It is currently possible to easily produce at least 1200 raw meat, 20 tallow, and 16 hides per year with only one hunter, one guard, and some careful building placement. With a bit of luck it can be right inside your settlement. Given the recent rebalancing this has become a glaringly overpowered method of food production.
I have two ideas for possible solutions.
The first is to accept that this is actually kinda cool and just rebalance it inline with other food sources. The value of boars was recently buffed to make it very worthwhile to micro some hunters on a boar hunt, that is good and should remain unaffected by any change to boar farming. So with that in mind I think the best solution would be to change boars to spawn as piglets that only grows into an adult boar after a year. The way the boar farm works would mean youâd now only be killing the babies, which can be balanced to give produce in line with other food sources. If the baby phase was also applied to wolves that could also help tone down the similar exploit of farming dens. The other situation this would create is the possibility to not automating the killing, but letting them grow to full boars and then killing them manually. That would still be an effective method, but the rate of culling would be vastly reduced and would probably be pretty balanced.
The second is to make the method impossible. The best way I can think to achieve this is to move the spawn point in a random direction by ~5 squares every time a new boar is spawned. With the spawn point no longer being static it would be impossible to set up the indefinitely automated farming of boars.
Interesting idea regarding having a juvenile and adult stage to wildlife, like trees and cattle. Huntersâ buildings could have a âtake only adult specimensâ setting, like work camps have âfell only mature treesâ as an option.
Boars are fantastic as the meat/time ratio is great but not really sure this is a âproblemâ that warrants âfixingâ. A normal hunter will make around half of that per year anyway, so youâre basically saving 1 hunter but you also need to put a dude permanently in a tower and pay gold for that. Itâs a good advantage but Itâs not âgame breakingâ IMO. I like that there is some variety in yields and what you can achieve
Your normal hunters are killing 10 deer a year? Iâd like to see that, maybe Iâm doing it wrong.
The comparison I have in mind are cows in barns. A herd of 10 cows gives a bit over 600 meat, requires 4 herders, somewhere to graze, and winter feed. They make cheese as well, normally less than 500, but add a couple cheese makers to the worker count.
Boar spawners are notoriously difficult to move/remove right now, so thatâs kind of a side-effect of that. I imagine once we address that, this will be a bit harder to set up.
Early spring in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, which at the time had one of the largest bison herds in the country. Woman with a camera was trying to pose her child next to a Bison Calf (newborn, so âonlyâ about 300 pounds). Bison calf was not happy about it, and Momma Bison was standing behind the woman, who therefore, with her kid, was between Momma and Child Bison. I told my companion, who was a photojournalist, that she was about to get pictures of a woman being driven into the ground like a tent peg, but Childe Bison was faster than either kid or woman, ran around them and back to Momma, defusing the situation.
Between Momma and Child is no place to be when Momma weighs about 1.5 tons and has a short temper . . .
I found myself using the guard towner and hunter shacks for regular boar hunting in an area near my farms but from what I can tell, the rate at which boars spawn does not increase with population size so eventually, this little source of food will taper off. This also means you have to designate that area as not to build on or too close too. Boar may gradually be pushed back to more distant areas like the deer, or they may attack your villagers more and keep your populations from growing.
Regarding the wolf dens, I found that your laborers will, for some reason, attack them on their own if they get too close. Exploring, wood chopping, etc. can drive them to rid you of wolf dens you might otherwise want to farm. You might try to put up fencing all the way around one in a distance, but youâd have to watch every laborer to make sure they donât go to the den and clear it out.
