Dev Update #17 - Skill Preview - Ranching

Hey Everyone!

We took a week off from our usual Patreon posts last week, and we’re coming back with an exciting one! This week we’ll be giving you a preview of the next skill we’re expecting to drop - Ranching! We’ll also give the usual rundown of what the team’s been working on (spoiler - it’s mostly Ranching 👀).

Ranching has been a work in progress for quite a while now, so we’re really excited to be able to give you a better insight into the content that it’ll bring to the Alpha.

You can expect to see Ranching introduced in our next major update! There’s no ETA on that update just yet, but we’re aiming to get it into your hands as soon as it’s ready.

Let’s get started!

🐮Ranching Preview

Welcome to a preview of our next Skill - Ranching (formerly known as COW SKILL).

What is Ranching?

Ranching is a Passive Skill where you are required to build and manage your own Animal Ranch, gaining passive resources in the process.

What is its purpose?

Ranching has one clear purpose - provide a passive method of obtaining various raw resources used around the game, most notably for Cooking & Crafting (plus some other Skills).

One goal we want to achieve with Melvor Idle 2 is providing you with a method of obtaining every raw material in the game outside of the Shop, and Ranching is one of those important skills that will do just that.

The Initial Setup & Mechanics

There are a few core mechanics you will interact with before receiving your first item from an Animal. Here’s a breakdown on the initial setup of the Skill.

Step 1 - Purchasing Land

Land is purchased using GP, which is where you’ll be able to start building an Enclosure (see below) for an animal of your choice.

Upon release of the Skill, there will be 15 total Land that can eventually be unlocked and purchased.

Step 2 - Build an Enclosure

After you purchase Land, you will then need to build an enclosure to house the Animals of your choice. The type of enclosure you build will determine what animal or animals can reside inside it.

Only one enclosure can be built on any individual Land space, but you can have multiple of the same enclosure across multiple Land spaces. You can also replace the enclosure with a different one (at a cost) at any time if you wish to change the setup of your animal farm.

Step 3 - Buying Animals

Now that you have an enclosure, you can purchase animals to house inside it. This is done from within the Enclosure UI, and they only cost GP.

Enclosures have a limit of how many Animals can reside in it at any given time, which can be increased by upgrading the respective Enclosure.

When you purchase an animal, you will receive a Child version of it which will eventually grow up into an Adult after a period of time.

Child animals have a 50% reduced XP and resource output rate.

Now that you have an animal, it’s time to look after it.

Looking after your Animals

Every animal has a primary stat called Happiness, which is calculated from three secondary stats - Hunger, Comfort & Satisfaction.

Happiness

Calculated based on the other three stats, this is the main value to watch. Happiness will determine the XP you receive from the Animal, as well as the quantity of items produced. 100% Happiness = 100% XP & Items.

This stat can go above 100%, thanks to Satisfaction (detailed below).

Happiness is calculated as follows:

Happiness = Comfort * 0.3 + Hunger * 0.3 + Satisfaction * 0.4

Hunger

Very simple. Keep your animals fed, and this will remain at 100%. If you run out of food to feed the animal with (how could you), this will begin to drop at 1% per missed feed (every 1 hour).

Any time an Animal eats, its hunger will replenish to 100%.

Some animals graze, which means they don’t require external items for food. This is a decent option for those who want a low effort progression to the Skill.

Comfort

The enclosures you build will degrade over time, requiring a repair (cost is based on material cost to build). The animal’s Comfort value reflects the state of the enclosure it resides in.

Every hour, the enclosure will drop by 1% which can then be repaired with a single button click. Don’t worry though, this won’t have an effect on the animal's happiness until it falls under 75% (25 hours of ignoring).

Satisfaction

This is one of the most important stats, which will allow the Happiness of an animal to exceed 100%. It’s designed to reward you for going above and beyond looking after your animals.

There are various things you can do that will maintain the Satisfaction of an animal, while also allowing it to increase over 100% (thus outputting more XP and resources).

This acts like a checklist of sorts, where each type of Animal has their own Satisfaction checklist to maintain for increased gains. This includes:

• Keeping Hunger and Comfort above 50%

• Feeding the animal Treats once per day.

  • This is automated like food, and each type of animal has their own selection of Treats.

• Petting the animal once every 2 days

• Scaling group bonuses, where you get increased satisfaction if the enclosure contains multiple of the same animal.

Each type of animal has the same checklist. So this means every Chicken’s satisfaction checklist requirements will be the same.

Satisfaction can be ignored, if you wish, as it remains at 100% as long as you keep Hunger and Comfort above 50%. Anything additional is a bonus for both you and the animal.

There will be other ways in the future to increase the Satisfaction of the animal, which will be released alongside Construction.

The Animals

Here’s a look at the animals you will see in the Skill (either on release or in the near future), and what items they consume/produce.

Animal Variants

When a Child is ready to become an adult, there is a very small chance it could turn into a variant. A variant is just a fun little feature where the animal might look visually different in some way, or it might have slightly boosted XP/item rates.

Quality of Life

There’s some inbuilt quality of life to help you “manage” your animal farm:

• Pet All animals button

• Repair All enclosures button

• Auto-buy Animals (immediately purchases a new animal when one… expires).

• Breakdown of all items consumed or produced by the Skill, including a per-animal breakdown.

• Breakdown of total XP being gained, including a per-animal breakdown.

There’s some more quality of life in queue to develop, which I hope to have available on release.

Visuals

Ranching will allow you to view each enclosure. Inside this enclosure, you’ll be able to watch your animals wander around, eat, and also sleep.

This is just a flavour touch we wanted to add to the Skill to really highlight the cozy aspect we were trying to go for.

Potential FAQs

You may have a few questions, so here’s our attempt to answer them before they appear!

There seems to be a lot to manage on a per-animal basis. Will I need to spend a lot of time micromanaging animals?

Nope! 95% of the Skill runs in the background on timers every 1hr or every 24hrs. The only thing you need to do is ensure you’ve got enough of the required resources available when those timers fire.

The only time you really need to manually interact with the Skill is to:

• Buy land or build a new enclosure

• Repair enclosures (once per day)

• Pet animals (Can be done with a single button for all animals).

• Purchase new animals if auto-buy is not set.

There is a “Land Overview” panel in the Skill that provides a full overview of the entire Farm.

Does the Skill adhere to the Offline time limit?

Yep. If you are away for 7 days, the game will only calculate everything up to the cap (24 hours in the current build).

How long do Animals live for?

This varies on the animal itself, but it's anywhere from 4 days to 16 days.

How long does it take an animal to grow into an adult?

1/8th of their total lifespan. So if an animal lives for a total of 8 days, it will remain as a Child for 1 day.

Can I remove an animal before they “expire”?

Yep - you can right click them and remove them at any time.

Can animals die if I ignore it for too long?

Nope. We decided not to include this as we really wanted the skill to be more cozy & chill in nature. If you ignore an animal for too long, its happiness will simply drop to 0% and you’ll stop receiving any XP or Items.

How long do I have to ignore an animal to reach 0% Happiness?

Here’s what you have to do for this to occur:

• Not feed the animal at all for 100 hours

• Don’t repair an enclosure for 100 hours

• Don’t pet the animal

• Make sure the animal has no other friends in the same enclosure

• Don’t feed the animals treats.

Why do animals produce raw meat if it doesn’t die?

Like mentioned above, we opted for a more cozy Skill. This meant we removed the requirement to slaughter an animal for its raw meat. If we added this mechanic as a requirement, it would mean animals would be churned like butter to produce the required amount of meat.

We opted for long-living animals you can take care of instead.

Can I dedicate my entire farm to a single animal?

If you want to, yep. The Land feature gives you freedom to set up your farm however you like, depending on priorities.

I want to prepare for this update, what should I focus on?

• Normal, Oak and Willow logs for the first few Enclosures.

• GP for buying the Animals.

• Bars starting from Adamantite for enclosures above level 40 Ranching.

Animals that require Grain cannot be prepared for, as this requires the Grain Mill in Farming to produce which will be released alongside this Skill.

Can I individually pet the animals?

Yep!

Conclusion

We hope you are looking forward to the release of Ranching! We're still cleaning up some mechanics, balance and UI for the Skill. When we have an ETA for release, we'll let you know via a future dev update.

🏋️ What the team have been working on 

Here’s what the team has been working on since our last post!

Development

Malcs:

• Has been focused on cleaning up Ranching this past week.

• Added initial Mastery Guild to Cooking.

Coolrox:

• Coolrox was on leave for a week in the time since our last post!

• Outside of his well deserved rest, he’s been continuing to work on various pre-requisite systems for Combat.

• He’s also been working on various under-the-hood improvements to the way we manage data in the game engine, which should make it much easier for us to manage the many interactions between skills and systems in Melvor Idle 2!

Game Design

Prat:

• Primarily focused on refining the Ranching experience, refining the costs and rewards, the progression experience, and the general gameplay of the new skill.

• Added some new Animals to Ranching that didn't exist 1 week ago.

• Also put significant work into skill interactions for Ranching - how it will interact with other skills for materials, progression and more.

• Has started the finalization work for Hunter and Beastcrafting.

Artwork

Tapi:

• Continued work on the various artwork needed for Ranching!

  • This is a huge undertaking, and Tapi is doing a fantastic job on the artwork so far!

Conclusion

This was a big post for us - it’s been a while since we’ve been able to do this kind of dive into a new skill! It’s always fun for us to be able to share our work in a lot more detail, so we hope you enjoyed it too!

As always, we’ll be looking forward to chatting about Ranching (and everything else!) here on Patreon, and over on Discord! See you next week 👋

- Malcs & Althalus