Cartur's Feeding Trough

A trough your animals eat out of, so you stop throwing food on the floor.

Build it with the hammer under Furniture. It costs 10 wood and needs a workbench. It opens like a chest. Fill it and walk away.

What it does

A hungry boar, wolf, lox, hen or any other tameable animal looks for food the way it normally would. If there is none on the ground, it tries the troughs in range, nearest first, and eats from the first one that holds something it will eat. The trough puts one item in the bowl for it, so the animal eats it exactly as it would eat food dropped on the floor. Everything that follows from a meal follows from this one too, so taming progresses, breeding is unblocked and tamed animals stay fed. How far an animal will look is the game's own food search range for that animal. The mod has no range setting.

The bowl shows what is in it. Put berries in and you see berries. It is drawn from the items' own models and is local decoration only, so there is nothing to pick up and nothing to desync.

A buildable piece is something the AI can decide to attack, and a plain chest is on the "walk over and break it" list, which is the one thing you do not want from the object you use to lure animals in. That is turned off here, so animals won't go out of their way to smash the trough. A raid that is already fighting you can still wreck it.

An animal that is being tamed gets a yellow bar under its health bar, and its hover text gains the time left. Both read the game's own taming countdown, so the bar stalls exactly when the taming does, while the animal is hungry or frightened. Vanilla already tells you which of those it is. This only tells you how long.

Eight slots

The inventory is four by two. A trough is a meal, not a pantry. Any food the animal eats works. It is the game's own list per creature and not one written down in the mod, so a modded animal that eats something new eats it out of the trough too.

Multiplayer

It works. The trough is a container like any other. Whichever player's client is running a hungry animal feeds it from the trough. If the trough is not open, that client takes ownership of it first, so two animals do not eat the same berry twice. Nothing is taken out of a trough somebody else has open.

Compatibility and known issues

Requires Jötunn, which registers the piece and renders its build-menu icon.

The trough is a reskinned wood chest under the hood, so it inherits the chest's build snapping and destroy behaviour. That is deliberate. It is what keeps the mod small enough to survive a game update.

Install

Use a mod manager (r2modman, Thunderstore or Gale) and it pulls in BepInEx and Jötunn for you. To install by hand, drop CarturFeedingTrough.dll into BepInEx/plugins along with Jötunn.

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Discord: bug reports, install help, and mod requests. Bug reports get their own thread so nothing is lost in a chat scroll, and requests are voted on.

Free, and always will be. If it improved your game you can tip me on Patreon.

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