Animal Husbandry account-wide restrictions

My main character Niph plays with Animal Handling as main skill. Because of this, I want to maintain a set of pets I can use in various situations, i.e. to do damage or to tank. I used to have 12 pets but I released most of them recently, keeping 4 of them. I guess I could release one and stick to an absolute minimum of 3. I assume players are intended to keep several pets, we have abilities to summon 6 different ones after all.

I also started Animal Husbandry, and as indicated when the skill was introduced, it consumes many stable slots. With my current max of 18, minus 4 for AH pets, I have 12 slots available for breeding.

After a long investigation I think I need an absolute minimum of 6 slots per genome (ex: Bee & Wasp), +2 per specie (ex: Wasp), so with 12 slots I can comfortably breed bees and wasps, and that's what I'm currently doing.

However, I'm prevented from breeding other genomes when they are introduced, for instance horses, but also cats, rats and bears. So I figured I was supposed to do that on an alt character. This other character can buy cheap slots and breed its own pets. The idea is then to start with bees now, to gain some XP, and when we have new genomes available discard the bees and play with what's new, just not starting from level 0.

So I went on my alt Steelflake and grinded 40 levels of Animal Handling (starting at 30 since Fairy) because, while technically you can buy Husbandry at 50, in practice you need level 70 to tame bees, otherwise you can't start. Then I went on and tamed 2 bees.

Then when I tried to breed them I found out the maximum number of simultaneous breeding attempts is per account.

Is this really necessary? Obviously, it's intended, but clearly it forces the account to choose one, perhaps 2 genomes, and no more. Not until you are completely done with one, which takes years.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm more interested in cats and horses than bees (and I pity the rats...) so it's tempting to completely give up and just raise the skill on my main, and wait. Because I already know breeding my bees is futile. I'll discard them, I won't have the slots.

Good question. I don't really see a huge inherent advantage in having multiple characters doing simultaneous breeding. You can't exchange breedable pets between characters, so all you gain from multiple characters with animal husbandry is the ability to breed multiple pet species at the same time rather than obtaining them from other players or taming. That doesn't strike me as an overwhelming advantage - sure, it's nice, but it's not like there's going to be a big money-making market for churning out oodles of level 1 pets.

In my own experience with animal husbandry:
For my second animal husbandry character, I dusted off a character on a different account that I'd used for Serbule Hills testing way back when. So, I have two characters with animal husbandry that don't share breeding restrictions since they don't share an account. The primary reason I used the different account was to take advantage of the free breeding pair - I figured it would be a lot faster to level from 1-50 than from 20/30 -70 for taming on my main account.

I don't really have a particular motive for doing animal husbandry multiple times beyond eh, it looks like a fun idea, let's breed some pets. I do enjoy having two chars with the skill - it gives me a different pet pool to work with, and I find it useful to have two characters at different skill levels when trying to pin down some weird bugs with level-up rewards not occurring when they should.

My long term goal is to do animal breeding on my other two alts on my main account as well. My vague idea was to have one species per char, so maybe wasps, cats, bears and bees. ( Rats, hah. Poor rats, indeed.) I don't really anticipate being hampered hugely by the account breeding limitation because I usually don't use all my breeding attempts anyway.

My personal big breeding problem has been the number of stable slots. I think the underlying issue is the same as storage space - the devs and I just have a hugely different attitude on how much it's reasonable to keep and how painful it is to get rid of stuff I might want to use later. I'm really relieved the special event for faster gestation time is over - I was starting to find the continuous decision making of which adorable newborn pet to toss out quite painful and I'm glad we are back to slower breeding times so I have more time for making choices. Well, actually, I haven't even looked at my latest pets for a few days now because I really don't want to decide which of them have to go.

Wandering possibly even more offtopic:
I'm unsure how I feel about animal husbandry. I love the basic idea, but I loosely feel I want to do "something" more with the skill.

I've enjoyed the pet raffles. A belated huge thanks to Tekrun for putting up a fae bee raffle a few months ago - first and only raffle I ever won, took my alt from 1-50 in animal handling. Best 400 councils I ever spent. :) I found the fae bee to be absolutely godly when leveling - anything is a huge improvement over rats over course, but the bee was great and its poison was absolutely devasting on those pesky snails and mantises in Eltibule. This was definitely the best early animal handling experience I ever had.

Once my animal husbandry improved, I've put up a few raffles of my own. I actually got a huge kick out off seeing another player in the goblin dungeon later, leveling what appeared to be a Tagamogi-bred raffle pet. I really love the idea of other players playing with my genetically superior pets.

But ... only so many players, only so much demand for pets, especially since few players would want to relevel a pet from 1-85 just for a couple extra stat points. So, I haven't really tried to get my pets out to other players except as a vanity project. To me, the effort is a bit too high as a money-making idea:
First off, I need a pet cage. All pet cages require random-drop resources that aren't easy to farm or mass-acquire.
Second, I need a raffler. I *could* put the pet up in my player shop instead but I'm not sure how many people are aware that searching for "caged pet" in the shops is an option. Since I tend to randomly forget about my shop and come back to it a couple months later, it doesn't seem like a safe idea for a limited term item like a pet cage that might not sell.
Third, it's a shuffle between Serbule and the casino. I need to be in the casino (or the even-less convenient Povus) for animal breeding decisions, but my pet is going to sell best in Serbule, plus all/most of my crafting materials are there.

I don't think any of the above is a problem as such, it just makes me very unlikely to attempt to sell/raffle a pet. Which then leads to the logical question of why am I breeding these pets? So I can in a year decide that I have a great pet that can't be improved upon and that is worthy of my time to start leveling from level 1? Maybe... I'm not unhappy with the idea, I just feel the skill could use more excitement.

I'm not sure what excitement I'm really looking for. Brainstorm ideas I've had:

- Have a pet breeding exchange where players can advertise their pets for stud/gestation services, and other players can pay to use that pet in a breeding attempt, and keep the resulting offspring. (Which still doesn't address the question of why we are breeding all those pets but I'd love to be able to diversify my gene pool a little bit.)

- Have NPC workorders that look for a particular type of pet - e.g. "want a fae bee with 60+ intelligence" This might give some incentive to breeding attempts.

- Have pet shows with awards for things like "best-looking", "most ferocious", "best all-around". I don't think this one would necessarily be easy to do - "best-looking" is more of a people-judgment and can't really be coded, and hey, how many players are going to care to take the time to look at someone else's pet and say it's cooler looking than their own? :) It's just that to me the pet breeding is kind of about vanity and having my own pets, and yeah, possibly having them be better than other people's pets. :)


I'm tossing all this stuff into this post because I feel that animal husbandry could use some changes, and possibly with those changes, the breeding limitation per account would then make more sense. Of course, people with altitis and multiple accounts, like me, can easily bypass the restrictions. As things are currently, I really don't see what the point of the breeding attempt limitation is.

One other brainstorm thought I had was to have groups of stable slots by species. So, a single character could have 8 slots for bees/wasps, 4 for cats, 1 for rats, but still only x breeding attempts. I don't know if that's necessarily better but it might help those players that prefer to have a variety of pets and and still breed some. I've also run into the problem of needing to release some pets I used to play with to make room for breeding, and I'm not really happy with it.

The idea behind the current pet breeding system seems to be specialization - overall limited stable slots, so it makes more sense for a character to focus on breeding one particular type of pet only. I'm not really convinced by the concept - it seems to lead naturally to wanting to have alts for each possible pet type. I assume the idea is to have specialization to get players to trade with each other and have the super-bear breeder exchange pets with the super-cat breeder, but again, I'm not convinced. For one thing, I always like doing my own thing, so I'd rather have my own second-best cat than someone else's first class cat. For another, there again doesn't seem to be much likely reward for being the server's best fae bee breeder - sure, a few people are going to want those awesome bees, but there's just only going to be so much total demand for pet bees, so having a more limited supply of specialist bee breeders doesn't seem like a long term solution.

Ok, I think this essay might be long enough...