a small restart essentially. The game has terrain with tons of vertical death pit caves, a very high amount of predators per place, enemies that spawn at night, and semi-weekly apocalypse events. Moving a herd is inherently more risky than real life, by a large degree. Animals don't need food, don't care about weather, and don't care about space. They can be gathered in a small pen and be forgotten about and be fine. They aren't nearly as valuable to the player as they would be in real life contexts.

Yes, you can do the work to have multiple bases, but why would you bring animals on trips outside of roleplay? The time spent making a base far enough away for it to matter includes travel time, which I imagine would be at a walking pace for the herd to follow. Based on how animals work, it would be easier to just have animals at each base without moving them.

I say this because I already do something kind of similar in my single-player VS games. I use a dirt hut through the stone age, on metalworking I upgrade it with planks, furniture, equipment, etc, and at iron I make a new base somewhere else more attractive/resource heavy from the ground up. That becomes the new base of operations, and part of my roleplay is I then make the dirt hut look ruined and abandoned. The transient stage of moving is the most annoying part, because there's only so much you can take at one time. So, you minimize your trips as much as possible, because the time spent walking is time wasted, and holding W isn't engaging at all. 

For herding to become an intentionally designed system in VS, animals need more resources put into them, and to get more resources out of them. Grazing and pastures is the plan, but I think it's easier to apply to a player-built pen by calculating the size of an animal pen, and then determining how many animals it can support based on that size. Animals should need to be fed, either by the player or by grazing, or either die/no longer produce resources. The resources in question should probably be compost, wool, more meat, or even be able to be sold to traders. But the point is they need to provide more value by being alive. By making animals more valuable as resource producers, but making them fragile, it creates an incentive to either A: invest in a structure to protect them but have to manually feed them, or B: invest in the equipment needed to move them away during inhospitable winter months to keep their automatic grazing. Unfortunately I feel like the cost/benefit ratio still skews heavily away from nomadic herding because of all the environmental hazards, but one could say there's a reason why historic nomadics settled down too.

[MKMoose]

11 hours ago, The Lerf said:

Vintage Story is not designed for nomadic life, and I don't know if herding mechanics is enough to allow it to actually be used to any effective measure beyond roleplay. People don't build a base/home because the game tells you to, but because it's the easiest, most effective way of surviving due to the ability to concentrate your resources and have structures for defense and production. To be nomadic, you have to give up your resources and defense and production until you return to that place. We don't have effective mobile storage in the game, so any seasonal move becomes a small restart essentially. The game has terrain with tons of vertical death pit caves, a very high amount of predators per place, enemies that spawn at night, and semi-weekly apocalypse events. Moving a herd is inherently more risky than real life, by a large degree. Animals don't need food, don't care about weather, and don't care about space. They can be gathered in a small pen and be forgotten about and be fine. They aren't nearly as valuable to the player as they would be in real life contexts.

It is unavoidable that you're largely correct on herding not being a particularly great fit for the current game mechanics, but the issue that I have with the current mechanics is not that they make hypothetical herding suboptimal - it's that they make remotely efficient herding quite literally impossible even if you really try. There is absolutely no way to reliably keep an animal from wandering off besides a fence, whereas realistically just having perceived safety and a source of food will often make animals stay and return.

There is quite a few things that could be considered as in need of some changes before herding and especially a more proper nomadic lifestyle gets introduced, but in quite a few cases I think those are mechanics which can be considered quite outdated either way, especially animal AI and domestication, or features that probably should be eventually implemented on their own either way, e.g. mobile storage.

 

14 hours ago, The Lerf said:

For herding to become an intentionally designed system in VS, animals need more resources put into them, and to get more resources out of them. Grazing and pastures is the plan, but I think it's easier to apply to a player-built pen by calculating the size of an animal pen, and then determining how many animals it can support based on that size. Animals should need to be fed, either by the player or by grazing, or either die/no longer produce resources. The resources in question should probably be compost, wool, more meat, or even be able to be sold to traders. But the point is they need to provide more value by being alive. By making animals more valuable as resource producers, but making them fragile, it creates an incentive to either A: invest in a structure to protect them but have to manually feed them, or B: invest in the equipment needed to move them away during inhospitable winter months to keep their automatic grazing. Unfortunately I feel like the cost/benefit ratio still skews heavily away from nomadic herding because of all the environmental hazards, but one could say there's a reason why historic nomadics settled down too.

I think a lot just depends on balancing. If farming and animal husbandry are made somewhat more demanding (with a corresponding yield increase, presumably), then you could be presented with two (quite realistic) options:

• maintain a large farm (or something like a hay meadow) to regularly feed the fenced-in animals to keep them producing,
• manage a mobile herd that would graze on natural pasture, requiring little to no food input if moved between summer and winter pastures approptiately.

You might notice that the latter option would allow managing herds of (within reason) near-arbitrary size with greatly reduced maintenance, which could be a very attractive possibility relative to a more maintenance-heavy conventional husbandry system. At that point, the bigger issue is "what are you gonna do with so many animals", which is where traders are probably the only singleplayer-friendly solution, though larger multiplayer servers like TOPS may also see some proper nomads.

 

Very fair criticism overall, and I appreciate it. Though given that there is this section on the roadmap:

Quote

More interactivity with animals

• More refined animal domestication system
• More complex animal behaviors
• Greater range of productive livestock, adapted to specific climatic areas
• [...]

I do hope that herding is on the table for the future.

[Krakuntun]

Perhaps hearding animals should only be unlocked after a certain generation of domestication or as LadyWYT said by buying young livestock from a trader.
That way existing mechanics would find use within this new framework.

Even if you wouldn't choose a nomadic lifestyle, grazing animals outside of pens was and is done with sheeps and goats. Therefore i'd welcome such an this mechanic in the game. A shepherd dog  would be nice as well

 

[LadyWYT]

I think when it comes to a nomadic lifestyle, it's probably best to take a look at the frontier days of the Americas and how those individuals survived, or the "hedge knights" and adventurers of antiquity, chiefly because...well, they were individuals. Yes, there have been nomadic peoples throughout history, but the difference between a nomadic tribe and a nomadic individual is that the tribe is going to have a lot of people to split the labor between, whereas the individual is going to have to do everything themselves. 

From a game standpoint, I think it's probably better to focus on the player managing a mount, a couple of pack animals, and a couple of smaller companion animals, at most. A handful of mounts/pack animals can be easily picketed to keep them from getting lost, and can transport essentials like tents, storage, or basic crafting stations. Smaller companion animals, like dogs or goats, can bear smaller burdens, hunt, or help deal with threats. Food will primarily come from hunting and foraging, with trade being necessary to acquire things that can't be easily obtained from such a lifestyle(workable iron/steel, grain, etc.). 

Pasture and herd mechanics work better for homesteading and governing wild animal movements(for appropriate creatures). From the homesteading standpoint, the player would need to make sure their animals have enough space to graze to stay in shape, or otherwise provide feed for their animals to eat to keep them from losing weight and/or getting sick. For wild animals, it could help keep them contained in a general area as a habitat, rather than having them wander off into areas they aren't suited to live in, as well as give the player a more interesting hunting experience in some cases. Think of it this way: a herd of buffalo just roamed up to the area near base. It's a great hunting opportunity, but it also takes a lot of food to feed that many animals, so don't expect them to remain in the area for very long. Waiting more than a couple of days to hunt means the herd moves on and the player must wait until the grassland regrows enough for the next herd to move through...which may be too long to wait, depending on the circumstances. Or the other way around: the player is out scouting for things to hunt, and finds a lot of grass that has been eaten. Following the eaten grass will lead the player to a lucrative hunting opportunity.

[Heegrim]

Grazing animals should at least be able to eat the tall grass instead of the player needing to cut it for hay. This would reward having a large pen or multiple pastures that animals are moved between once the grass is eaten. 

I always thought it looked weird that my sheep are just hanging out in tall grass up to their necks.

This way you could leave your animals in a small pen if you want the population to stay roughly the same and move them to pasture when you want them to mate. 

[coolAlias]

I think that if animals became desensitized to your presence over time (faster with feeding), rather than only over generations, it would make both herding and animal husbandry more natural feeling. Bonus points if they can still get spooked occasionally.

[Bruno Willis]

On 5/20/2026 at 2:57 PM, The Lerf said:

Vintage Story is not designed for nomadic life, and I don't know if herding mechanics is enough to allow it to actually be used to any effective measure beyond roleplay.

I would say, I think the devs want travel to be a big part of V.S. so it'd be nice if they implemented methods from traditionally mobile cultures to support that gameplay (traveling to far distant story locations).

On 5/19/2026 at 5:03 AM, MKMoose said:

Herding staff (or herding crook, alternatively abstracted to just a walking stick, potentially alongside some related items) - allows to group animals into a herd assigned to this staff (e.g. assign by clicking on an animal with RMB, remove from the herd with Shift + RMB; a staff without an assigned herd could automatically take on an existing herd on the first RMB). The simplest possible implementation would have all animals assigned to the same herd loosely follow the person holding the staff and stay in the vicinity of the last position where the staff was held in hand. Some features could then be added or adjusted (especially some way to force a herd stay in a location and to call back lost animals would be useful) to allow more intuitive or more complex herd management and avoid mistakes like accidentally holding the staff for a moment and causing the herd to move. The staff (especially if named a crook) may also allow to "pick up" and move animals in a way similar to the entity mover tool available in the creative mode, although it would likely be less effective and potentially restricted to baby animals.

Rather than a crook, (or probably alongside it) I'd love to see herding dogs used. I'd love to see early dog domestication as part of herding. A working dog would circle the herd to keep them bunched while traveling, then leave them alone to have a good sleep if fed meat, (or return to nature and devour a goat if left hungry too long). Working dogs could also frighten off wild wolves, or fight them, and a loyal, highly domesticated one might go up against a bear to protect the flock. You could smith spiked "wolf collars" to give your working dogs better defense and the ability to throw damage back at an attacker.

 

In the other block game, the pets feel awful because they don't really do much and just get left waiting around, begging for pointless interaction. I'd hate V.S. to add dog domestication just because people want dog pets, and herding would be a great real reason to keep dogs.