I thought addition of donkey was to make it so it was easier to mount up?

[MythN7]

So, adding the donkey made it feel in the notes like it was meant to be more of a base mount, and the horse was kinda like your higher tier.

But you need a stable to have either, and the price in terms of getting just 1 is not really a factor at all.

By the time you have enough farming exp to build a stable, if you cant afford a fleet of adult horses your doing something very wrong.

Am I missing something?

[Capuzzi09]

Originally posted by S†ƴх:

More load as 10 or 20 k doesn't make sense since 2 things :
1) the mount doesn't take into account your own weight /
2) the way the game is made i can't imagine playing without bags on season 1, so you start with 65 kilos in inventory, and then the saddlebag gives another 45 kilos, the differents buff on excavation (mule) and farming (carrot and stick) gives at least 45 more kilos...
is this difference worth the speed reduction by the time a player is able to get one??
I agree with OP.

1) We should expect this to be fixed sooner or later...
2) Maybe you can't imagine not to play with maximum bag capacity right from the start. I, in contrary, can and I do. I only use bags that I'm able to craft myself.
I start the game slowly and also I expand my village slowly.
This prevents me from a huge number of "problems" that a lot of players seem to have who all expand way too fast, in my opinion. Never expand more than you are able to maintain without working through the nights. That's my approach and I'm doing very good with that decision.
Of course, you are free to do whatever you like. But don't say it's the only possible solution and also don't say a donkey is useless just because YOU can't find a use for it.
Just my two cents.

On a side note:
You can also increase the speed of mounts by perks in farming skills, not only the weight it's capable to carry around. Doing this makes your donkey a lot faster and it's absolutely capable to carry you all around the map in very short time.

[Milinia]

Originally posted by Spotter:

Learning moment ahead. It is quite common for mules to carry upwards of 200 to 225 kilos weight, being led by its handler. With a rider that carry weight is at least halved. 👍😲

Errrr NOOOOOOOOOO!!! I'm guessing you meant pounds and not kilograms? Any pack animal should carry no more than 20% of it's body weight, which is around 90KG
on average for a mule.

A quick quote from wikipedia:
"The US Army specifies a maximum of 20 percent of body weight for mules walking up to 20 miles a day in mountains, giving a load of up to about 200 pounds (91 kg). However an 1867 text mentioned a load of up to 800 pounds (360 kg). In India, the prevention of cruelty rules (1965) limit mules to 440 pounds (200 kg) and ponies to 154 pounds (70 kg)."

Also, there are no mules in the game. We're talking about donkeys which can carry even less, around 50KG for an average donkey.

[Werric]

In my game where I have bought a donkey I use it mainly when mining. I load it and myself up with ore to just below our carrying capacities. Then I run back to my village and whistle for my donkey. I don't ride it because the run to and from the mine is through fairly dense forest and I can run through that quicker than I can steer the donkey. I could go by road at about double the direct distance but prefer to run.

I don't use the exploit because I figure it will get fixed sooner or later and also because I can get enough ore without using it.

I'm a fan of the donkey but not a fan of the riding control system. I'm getting used to it but it is rather clunky.

[GelberBuntstift]

Yeah, problably i can buy me a horse when i am able to build a stable. But the donkeys are so cute and i want a donkey and not a boring horse.

[Jambie Lionheart]

Originally posted by Werric:

In my game where I have bought a donkey I use it mainly when mining. I load it and myself up with ore to just below our carrying capacities. Then I run back to my village and whistle for my donkey. I don't ride it because the run to and from the mine is through fairly dense forest and I can run through that quicker than I can steer the donkey. I could go by road at about double the direct distance but prefer to run.

I don't use the exploit because I figure it will get fixed sooner or later and also because I can get enough ore without using it.

I'm a fan of the donkey but not a fan of the riding control system. I'm getting used to it but it is rather clunky.

There's a quicker way to do that. You can just build a storage building outside of the mine and dump the mines goods in there. You don't have have to carry it because all of the storage buildings you have share storage room. Meaning thatanyhthing you put in one storage building, will also be accessible in any other storage building. Greatly reduced number of trips and overall travel time.

Ride the mule back and you're laughin'.

[S†ƴх]

@ Capuzzi:
1) Until then, they can't address the uselessness.
2) Bags don't mean fast expansion, it means doing less travels for the same weight, which in turns means more time for village building, ressources harvesting, tax-paying items crafting and so on. Please try the game on 1000% everywhere and we'll talk about the use of the donkey vs horse, because that's the point. Being able to carry 10 or 20 kilos more is a drop of water in an ocean, even considered the weight expoit fixed.

About your side note : you do realize that the speed buff applicates to all mounts?
But also, in the donkey case you NEED them to not be slower than on foot, because as you may know you do not run full front but strafing so that the 2 directions vectors are applied instead of only one when running straight. The "velocity on direction" hasn't been established yet... so if you ride a donkey without these, you're basically losing time instead of anything else.

Also, about right from the start (meaning after a few stone knives crafted), you should be able to craft pouch/packback/saddle+saddlebag, the two latters cannot be used until you get farming to 2000, at which point you should largely be able to afford horse + all tier 3 bags... Even if plowing 16x16 fields to get those points, it takes a fair amount of time, and in this time, as the OP said, if you didn't make your bucks to get a fleet of horses, you're doing something wrong.
Sewing makes 0 sense right now, you can pay yourself the best clothes on day one or two, and you don't even have to craft things for your villagers. Been there, done that, absolute waste of time to even try to sew on your own.

It's ok to "do things at a slow pace to artificially lenghten the game" but it's not ok to enforce unbalanced assets because you're not to the point where it matters.

Also please make sure to play at least on 500% settings, anything less holds 0 challenge, which in turn makes the stats, perks, and values irrelevant.
Example : Everyone is talking about putting ressources storage here and there to minimize the transports. Try this with 1000% taxes. None would put 1200 gold/year buildings about everywhere on the map, until very late game if ever, if you want to ever build something else, considered the money output of the vendors.

One needs to study edge cases to get a better glimpse at what is unbalanced and why. We're not discussing "changing the game as it pleases us", it's about improving stuff that makes no sense if put in the right context. Standard Settings are not giving an accurate depiction of mechanics at work and i will stop at that by demonstrating difference in hunting :
100% Settings : hunting = running to animals with a hatchet, one shot them, they barely scratch your belly if they ever retaliate. Or better, take the most basic bow, the most basic arrows, kill everything in one or two blows, even bears or wisents.
1000% Settings : hunting = ever be watchful for dangerous animals, everything will instakill you on touch, you will run a lot, and will need many many iron arrows/bolts and better get that crossbow asap.
100% case : no incentive to get better, mostly an op theme park,
1000% case : everybit of progression (basic bow to crossbow & stone arrows/bolts to copper to bronze to iron) makes sense and actually does something in the long run.
(edit : it's not so much a demo, i don't have the time to record and post videos about it, just facts observed while testing these settings on different games each time)
Finishing on this. I don't know you and probably you do know all this already, so i meant no harm explaining myself. It just appeared to me useful that everyone on the thread talks about the same thing so for those who will join discussion later i assumed it was a good idea to replace things into perspective.

(2nd edit : To "answer" to OP, considered everthing else, if they ever want to balance and achieve what they meant by easier mount to get, they'd need to introduce a donkey stable somewhere around the 1000 agricultural tech points to halv the way to horse, that may be just enough to give at least some use to it while waiting for horse and wouldn't articially push players to plow soils to reach that in a senseful timelenght)

[Werric]

Originally posted by }P.B{ CtMurphy:

Originally posted by Werric:

In my game where I have bought a donkey I use it mainly when mining. I load it and myself up with ore to just below our carrying capacities. Then I run back to my village and whistle for my donkey. I don't ride it because the run to and from the mine is through fairly dense forest and I can run through that quicker than I can steer the donkey. I could go by road at about double the direct distance but prefer to run.

I don't use the exploit because I figure it will get fixed sooner or later and also because I can get enough ore without using it.

I'm a fan of the donkey but not a fan of the riding control system. I'm getting used to it but it is rather clunky.

There's a quicker way to do that. You can just build a storage building outside of the mine and dump the mines goods in there. You don't have have to carry it because all of the storage buildings you have share storage room. Meaning thatanyhthing you put in one storage building, will also be accessible in any other storage building. Greatly reduced number of trips and overall travel time.

Ride the mule back and you're laughin'.

Yep I do know that I can do that. It would be tricky to place a resource storage at this mine plus it would negate the bear spawn point if I did. I don't have to hunt anything for my village so having a reliable 1-2 bears to hunt every time I go to the mine is nice.

The other factor is the mine is roughly 2 rl minutes running from my village so going back and forth isn't really an issue.

All in all though I just prefer to play this way in this particular play through.

I have another where my village is even closer to a mine. In that one I placed a house, an excavation shed and a storage at the mine. In fact in that play through I'm placing all buildings close/closer to the resource and providing the workers houses there as well.

[Capuzzi09]

@ S†ƴх:
everything in this game is balanced to 100% settings, mounts and inventory included.
So, if you decide to play on absolutely insane settings, don't blame the game if you get bad results or feel unsatisfied in any way.
I really wish the devs didn't open game adjustments for players, since they can't handle it. You're a perfect example for this.

[S†ƴх]

My dude, if they didn't open these scales i would have stopped playing a long time ago since there is basically no challenge at all at 100% settings. If you do think otherwise... you're just part of the problem and that effectively saddens me for you. If you think getting oneshot by a bear or a wisent is insane... please get in the wild and have an experience for yourself.
I'm playing all the time at 1000%, are you?
I could have put it the other way, pretending to feed an entire village for a season with 10 rabbit meat is perfectly not insane and totally realistic.
Having to cut less than 10 trees to effectively heat a whole village for a winter season? Perfectly fine.
Killing a bear with a club face to face? Totally legit!
Please, grow up, answer arguments with arguments, and don't pretend to feel like "duh they can't handlie it" while you can't handle this basic conversation.