Okay, so I did some testing, and I did the math. I started out with both multipliers at 1.0, and tested one passive (lvl 55 bronto) and one aggressive (lvl 80 carno). I chose the levels because they both had the same expected tame time according to Dododex. It's probably as close to "apples to apples" as I'm likely to get.

So, for the bronto, it was supposed to take 3 hours and 45 minutes but instead took 30. That's roughly a 7.5x taming speed. The carno took a little longer at 37 minutes, which amounted to about a 6x taming speed. So, this is what I came up with:

ImmersiveTamingSpeedMultiplier=0.2
ImmersiveFeedingIntervalMultiplier=1.0

That gives a roughly 1.5x speed bonus for non-aggressive species, and a 1.2x speed bonus for aggressives. I could tweak it a little more to be closer to stock, but I think this works for me for now.

Howdy!

Petting is available from the get go, but it's unlikely to be able to be performed on hostile creatures, as the option is disabled if the dino is aggro'd, and will likely aggro on the player until target prevention.

As the taming activities are done in real time, as opposed to running on X time passes, eat Y item until Z affinity is gained, it's difficult to balance it to be in line with vanilla time. There's also too many variables. You could protect a Parasaur from an army of Raptors and tame it within minutes, or you could feed it once and pet it for the rest of the tame, taking significantly longer.

Here's some technicals. Might help you in tweaking to find the perfect balance for your game.

The affinity from food items is the same, but the eating intervals differ. I had them set up to mirror vanilla, but more powerful dinos that have a longer interval ended up simply being fed less and tamed by more pets/ cares, in addition to any other activities that were available.

I though about scaling the other activities in line with the dino's vanilla feeding interval, but it resulted in the player just waiting around more often than not, which is the opposite of what the mod is intended to offer.

So instead, the feeding intervals are bait specific, with raw fish meat being the shortest at 22.5 seconds and kibbles being the longest at 60 seconds.

The dino's actual food value has no impact on if the dino wants to eat while being tamed using the mod. It's all trickery.

Pet, Care and Protection affinity is dino specific, and is a percentage of the "Required Tame Affinity Per Base Level".

For example, a Dodo's base affinity requirement is 450, but an extra 22.5 is added for each level. This 22.5 is the Required Tame Affinity Per Base Level, and it of this amount the pet, care and protection affinity gains are calculated.

Pet is 50%, Care is 100%, and Protect is 12.5%.

This is then calculated by the ImmersiveTamingSpeedMultipler and game's own TamingSpeedMultipler.

If PercentageBasedAffinity is set to true via ini, then pet, care and protect are 2.5%, 7.5% and 1.25% of their total taming % requirement, and are unaffected by ImmersiveTamingSpeedMultipler and TamingSpeedMultipler settings. This was originally an option for debugging but can still be used.

Protecting the dino or helping it in battle takes 50% of the damage applied, and converts that to affinity. If you kill its enemy, it then adds 50% of the dino's kill XP and converts that to afffinity.

If you're curious to know anything else just lemme know (:

Hello, and thanks for the detailed response!

I intentionally left out the protect/assist mechanics in my testing because I expected those to be highly variable events and difficult to make consistent in terms of testing. Also, given the difficulty of hitting the tame's attacker/enemy without hitting the tame itself increased the variability more. I consider those mechanics to be more of a "risk vs. reward" element and therefore an optional bonus that can dramatically improve taming speed. Given the risk of hitting the tame when using that mechanic, it could just as easily extend tame times if one is particularly bad at it.

I had thought about one possible balancing option that might even out the discrepancy between aggressive/non-aggressive creatures. If the pet mechanic could be disabled until 25% (the point where the creature no longer considers you a threat), then the two scenarios should be effectively the same. It could conceivably be exposed as an ini option, but of course I'll make no assumptions as to how easy/hard that would be to implement. You're the expert on that. ;)

Now that I know that the feeding interval is what varies between weaker/stronger creatures, it's clear I'm going to have to do some testing on a wider variety of tames before I can come up with a suitable average. I'll continue testing with both multipliers set at 1.0 and make comparisons between different creatures that all take the same amount of time to tame (using Dododex to figure out which level creature hits the time target). I'm only using the "easy" mechanics (feeding, petting, and Care), leaving the risk/reward as a bonus. As long as I can get an average that still boils down to tame times within 1x and 2x after tweaking ImmersiveTamingSpeedMultiplier, I should be able to bring this "live" on my server.

I suspect that some might ask why I'm being so picky about this. It has to do with the goals I've set for my server. I spent 1.5 years on officials, and got very used to that pace of gameplay. Also, I've noticed that accomplishments made on private servers tend to be looked down on by the larger community, with the assumption that those accomplishments were manufactured by mods and high taming multipliers. If someone tames a spino on my server, I want them to be able to brag about it un-ironically. ;)

So, my end goal is to have immersive taming be considered "equivalent challenge" to vanilla taming, while adding some variety and fun to the taming experience. I plan on disabling immersive taming for creatures that are already tamed passively, as the passive taming mechanic already has quite a bit of variety to it.

Thanks for all your help with this. This mod shows a lot of promise and I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops.

I'm keen to hear about your progress, QuartzBear. I was heading down a similar line of thought to the one you've outlined above and you've saved me a considerable amount of time, both with your testing and your questions. Burgesssssss' detailed response is excellent.

I do still agree that there should be an ini option to prevent or discourage petting passives before 25%. I know this will result in players 'waiting' but it's not the same kind of waiting experienced in vanilla with KO tames. This also affects mostly the early game. Current default settings make it far too easy for me to get established (SP) and so I'm looking to balance that out.

I'm terrible with early game KOs so, without Immersive Taming, I generally have to wait until I have tranq arrows before I can tame. Berry bags, combined with petting from the get-go, has allowed me to get established far sooner than would otherwise be possible.

Really, I think that petting a passive prior to 25% should potentially aggro them or make them flee - depending on their vanilla AI response to injury/threat. At least it should have a (configurable) percentage chance to 'fail'. The chance of a petting attempt failing could have something to do with the player's level and/or the dino's level.

This would return at least a small element of risk/reward to the taming of trikes, pachy, doeds, anky and flyers, and make getting established depend on more than just unlocking the food bait station.

If you guys are still curious, the mod's been updated to allow various tweaks on a per dino basis, all handled via an in game menu. Petting passives prior to 25% is still present for now, but the other settings may allow you to customize certain aspects to your liking.

See this thread for more info!

!Ha
That's excellent. And I most definitely am still interested, thanks. I've been moving house for the past couple of weeks (huge job) but I've missed my game so badly. This makes me want to get back into it asap. Thank you