Hardcore sheep (spoilerish)

[Six]

So wait, what is the method to breed the gold chocobo sheep?

[Roablin]

This is fantastic, it's the funnest thing I've ever seen done to a mob. It also adds another job to MC, that of a shepherd or breeder. I love how it makes colored sheep a prized possession.

[FlowerChild]

This is fantastic, it's the funnest thing I've ever seen done to a mob. It also adds another job to MC, that of a shepherd or breeder. I love how it makes colored sheep a prized possession.

Awesome man. Glad you're having a good time with it :)

I think I've given up on my policy of not making things harder in order to make them better. Previously, any changes I made to vanilla behavior were always along the lines of making things easier (being able to feed animals by throwing food at them for example). It's become more and more apparent to me as of late though, that that's really tying my hands with regards to improving the game and forcing me to basically contribute to the ever declining level of challenge within MC. Previously, I'd rely on Notch to balance his own level of difficulty with regards to vanilla features, but that's really just not working anymore with Jeb at the helm.

People may grumble about it, but in the end, I think they'll change their tune when they eventually realize that they're having more fun. The question I am basically asking myself now is "would this be a welcome change to vanilla if it was made?". If so, then I do it.

[Sarudak]

Better than wolves is truly reaching toward becoming it's own game...

[Rianaru]

That is a fantastic policy. By the way, I don't feel like I've shown enough appreciation in the past, mostly because everything you release is a good idea and well-balanced and so many other things I think I may have been partially desensitized to it.

Thes changes to sheep and now chickens are fantastic, and add a massive depth to even the peripheral parts of gameplay, which is more than I can say even for most game developing companies, let alone one man. And seeing as how I'll be receiving a degree in genetics fairly soon, you have no idea how much I appreciate the changes to sheep ^.^

You shall have a contribution to your cause, good sir, and in my opinion, this community owes you enough to keep you swimming in alcohol until your eldritch equivalent of a liver gives out.

and on another note:

Better than wolves is truly reaching toward becoming it's own game...

Give it a graphics engine of its own and we're good to go!
(Joking of course. I know there's more to it than that :P)

[FlowerChild]

Better than wolves is truly reaching toward becoming it's own game...

Well, not entirely. I still love Minecraft, and I do intend to stay true to the underlying design. More recent additions to the game though...not so much.

I think we all know that MC development jumps from feature to feature without completing most of them. Some, I can "finish" by refining them in a way that helps the player. Some though...I really need to give myself the freedom to also make them more difficult.

[MoRmEnGiL]

I'm not sure easier / harder are the proper words for it.

Throwing wheat does not really make it easier per-se, just more convenient in vMC mechanics, and is an automation enabler in btw. Which might be technically "easier" than manually feeding them but yeah, we all love automation and it's btw's middle name.


Hardcore sheep mode, again, technically makes it "harder", but what it actually does is make it more complex and fun. It takes a process from being a to b, and makes it being from a to b to c to d to end result. But isn't the journey half the fun, if not more? Reaching the same end result (coloured wool farming) just with a longer process is not really making it "harder" for me, because I'm gaining more with the new system. More fun that is ;]

[kazerima]

Maintaining a steady breeding supply of sheep and isolating mutants for selective breeding definitely beats keeping a lone sheep of each color locked in its own pen. Plus, with a little skill and patience, you can produce colored wool without having to gather dyes in the first place.

[Extreme Boyheat]

Now we just need to figure out how to automatically sort the different colored sheep. :D

[chaoticneutral]

I'll try to sum up in an hypothesis. If some (or all) parts of this are wrong, feel free to correct me, folks.

vMC sheep have a color tag (I'll call it "phencolor", short for "phenotype color"). It tells the game which color it should render the sheep and the wool you get when you kill/shear it.
When you paint a sheep, the game changes the phencolor from, say, phencolor=white to phencolor=blue.
When regrowing wool, the game checks phencolor and the wool regrows at that color.
When breeding, the game checks each parent's phencolor and toss a coin. If heads, child inherits parent1's phencolor. Else, it inherits parent2's phencolor.

FC added another tag for the sheep - I'll call it "genecolor". This tag is created in BTW when the sheep lacks one, and its value is firstly set as the same as phencolor. But once set, it's done for that sheep - no in-game way to change it (phencolor is still changeable as usual).
When wool regrows: the game checks genecolor and changes phencolor's value to the same as genecolor. This means the sheep will regrow its natural color, not the one you painted it.

When breeding, one of these is selected:
1. The child inherits parent1's genecolor, or
2. It inherits parent2's, or
3. It gets a pre-defined "mixture" (maybe, the game looks a color combination table for this, that FC is trying to tune now?), or
4. Get random mutation.

By testing, I got roughly a 1/32 to 1/50 chance for random mutation. When breeding white sheep, I've seen slightly more black and grey mutations than the others, so I guess FC attributed slightly larger odds for natural colors.

If my hypothesis is correct, a very, very patient breeder can get all the 16 sheep colors without using a simple drop of dye. This is at the same time harder and easier than vMC: harder if you got plenty dyes, easier if you got none.

Also: hi, first post in the forum. And yes, I've read the rules :D

[Detritus]

Playing with this system is going to eat my days isn't it? As if BtW didn't eat enough of my productivity as is. Also, does this increase sheep spawning rates? I seem to have an extremely high ratio of sheep to other animals in my world. Somewhere around 5 sheep for 1 chicken, pig, or cow.

I have a similar thing, my island had (until I imported cows and wolves) only sheep and chicken, and a very few wolves to start with. (these died quite promptly)

[SterlingRed]

If my hypothesis is correct, a very, very patient breeder can get all the 16 sheep colors without using a simple drop of dye. This is at the same time harder and easier than vMC: harder if you got plenty dyes, easier if you got none.

Also: hi, first post in the forum. And yes, I've read the rules :D

Welcome!
You forget something, dyes are trivial to obtain. The only exceptions being cacti if you have not found a desert biome. And breeding fifty pairs of sheep is much harder than collecting dyes. I still use both, I need the colored wool slabs for bd timing, but I haven't bred all the sheep colors yet so I'm using dye for the ones I'm missing until I get a sheep I can automate. It's a really neat system! I really need to build a minecart breeder system though since my lag pit is a pain to use.

[STrRedWolf]

Okay, I got it!

Spoiler

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Hardcore sheep are really anime hair color sheep.

[Itamarcu]

If my hypothesis is correct, a very, very patient breeder can get all the 16 sheep colors without using a simple drop of dye.

I think you are wrong, From what I understood from FC's post, every color combination has certain available mutations. For instance, breeding 2 white sheep will have a ~1/50 percent of getting a mutation, but the mutation can only be black, gray, pink or brown. Breeding a brown sheep and a pink sheep will have a chance of giving you, for instance, red sheep. That means a player can't just get all colors from white sheep - he has to selectively choose the mutations and breed them, like farmers used to do IRL.

[Rianaru]

I think he's talking over several dozen or hundred generations, not getting all colors from the offspring from a single pair of white sheep.

[Calcifire3691]

If my hypothesis is correct, a very, very patient breeder can get all the 16 sheep colors without using a simple drop of dye.

I think you are wrong, From what I understood from FC's post, every color combination has certain available mutations. For instance, breeding 2 white sheep will have a ~1/50 percent of getting a mutation, but the mutation can only be black, gray, pink or brown. Breeding a brown sheep and a pink sheep will have a chance of giving you, for instance, red sheep. That means a player can't just get all colors from white sheep - he has to selectively choose the mutations and breed them, like farmers used to do IRL.

that's what he said, if you have two sheep, you can breed them until you get a mutation, then that mutation can be bred to cause more and more mutations.
using your example and my finest powdered leprechaun for a ridiculous amount of luck, if you start with two white sheep, you could breed them once to get a brown sheep, and again to get a pink one, you can then breed those two to get a red sheep

and goddamn it FC, I just realized you're making us cause sheep incest, are there any depths to which you won't make us sink?

[Mason11987]

and goddamn it FC, I just realized you're making us cause sheep incest, are there any depths to which you won't make us sink?

My testing was based around repeated incest in a enclosed area which led to a pit where I slaughtered those born the wrong color, so there's that.

[HtKsos]

Thank you FC for giving me an interesting detour in my game as this feature is fun in all ages!

[Dreambolt]

Wheeee! Genetics! My favorite! Though the question is your design a 2 allele system or does it work of some alien principles? Any who, I'm going to go put my university education to use :D.

(Fun fact for those who are interested the forestry mod isn't accurate given that male honey bees are haploid, not diploid)

[DaveYanakov]

Have we determined yet if it's a straight chance for mutations? If so I'm wasting my time trying to map out recessive genes in different parents. I built a little rail depot so I can select any two specific sheep out of a breeding pool of 24 to experiment with but I've not had much time to use it yet. The question is just how much information does the sheep retain, if any, additional to it's birth colour.

[chaoticneutral]

If my hypothesis is correct, a very, very patient breeder can get all the 16 sheep colors without using a simple drop of dye.

I think you are wrong, From what I understood from FC's post, every color combination has certain available mutations. For instance, breeding 2 white sheep will have a ~1/50 percent of getting a mutation, but the mutation can only be black, gray, pink or brown. Breeding a brown sheep and a pink sheep will have a chance of giving you, for instance, red sheep. That means a player can't just get all colors from white sheep - he has to selectively choose the mutations and breed them, like farmers used to do IRL.

Well, breeding only white vs. white sheep, I got some weird colors - namely, light blue, lime (or green?) and pink. This was as soon as we got HC sheep, however, and he could had the mutation scheme changed.

A less Biologist, more coder hypothesis: he attributed RGB values for the colors (red = 200, pink = 100, etc.) and made the random mutation rise or lower one of those six. Still, this doesn't explain why white+white = black sometimes...

[Rianaru]

Also from a coder standpoint(sort of) the RGB values have to round to the closest color in the game, since none of us has seen something crazy like chartruese(sp?) or peach, and I don't think FC would go to all the trouble of making infinite colors in the game. So if all the values were near the limit, wouldn't the mod round it up to black RGB values?

[chaoticneutral]

Also from a coder standpoint(sort of) the RGB values have to round to the closest color in the game, since none of us has seen something crazy like chartruese(sp?) or peach, and I don't think FC would go to all the trouble of making infinite colors in the game. So if all the values were near the limit, wouldn't the mod round it up to black RGB values?

No, I wasn't thinking he put HTML RGB values in the game (like, calling "gray" #7F7F7F). I thought he just did simpler values and added a random mutation for each, like 100 (red) > 110 (yellow).

But now, after some more tests, I noticed he didn't. Nor BTW follows Mendelian genetics, it's something along this:
a. Check if the breeding pair in the table. If not, just select one of parent's colors and done.
b. If the pair is in the table, roll a number between 1 and 100;
c. (For white+white, as example) if the rolled number is:
1 or 2 or 3 - offspring is black
4 - offspring is pink
5 - offspring is lime green
6 - offspring is light blue
7 or bigger - offspring is white.

(For red+yellow, another example) if the rolled number is:
Smaller than 25 - offspring is red
Between 25 and 75 - offspring is orange
Bigger than 75 - offspring is yellow

I've managed to produce almost colors starting only with white sheep, and here are the pairs you CAN start with to get any color:

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White + white = black, pink, light blue, lime green
Black + pink/light blue/lime green/white = red/blue/green/gray
White + gray = light gray
Red + green/blue/yellow = yellow/purple/orange
Green+blue = cyan

I've yet to produce magenta (probably purple+pink) and brown (yellow+black OR random mutation from white).

It was a quite long time since a game feature "bugged" me (in the good sense) to test things out like this. Thank you, FlowerChild. I owe you a beer.

[HtKsos]

Chaoticneutral,
from your results it appears that white/white may be the most productive to start with.

I started with Dark Gray, Light Gray, White, and Yellow (I had from pre-upgrade) and gained Green and Lime from "mutations"
I bred each possible pair 5 times and got a 3-2 split on the parents' colors. so the non-mutating pairs become evident.
the mutations (Where the resulting color was not that of either parent) I had were:

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White + Dark Gray = Light Gray (Light gray appeared to replace the White result)
White + Green = Lime
Light Gray + Light Gray = Green

My next hypothesis is that purebreds are more likely to mutate :)