Animals vialbe now?

[Destroi]

At least early game.

It is amazing how much you can gain from a couple day 1 chickens.

A massive standard berry farm is probably still the way to go for MAX money, but this meadow farm has definitely made making an animal farm more fun.

[Snowy Sprout]

For me the hard part is holding on to the eggs until I can make mayo. But the self control pays off, when I'm making nearly a thousand gold a day from mayonnaise.

Obviously other folks play differently. But I would always regret the lost profits if I sold an egg (or most other crops) unprocessed.

[Útost Alronbem]

Animals were always viable. Notably, as a #1 source of "best tier" universal gift item in the game.
1.6 didn't made animals more convenient or more profitable - just fixed lack of dedicated animal-centric farm type and allowed slightly faster progress of bonding with them. Prior to that, they were just a nice addition to farms with other specialization. And a backup plan for Shore farm...

[Krasus]

Originally posted by Snowy Sprout:

For me the hard part is holding on to the eggs until I can make mayo. But the self control pays off, when I'm making nearly a thousand gold a day from mayonnaise.

Obviously other folks play differently. But I would always regret the lost profits if I sold an egg (or most other crops) unprocessed.

i see it that if you safe up the egg you have no money to increasy your earning.
money gets invested to get more money, but if you save up, you make no money at that time.
i personaly would use the eggs and invest the money in something, crops for exampel.
i think this makes more money than hording and waiting until you get more out of it.

[Queen Droxxanna]

petting the chicks helps to level them up faster, and my policy is to keep the regular quality eggs for cooking later, and early sell any higher quality ones. then once I got the mayo machine, I make mayo from the silver/small gold eggs, but sell directly any iridium eggs, since you only will get gold mayo from them.

[red255]

the issue in my book with raising animals is the cost per time is too high.

If I could get an autograbber and auto petter, auto feeder, then animals would more likely be viable., but if I got to wake up, deal with my animals, deal with the other stuff you are wasting daylight. and at a certain point the few thousand gold just doesn't work.

I keep a couple animals, and auto grabbers, and just let them run free, and whenever i need to cook anything I can go over and loot the autograbber.

but they aren't worthwhile for the time spent, because of the time spent is too high. Not needing to carry a milk pail was pretty good too, but yeah. after finishing the greenhouse I ignore my animals. because I just don't have time, even a Fish pond makes decent money and doesn't require the level of attention animals do.

[Crater]

Originally posted by Destroi:

At least early game.

It is amazing how much you can gain from a couple day 1 chickens.

A massive standard berry farm is probably still the way to go for MAX money, but this meadow farm has definitely made making an animal farm more fun.

Well if you're being objective you have to compare like for like. When you say it's optimal for early game, you actually have to define what you mean. More importantly you then have to compare the alternative. For example:

New farm has higher gold per day from spring 1 - spring x

Standard farm breaks even at spring x - to infinity

So if you care to be accurate, you'd actually have to analyse it in these terms. Who cares if day 1-10 meadows > standard if by day 10 I'm caught up and surpassing you?

[Snowy Sprout]

Originally posted by Krasus:

i see it that if you safe up the egg you have no money to increase your earning.
money gets invested to get more money, but if you save up, you make no money at that time.
i personaly would use the eggs and invest the money in something, crops for exampel.
i think this makes more money than hording and waiting until you get more out of it.

My play style doesn't need me to invest heavily into crops right away though. I actually avoid planting many crops early on because I hate watering chores.

I gain farming xp from petting chickens and picking up eggs. This accumulates FAST. The money for the actual eggs is secondary to me, and I don't mind waiting a bit to get more. It's the XP that I'm after. That xp helps me get much better stars on the crops I harvest.

For money in early game I like to fish. I can get several thousand dollars every day from fishing. This doesn't matter as much later in the game, but in the first week it's phenomenal.

[bzcharkl]

Main thing that makes animals a hassle for me is that there is no good way to get Auto-petters for Community Center save files, and I can't think of any legitimate gameplay reason why this should be the case.

[maestro]

Animals have ALWAYS been viable.

They are passive income once you get Farming 10 and get an Auto-Grabber for each of your buildings.

Petting animals is easy once you realize you can hold the right mouse button down and just walk around the animals.

With just 1 coop and 1 barn maxed out, it's 10-12k per day, passively with just 20 or so minutes of in-game time spent. It adds up, fast.

And that's with only 2 void chickens and no ostriches. It's actually more, once you get to spring and pigs start digging truffles again lol