Ok breeding your slaves is- a remarkably good idea. (And deserving of it’s own thread.) It turns out random internet folks are kinda messed up, who knew?. Also I’d assume you are mostly in charge of what role your pet falls in.
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Many people did it. In America, people bought families of slaves, so their slave populations grew. In the Caribbean, they only bought strong men, to work the sugar cane plantations, and many died. it is why the slave population in America became so large.
Man life is so🇧🇪ed up. I’m mad at life.
The one problem I have with this is that it doesn’t lend itself to artificial selection. What if I, the player, wanted to make my omnivorous lone animal livestock? It wouldn’t be possible because the game categorizes it as a pet simply because it is a hunter.
Perhaps I was unclear, sorry.
It’s not that animals would be categorized automatically, it is that they would be assigned values that determine how well an animal would perform in a category. The ultimate categorization would be determined by the player.
Your omnivore would make a good hunter if it was used for such, but you want it as livestock so that’s what it would be.
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What do y’all think the categories should be?
As far as I can tell all domesticated animals fit into four (admittedly broad) categories:
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Pet: Provides your people with happiness by looking or acting pretty. Examples include some dogs and goldfish. The sapient equivalent would be a domestic servant.
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Combatant: Helps your people in combat or chases. Most useful for hunting down other animals but could be used in war as well. Irl dogs were originally domesticated for this. The sapient equivalent is a battle thrall.
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Livestock: Produces some physical resource your people need. Obtaining it may require slaughtering the animal. The exact resource it supplies depends on its biology, but it would have to be a very weird creature for meat not to be one of the options. Examples are poultry and sheep. The sapient equivalent is not something you should want you monster.
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Transport: Moves around cargo and/or people. The maximum load depends on the creature’s strength so larger animals are more useful (though a small nimble creature might have some use). Irl we have horses, elephants and pigeons for this. The sapient equivalent could gather its own resources to transport, though I admit this stretches the definition a bit.
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I like these definitions
The general consensus as far as I could tell, would also give pets a small bonus in something else as well as a happiness boost. But other than that, these are what people pretty much agreed on.
The categories could also be split into subcategories such as these:
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Pets
Hunting/combat: Happiness and small boost to hunting and combat (for simplicity). EX: Dogs
Livestock: Happiness and small amount of resource. We don’t really have any of these
Transport: Happiness and Movement. EX: Horses
Entertainment: double happiness boost. EX: Parrots -
Livestock
Slaughtering: You kill the animal. EX: Bulls
Harvesting: You harvest something the animal produces continuously. EX: Cows -
Combatant
Warring: animals that help in war. We don’t really have an equivalent of this type
Hunting: animals that hunt. EX: Eagles -
Transport
I don’t really see any subcategories for this type.
There are many possible creatures that I’d say would not fit into those categories. For example:
A dry-skinned slug used to clothe and protect a moist-skinned sophont
A sapient brood parasite’s host
A creature that produces heat and sparks for lighting tinder
A phoront that cleans a larger sophont
A scavenger that eats and cleans away dangerous waste
I would say most of these are extremely unlikely and probably rare. The dry skinned slug would probably be a symbiont, as well as most of the other animals you mentioned. the one that makes sparks would be unlikely to evolve via auto-evo, and the scavenger would be classified as either pet or combat/hunter.
Even if they are rare, they still should be possible, and so should really fit into this system
Besides the parasite host, which I think deserves a unique treatment from simple domesticated animals, I think these are all just pets. I don’t see anything they do being modelled in game as anything more detailed than a boost to happiness. This is especially true seeing as they all perform tasks that could be just as easily done by a person, making them effectively domestic servants.
Protecting someone from a painful death by dessication, as in the first example I gave, does not seem like a simple happiness boost any more than transporting things or fighting
If your species would die of desiccation without a certain animal, that’s a symbiont, not a domesticated animal.
It does not need the slug to survive at all, just to survive in dry places, in the same way that humans need warm clothes to survive in cold regions
Then you could consider it a form of clothes.
So, it wouldn’t fit into any of those categories?
no, because I wouldn’t really consider that a domesticated animal in the first place.