No Ranching XP if you use automation?

[Deputy Dawg]

Since I automated my barn and coop, it feels like my XP progress in the ranching mastery skill has either stopped, or it's slowed to a crawl.

Does anyone know if I'm right? I need a Loom for my sheep, and it seems to be taking forever to get up to Mastery level 6 and unlock it.

Do you think I should go back to manually looking after my animals for a while, if it will improve my XP numbers

[Piperbird]

Correct, automation doesn't count towards XP. Just doing by hand or hand tools.

[Xenomorph Kitty]

I mean it makes sense doesn't it?

You've got machines doing it, and not you. So why would you be learning anything from it?

[MLink]

Originally posted by Seri:

I mean it makes sense doesn't it?

You've got machines doing it, and not you. So why would you be learning anything from it?

No it doesn't make sense, do you know why? Because you earn fishing and catching experience using the fish pond and the insect house, same logic here, you're not actually fishing or catching anything.

[Deputy Dawg]

Originally posted by MLink:

Originally posted by Seri:

I mean it makes sense doesn't it?

You've got machines doing it, and not you. So why would you be learning anything from it?

No it doesn't make sense, do you know why? Because you earn fishing and catching experience using the fish pond and the insect house, same logic here, you're not actually fishing or catching anything.

I can see both sides of the argument here. Logically it make sense that you have to interact properly with your animals, but from a gameplay qol, I'd rather xp was earned using automation (but at a lower rate). I mean there's nothing in the menu about this, when you pay large amounts for the upgrade to automatics, It would have been nice to know, because I would have hand reared my animals instead (at least till level 10 anyway)

[bipu_keren]

I can only say a lot of code or design in this game doesn't make sense. Let's say from design perspective, farming exp is obtained from watering, tilling, harvesting. The harvesting will depend on the price of the crop. From coding wise, it only gave exp points from watering and tilling manually, auto harvesting still provide experience.

Let's come back to ranching, design perspective, the exp is obtained from petting and collecting products base on product quality. From coding perspective, it doesn't enable any exp from automation. And the most points is either to pet (10) or to collect gold/osmium product (10/15) which is varied by chance,

From ranching itself we can see how flawed the experience design for ranching is, because having chicken will be earning much faster experience rather than having duck, quail or peafowl for who knows what reason. And the total exp required for level 10 is 17,480 so you can do your own math how many animals/petting/etc required to reach this number.