October 2026 dev log, part five: the livestock get real bodies

Part four ended with the barn door fix waiting on the livestock update. Here it is.

Real bodies for the farm animals

Since 0.6.7 the cows, pigs, sheep and chickens have had genes and star grades, but they were wearing stand-in models. That’s done. Every one of them is built from reference photos and checked side by side against them, the same way the horses were:

• Cattle: the small Dexter, the blocky Angus, and a new breed, the tall black and white Holstein, the dairy cow.
• Pigs: the little wattled Kunekune, the black Berkshire, and a new one, the big pink Yorkshire.
• Sheep: the Merino under its wool cap (the rams with spiral horns) and the black-faced Suffolk. Shear one and the slim sheep under the fleece is really there.
• Chickens: the deep red Rhode Island Red and the broad white Cornish Cross. The Rhode Island Red rooster’s tail fans out.

Babies aren’t shrunk adults any more. Calves are all legs with a big head and a short face, piglets are round, lambs are leggy in a short fleece, and chicks are little balls of fluff.

A day of their own

They graze, root and peck about, chew the cud, and a chicken shakes its feathers out now and then. They lie down to rest, and at night they sleep. At dusk your cows, pigs and sheep walk to stall bedding (Equestrian’s straw or shavings) and lie down on it, so a barn with bedding in it works as their stalls. Chickens just settle where they are. Cows, pigs and sheep now drink once a day like the horses do, and a rooster crows at dawn. The crow uses a borrowed sound for now. The rooster, bull and boar all get their own sounds in the next update.

Stars, milk and selling

• Milk is graded now, like the meat. A Holstein’s milk is the only one that reaches 5 stars; an Angus’s beef is the only beef that does.
• A sword is a rough cut. Killing your own animal with a sword or your hand drops its whole meat, but at 1 star. The Culling Prong is still how the stars are kept.
• Equestrian’s certificates work on livestock. Sign a Breeding Certificate with your bull, boar, ram or rooster and give it to a female, and her young are born right then, by him. Put a grown animal on an Ownership Certificate and its dealer buys the paper by its stars.

Prices are still stand-ins. The real ones get set with the community at the very end.

Equestrian 0.2.2

• The Ownership Certificate: put a horse on paper to trade it, sell it or give it away. Whoever uses the paper gets that same horse.
• Shears take the freight wagon’s canvas top off, and put it back.
• A horse in the horse box rides steady when the team is put to or taken out.

Missing Blocks 1.3.1

• Fencing for livestock: tube and field fences, wire fences in every wood, and tube, wire-filled and bull gates 2, 3 and 4 blocks wide. Everything comes galvanized, and a dye paints it.
• Barn doors stay put in water, the same fix Decor’s stall doors got in part four.
• The wooden bucket works again.

The standalone Missing Blocks download had fallen behind the copy inside the Farm Sim Pack. 1.3.1 brings them back to the same thing.

This one’s the test

I’ve only had a quick look at all of this in game myself, so this release is the real test. If an animal looks wrong, clips, floats or won’t go to bed, tell me on the Discord.

What’s next

• Sounds: the rooster’s crow, and the bull’s and boar’s charges.
• Vendors with their own looks, and prices tuned with the community.
• Then the list from part three: the Shire and jump poles in more colours.