QOL Suggestion for Breeding

[StoicSunbro]

Reworded for clarity:

Currently we have hatcheries enabled for breeding, which is wonderful. However it doesn't address live births, which is why I don't bother breeding them for muts. It also leads to having to soulgun countless hatched eggs. I suggest we turn on newborn autotrap on the terminal to make breeding less tedious. We could make the automation cost be element shards or something.

I can understand the hesitation against automation. When we got gachas and the item collector we just didn't need to gather much anymore. I liked mat farming. However, with this change no enjoyable gameplay is lost.

 

[darkspawn27]

Totally Agree - I posted about this same thing in Discord. I would love to see Newbord Autotrap turned on or another addon that does something similar as the Hatchery for Mammals

 

[StoicSunbro]

My current motivation for this is Genesis. I would love to breed ferox or mosasaurs but having to plan around a gestation timer has been discouraging.

 

[Phillip]

So I looked into the "auto trap" feature and have had a change of opinion on the feature. These would be my suggestions to make our whole breeding system more balanced between Egg layers and Mammals, allowing dino farms to work, while balancing the current imbalance existing because of Hatcheries-

Dinostorage has these settings I think could help with the current Egg/Mammal differences, and allow for enabling "auto-trap"

PreventOfflineMatingInterval=0.0

This would be the big one, and IMO currently the most abused feature of the hatchery.

0.0 meaning time in hours it checks for a tribe member online. We could set it to (for example purposes) 4 hours. Every 4 hours it checks tribes if someone is online, if no one from a tribe is online, it turns off breeding to all dinos in the tribe (no more egg farm abuse that the hatcheries allow, no future mammal abuse.) Dinos need to be re-toggled on if no one from a tribe is logged in after the offline mating interval expires.

TerminalOnlyAllowItems=/Game/Mods/DinoStorage2/SoulTrap_DS.SoulTrap_DS,/Game/Mods/DinoStorage2/SoulTraps_DS.SoulTraps_DS

We would have to turn this off/modify it to allow eggs/empty soul traps to be placed into the Soul Terminals.

DisableNewbornAutoTrap=False

This would be the balancing to having the hatchery cook down an egg and waiting at most 10 minutes to hatch vs.waiting hours/forgetting about mammal birth timers.
Enable's auto trap feature for all babies (Egg and Mammal) birthed in Soul Terminal's radius.

AmmolessNewbornAutoTrap=False

Costs Orbs to auto trap babies wandering in Soul Terminal's radius. We have a cost for soul orbs already, IMO there should be no reward to catching baby dinos (reward being free empty orbs).

EnableFertEggCollection=True

Enables collection of fertilized eggs from un-orbed dinos within Auto-Trap range of the Soul Terminal.
Acts as the Hatchery did, can be a custom set range size within the terminal's pinwheel options (not an .ini line), has a visible range size displayed... no need for 30 hatcheries around a base on forever collect anymore. Plus we can physically place eggs into Soul Terminal now (vs. placing them on top of a Hatchery, waiting for Hatchery to pick them up).

EnableIncubation=True

Terminals would incubate the eggs in their inventory down to 99% making hatchery obsolete with above option.

IncubationMultiplier=1.0

How fast the Soul Terminal cooks eggs. Default is 2. I don't think we need a bonus for this feature, so change it to 1

EnableEggGeneration=True

If any, this option doesn't need to be enabled IMO. We do have means with vanilla/SS to handle this, and I don't feel there's server lag related to these dinos being left out. Client side performance would increase around base likely, but this option would make us move away from needing to keep dinos fed, risking wild dino attacks, etc.

Follows server settings for egg laying. It's supposed to duplicate idle dinos left out for egg collection (Vivarium also duplicates this, but benefit would be the same- game not needing to render all idle egg layers) The goal to this script is to make the Soul Terminal now act as similar to left out dinos as possible.

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Interested in everyone's thoughts. I know the Hatchery has been great for egg laying dinos, but its hard to deny the over-powered sense they give. Not just over mammals, but by being able to forever collect eggs underneath it is a heavy crutch. The hatchery is for egg breeding and we don't have anything similar for mammal breeding. I personally was against the "auto-trap" feature until I read into it more, but I think it's more suited to the vanilla feel (and much better than the hatchery crutch) in this set up.

 

[darkspawn27]

Phil,
I think this is pretty fair to even the playing field between egg layers and live birth tames. Are you able to also enable the mating pulse within the terminal so we wouldn't have to enable mating on every dino manually?

 

[Phillip]

I thought that was a setting that comes with the auto-trap for babies, but didn't confirm I guess.

I don't see any reason to not allow that to be enabled though.

 

[darkspawn27]

Excellent! Thanks Phil

 

[StoicSunbro]

Thanks for looking into this. Looking forward to it.

 

[Phillip]

we need more opinions on it still and see if its a thing we can move forward with or not - those are just my suggestions. lol

 

[Trama]

I think this is a great idea. Thanks for looking into it all Phil!!

 

[Chemayla]

My biggest problem is forgetting about baby and it wondering off on me. So anything that would help that would be cool. Also small live babies still like to fall through ground, have had that happen few times. Some of those babies are FAST and unless your sitting right there staring at it. Its gone even through fences.

 

[Phillip]

My biggest problem is forgetting about baby and it wondering off on me. So anything that would help that would be cool. Also small live babies still like to fall through ground, have had that happen few times. Some of those babies are FAST and unless your sitting right there staring at it. Its gone even through fences.

ideally the auto trapper would help with all of that

 

[Strax]

This would clear up sooooo much space around the base and with these settings i feel it would be very similar to the collecting system already implemented. This is a great idea and I am all for it. Thank you Phil for your on going service to the ark servers.

 

[Bigmike]

These sound like some good ideas to balance out the egg layers and live birth creatures.

One suggestion I would make would be on the 'Offline mating interval' IMO, 4 hours is a little short. Through normal life between work, gym, taking care of kids, etc. that is an unattainable number. I would suggest that number be set around 20 hours. For example is somebody logs off at midnight they would be able to log back in at 8pm the next day and still be able to refresh the timer, which I think is pretty reasonable for a daily player. This would reward daily players with not having to worry about getting everything breeding again, and it would not give anybody 'free eggs' or a 'free baby' on a day where they don't log on if the timer was set to longer. And by the sounds of it if you do miss the refresh on the timer it wont be overly difficult to get everything set back to breeding.

As far as the 'enable egg generation', IMO that feature could be left off. The vivarium is enabled for that very reason. It gives a good attainable goal for anyone wishing to downsize their kibble dinos. The crafting cost is more in line with what it is offering and can only hold 10 dinos as opposed to a relatively cheap soul terminal with 300 slots you can craft at lvl 1.

 

[Phillip]

yeah, that interval timer is up for discussion. I like 20 hours - reasonable to think a person could log back in within 20 hours to maintain their timers IMO, and most long re-breeds are within that 20 hours

 

[darkspawn27]

I agree, I think 20 hours is fair

 

[DudeAwesome]

o/
I myself had my doubts of us ever turning this feature on, but at this point, like you said, Phil, it really just makes sense. Got to give it to Lethal, that dude makes some fine mods...
I agree about the Egg Generation. Seems like a bit much, but just my thoughts. I never would of thought we would ever be enabled the auto-trapping in the first place either
Thank your Phil for hunting the info down!

 

[Phillip]

Stoic and Darkspawn have been pushing for it for a little while... I was very much against it until I saw the customization we could add to suit us, and it makes more sense than the hatcheries to me. Credit to them for understanding the indifference and pushing to make a change.

Is there any reason to not implement the change? Should we start a poll? What should our next step be? I haven't heard any negative feedback in here yet.. Though its only been a day I feel most of our active members are on discord and have seen the posted thread.

 

[darkspawn27]

I haven't heard anyone speak against this change either in discord or on this forum. I believe we are really close to working out which settings we collectively want with this mod. My advice is that we finish nailing the settings down over the next day then direct everyone back here to review the change. Give everyone one last chance to speak their mind if they disagree for whatever reason then we move forward with the change.

Where would be the best place to iron this out? Would it make sense to create a temporary discord channel to discuss this over the next few days as opposed to exclusively using the forum? I feel like discord may be a bit quicker but can spiral out of control if people start memeing or going off topic

 

[Phillip]

that's what I worry about putting it on discord too - easy to get bypassed lol

Pass or fail, I think we should impliment the PreventOfflineMatingInterval on. I like 20 hours unless people feel otherwise?

also, EnableEggGeneration=False should remain as false- as stated, we have the vivarium, and BigMike's point to it creating a very cheap version of this though the soul terminal seems to counter the reward of working towards a vivarium.