farming/livestock

[Smashpaw]

I am getting decently far into the game, and havent really touch farming, or taming animals/building stables. I have seen some posts about ppl bringing animals with them to fight bosses? i havent really looked into how farming and animals work in this game. Am i hurting myself not taking advantage of it?

[Leiraion]

I completed the game without ever trying to use a tamed animal in a boss fight so as far as that's concerned, it's not essential.
If you are planning on taming and breeding animals as a source of sustanable meat--- I would highly suggest you simply run around and hunt whatever animal you are after instead. It would be much faster.
---- This is because breeding takes a fair amount of time and you have to be physically near the animals for it to happen.

Farming, yes, I would recommend you do this. There are a lot of recipes you can cook that are very good and will help you a lot in the mountains and onward towards the rest of the game. Not to mention many potions you can make (the mead base often requires some crop)

[Suzaku]

Animals aren't really a big deal, and can be a bother to get them tamed and brought to your base, and then potentially lose them to a base raid.

Crops are easy. Plant seeds and harvest a while later. Plant the crop itself to get 3 seeds. Literally infinite food. Cooked meals are better than raw ingredients, so get farming if you want that extra edge.

[Leiraion]

Oh yes, what Suzaku said is not a joke.
I had a raid of bats. Yes bats.
I was fighting fairly far away from my enclosure of boar.... after the raid some time later I went to check on them and all 12 were dead. I literally had spent a few hours taming and breeding them prior to that so I was seriously put out on anything animal related for a while.

[knighttemplar1960]

If you want the higher tier foods you will have to farm. You can't get carrots only seeds, you can't get turnips only seeds, you can't get onions only seeds.

Tames are up to preference. All the animals that you can tame exist in their biomes and can be hunted. Taming gives you a reliable supply without the risk or the time and usually earlier than you can successfully hunt them.

Boars, for instance, can be tamed in the stone age. You need a stone axe, a hammer, and a supply of wood to build a pen. Usually when I make a new start the first thing I do after I get these tools is go to the forsaken stones and not far away build a double pen and lure a boar into each side. Then 15 or so meters away I'll build my starter house so I have a place for a bed, a fire, some storage and some beehives. By the time I have all that built the boars are tamed and I can take the center wall out and start breeding them. I get decent health food and I get all the leather scraps I need to build the bow that I need to get the deer hides and better food that I want.

Wolves are the same way. Navigating the mountains can be hard until you get better gear. Taming a couple gives you early access to better foods. Same with lox.

The raid issue is easy to solve. Except for 1, raids can't spawn any place that you have fewer than 3 of the base items that suppress spawning. If you build a pen and leave 1 workbench and 1 portal there, and that's it, the pen is raid proof and you can breed animals in peace. If you feed them as soon as you arrive you can take some time to cull a few and let them breed. Take your tin butcher knife through the portal and repair it then come back a bit later to make sure that you have young and let time pass until the young are grown. Repeat as needed. If you are playing multiplayer and need more food you can just build more raid proof pens.

[Oakshield]

Using tamed animals for boss fights take time. And for some fights they won't even work (well).

I've used an "army of wolves" to fight Yagluth once. Took me 12-16 RL hours before I was happy with my horde, not to mention the load of meat. Fortunately I had a nice hoard of boars before that, so butchering most of them and leaving only 2 behind wasn't a problem.

Disadvantage of breeding - as already mentioned - it takes time. You need to be around the animals and they need to have enough food to last a while.
The advantage, it's exponential, so you can start out with a pair, which will have one offspring, and while that one grows up another and so on, as long as there's food. And wolf meat won't work, it has to be boar or deer.
Cubs take some time to grow, so you'll have a large number of them - and a headache of the constant howling - before your two wolves actually become three, four and so on. But once you got multiple pairs; the breading goes faster and does lack less time to have the numbers increasing.

The fight itself?

Well, suffice to say that marching in with an army of 50-ish wolves was a bit overpowered. I lost about half of my wolves but by the time I was able to hit Yagluth his health was so far down it was an easy kill.
Didn't use the wolves on Moder and the Queen for two reasons;
1) Moder flies off every once in a while and at that point the wolves are extremely vunerable, as they won't hide for her "breath".
2) A fight against the queen also means a fight against their spawns. And those may cut through your wolves faster as you can kill the spawn and the queen.
So while the wolves may be a nice distraction, I doubt they're useful. More or less similar to the skellies we can summon on the queen fight. Nice to have, but not really useful.

Thorin :)

[Tristen]

If you want to get through Valheim as fast as possible it's not really a requirement at all.

But if you want to take your time it's a great addition to your gameplay.
Learning how to tame Boars can get you a great supply of meat and hides for the rest of your playthrough.

Learning how to tame Wolves will get you loyal companions attacking anything hostile around you. You can have a pack of any size following you or patrolling your grounds.

Taming Lox is easy, managing them can be a pain. But if you manage you'll have fluffy bodyguards able to defend against almost any enemy in the game dropping fantastic meat and hides and you can even ride them with a saddle.

Farming is a chore and I wish the developers added a farming level that rises and allows for multiple seed/crop planting or harvesting. But if you do it you'll find that you can have a lot more say in what food is in your stomach when you face the world. And food is one of the biggest ways to determine a player's power.

It also fits in with animal taming as a source of their food.

Here's a field where some of my wolves run.
https://imgur.com/jvpPUpk

[Pantstron]

Answer op, not really, imo its a lot more effort to accomplish the same outcome

[OctoberSky]

There are no wild chickens so you will need to solve the base raid issue if you want honey-glazed chicken and/or omelette food items. As others have already shared, keeping the farm animals in large barn-like enclosures will prevent bats or drakes from getting to them. I've only used wolves as a hunting partner or lox as a steed to ride to combat with Fulings. But I leave them home when going to engage the Forsaken and the trend that we see with The Queen may make it impossible to take anything that is not inventory.

[DarkEternal]

I have never once used a tamed beast in a boss fight and I've won every single time.
I just use them for food.

[Not Known]

For farming, Plant Everything is an essential mod. I've somewhat grown tired of the base game itself, and am just enjoying harvesting, planting and cooking.