a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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In my constant drive to be useful, i've been spending some time shepharding, mostly, moving mutton, disposing of dead bodies, etc.
A limited amount of feeding, because it's often not the thing that needs to be done.
But I run off for a bit and come back and there's a bunch more sheep. More poop than anyone knows what to do with, no shortage of wool. And if people need wool, cut and then feed.
of course periodically you come back and all or all but one sheep are slaughtered.
I'm assuming the culprit here is well meaning individuals making food to try and help out, but they aren't.
Please don't overfeed sheep!
if someone is clearly running the pen, don't create new sheep!
If there is adequate mutton and the pen is full of poop, there is literally no reason to feed the lambs.
I'll tell you what I tell all my children: Make basket, always carry food.
Listen to your mom!
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doesn't sound like a big deal, honestly, a village can almost always use more mutton and more dung, and more wool, maybe make some sterile pads with the wool.
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doesn't sound like a big deal, honestly, a village can almost always use more mutton and more dung, and more wool, maybe make some sterile pads with the wool.
Pen space is a limited resource. Creating dung consumes it, and it requires significant labor to get it back. Creating more dung than is needed at any given moment strains both the space capacity of the pen and the labor capacity of the shepherds.
Even worse, sometimes some genius will realize that the pen is too full of dung and will start moving it out of the pen and onto the ground nearby, which uses up the shovel.
Efficiency in this game is all about recognizing which resources are currently scarce and which resources are currently abundant. If there's plenty of dung already, don't feed lambs.
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I understand your frustration, but I must admit, I would rather have a pen full of sheep and dung, than an empty one. It makes more work for the overburdened shepherd, but it doesn't break the compost cycle. It also tends to be a self-limiting problem. If the pen is full and you do not need more mutton, dung, or wool ... leave it that way for a while. No one can make more sheep until the pen is emptied or expanded. In the meantime, the shepherd can focus on making new wet compost piles, checking on the bakery and carrot farms, or adding a second pen for sheep/cows/geese.
Instead of getting annoyed because someone messed up your preferred pacing, take a little break from that specific job and work on related occupations until the need for more sheep products rises back to the top of the priority list. It won't take that long and in the mean time, someone else might have cleared the pen for you.
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Even worse, sometimes some genius will realize that the pen is too full of dung and will start moving it out of the pen and onto the ground nearby, which uses up the shovel.
Oh, yeah that's a mistake I'm making, i was kind of thinking about that, in my head it seemed more efficient to gather the dung for the compost area so there is dung waiting there when you want it. i realize that's two uses instead of one and iron is the main scarce material now.
Also, i've seen civs with like 10 baskets of mutton and the pen full up of dead sheep and dung that didn't need to exist. It's frustrating because i'm spending my whole life trying to keep the sheep pen clear enough, remove the dead bodies, move mutton, etc. and the sheep keep reproducing, dying, etc faster than i can work.
You should really only feed the sheep if you have a reason to. I'm confident people are just trying to help, but it doesn't actually help.
I'll tell you what I tell all my children: Make basket, always carry food.
Listen to your mom!
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If the pen is full and you do not need more mutton, dung, or wool ... leave it that way for a while. No one can make more sheep until the pen is emptied or expanded.
The problem is that you need empty space to work in the pen. You need room to set down a basket, and you can't do that unless the pen is substantially less than full. If there's only a few empty spaces, you still can't use any of them because the animals occupy them instantly by moving around.
The ideal pen has some dung so no one has to wait when ready to make a compost pile, a mouflon so you never have to worry about shearing the last sheep, one or two unshorn sheep so you never have to wait for a lamb to be produced when you have a food bowl ready, and plenty of empty space so you can work. The shepherd's job is to restore this balance whenever it gets out of balance temporarily due to fluctuating demands.
If someone is doing the work to make food bowls and feed shorn sheep to harvest wool, then increasing the size of the flock by one or two additional sheep makes sense. But if all you're doing is making compost and pies, a small flock and an uncluttered pen is better.
Last edited by CrazyEddie (2019-02-06 16:38:34)
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yes, exactly! And it is beyond frustrating to try to keep that in balance when people are randomly feeding sheep for no reason! It's so frustrating to spend a whole life just trying to keep the GD pen clear. There's no general reason you need more than a mouflon and a couple of shorn sheep unless you are trying to produce something specific.
They don't take long to grow either, and you fundamentally need to slaughter one sheep per compost pile, so just that produces quite enough in most circumstances.
It's also frustrating because sometimes no one else is making compost or growing wheat or whatever, and by the time i deal with that and come back to the pen it's already entirely full of dead sheep and dung that have no reason to be there.
I suppose these problems could be mostly solved by making hauling mutton the job of the bakers assistant and leaving the composter in charge of gathering the dung, but that requires people doing both of those things. And in that circumstance the shepherd would actually have time to make yarn by request.
But honestly, it seems like at that point half of what you're doing is just guarding the sheep, though that does make sense.
Also, is iron scarce enough that it's now a faux pas to make trash pits? I never see them anymore though no one has yelled at me about it. but i've been making them in sheep pens because it's way easier to clear the dead sheep bodies and if it gets over populated you don't need to set a basket down.
I was gone for quite a while, and am still getting used to the severe scarcity of iron. I feel like the amount of time saved merits it, but it also seems like the consensus at this point labor is seen as less valuable than iron.
I'll tell you what I tell all my children: Make basket, always carry food.
Listen to your mom!
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Iron is overvalued, at least by many of the people on this forum. Labor is underappreciated as a factor.
That said, it's easy and dumb to waste iron on things like turning the boneyards into graveyards. Using the hoe twice on a single-soil pile instead of once on a double-soil pile is usually a mistake, but (despite what many people think) can sometimes be the right thing to do, depending on soil availability or urgency of the crop.
It's probably a mistake to make a trash pit to dispose of dead lambs. They despawn by themselves in five minutes; I usually just leave them alone. A 5x5 pen has enough room for a few sheep, some dung, some room to work, and the dead lamb bodies produced by the living sheep. Moving the dead lambs out of the pen is just extra work you don't need. If you're tight on space, shear/kill/butcher the sheep and haul out the bones and meat.
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Iron is overvalued, at least by many of the people on this forum. Labor is underappreciated as a factor.
That said, it's easy and dumb to waste iron on things like turning the boneyards into graveyards. Using the hoe twice on a single-soil pile instead of once on a double-soil pile is usually a mistake, but (despite what many people think) can sometimes be the right thing to do, depending on soil availability or urgency of the crop.
If anyone's got clever ways to make those judgements, I'd love some brainstorming on Labor Cost Analysis - Ideas
It's probably a mistake to make a trash pit to dispose of dead lambs. They despawn by themselves in five minutes; I usually just leave them alone. A 5x5 pen has enough room for a few sheep, some dung, some room to work, and the dead lamb bodies produced by the living sheep. Moving the dead lambs out of the pen is just extra work you don't need. If you're tight on space, shear/kill/butcher the sheep and haul out the bones and meat.
Very this.
If the pen is flooded with lambs, shearing/butchering sheep is plugging the hole.
For illustrative purposes, each fertile (unshorn) sheep takes the following space:
Parent
(~1/2) lamb (leaves parent every 80s)
dead lamb (minute 1)
dead lamb (2)
dead lamb (3)
dead lamb (4)
dead lamb (despawns on its 5th minute)
(note butchered sheep bones take an epoch to despawn)
Last edited by betame (2019-02-07 02:46:12)
Morality is the interpretation of what is best for the well-being of humankind.
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