Quick Breeding

Breed tamed animals by hand-feeding them, instead of dropping food and waiting.

Walk up to a tamed animal, look at it and press Use. It takes one item of the configured breeding food from your inventory. Feed two animals standing near each other and you get one offspring within seconds.

Ground feeding still works exactly as it always has. Dropping food on the ground tames and breeds animals at the usual pace, untouched. Hand-feeding is simply a faster, more deliberate option on top.

Features

• Hand-feed to breed, with on-screen feedback at every step — how many feeds an animal still needs, when it is ready, and when it is expecting.
• One feeding produces one offspring. No runaway pens.
• A cooldown per animal stops the same pair being fed over and over.
• The pair is left hungry after the birth, so they will not immediately breed again on their own.
• Blocked feeds cost nothing. If an animal is on cooldown, if there are already too many animals nearby, or if nothing is close enough to pair with, you are told why and keep your food.
• Hearts appear over every animal a fed one can actually breed with, so you can see the pairing range instead of guessing at it. Hearts over nothing means move them closer.
• Newborns can be hand-fed too, which brings adulthood forward. Growing up is the longest wait in the cycle by far.
• Each animal gets its own feed, crafted at the food preparation table from something it already eats plus a yellow mushroom. Boars simply use the yellow mushroom itself.
• Feed items are inedible — they are animal feed, not meals, and do not compete with your own food.
• Every setting is per animal, including which feed works and whether its item is created at all. Animals added by other mods appear in the config too.

What it tells you

Feeding always says what happened. Every row below marked no food taken is a refusal, and in all of those cases you keep the food.

Message	What it means
Boar fed (1/2)	Accepted. It needs more before it is ready.
Boar is ready to breed	Primed, waiting for a partner that is also ready.
Boar is expecting	A pair came together. Young on the way.
Boar is already ready to breed	Nothing to gain. No food taken.
Boar is not ready to breed again (30s)	Still on cooldown from its last pairing. No food taken.
No other Boar ready to breed yet	Others are close enough, but still on cooldown. No food taken.
No other Boar close enough to breed with	Nothing in range to pair with. No food taken.
Max animals in area (5/5)	The population cap, counting young. No food taken.
Piggy grows up in 24m 45s	A newborn took the feed. That is its new wait.
Piggy is already growing faster	It has had its one feed. No food taken.
Piggy is already growing up	Its time is up; it changes any moment. No food taken.

The last two are worth reading together with the hearts. Feed an animal and hearts appear over everything it could pair with - so hearts over nothing, and that message, are the same news told twice: move them closer, or wait for the cooldown.

Newborns

Growing up is by far the longest part of the cycle, and a newborn is no use until it is done - it cannot breed, so a pen of young is a pen that does nothing yet.

Hand-feed a newborn and it grows up in half the time. It takes the same food as its parents, once per animal. That works for every animal, including the ones that hatch from eggs, however they were bred.

Look at a newborn while carrying its food to see the prompt. Once it has been fed, looking at it shows how long it has left.

Settings

Setting	What it does
EnableMod	Master switch. Off returns everything to normal.
HandFeedCooldown	Seconds before an animal can be hand-fed into breeding again.
FeedsRequired	Hand-feeds needed before an animal is ready.
PregnancyDuration	Seconds between conceiving and the baby appearing. Affects ground feeding too.
GrowUpFeedReduction	How much of a newborn's wait one hand-feed removes.
CheckInterval	Seconds between breeding checks. Affects ground feeding too.
BreedChance	Chance per check of progress toward conceiving. Affects ground feeding too.
PartnerCheckRange	How far apart two animals can be and still pair up.
TotalCheckRange	Radius used to count nearby animals.
MaxCreatures	How many animals of a kind can be nearby before breeding stops.
BreedingFoodOnly	Whether only the listed feed works, or any food the animal normally eats.
ExcludedAnimals	Creatures the mod leaves entirely alone.

Settings that affect ground feeding default to leaving the game's own values alone.

Per-animal settings

Each breedable creature gets its own section in the config, listed by name:

Setting	What it does
BreedingFoods	What hand-feeds this animal. Blank means it cannot be hand-fed at all.
GenerateFeedItem	Whether this animal's feed item is created.
MaxCreatures	Population cap for this animal alone.

There is no global food list — an animal is hand-feedable only if its own entry names something.

If you would rather use an item you already have, run the game once so the sections appear, set GenerateFeedItem to false for that animal and put your chosen item in its BreedingFoods. On the next run its feed item is never created, so nothing clutters your crafting menu that you do not use.

Example setups

Three settings — CheckInterval, BreedChance and PregnancyDuration — affect ground feeding as well as hand-feeding. Setting them to 0 leaves the game's own pace alone. Everything else only affects hand-feeding.

Hand-feeding is the fast option (default)

CheckInterval     = 0
BreedChance       = 0
PregnancyDuration = 2
HandFeedCooldown  = 60
FeedsRequired     = 1

Ground feeding behaves as it always has. Hand-feed a pair and the baby arrives in a few seconds, once per minute per animal. Good if you want a quick option without changing the ground feeding mechanics.

Everything is faster

CheckInterval     = 2
BreedChance       = 1
PregnancyDuration = 2
HandFeedCooldown  = 60

Animals left with food on the ground breed several times faster than normal. Be careful: pens fill very quickly, and because ground feeding has no cooldown it can easily out-produce hand-feeding, which makes the hand-feeding pointless.

Predictable ground feeding

CheckInterval     = 15
BreedChance       = 1
PregnancyDuration = 20
HandFeedCooldown  = 60

Removes the random chance from ground feeding, so animals left with food breed on a steady, knowable schedule instead of sometimes stalling for no visible reason. Hand-feeding stays clearly the quicker route. Tune CheckInterval and PregnancyDuration up or down together to set the pace.

Larger pens

MaxCreatures      = 8
PartnerCheckRange = 20
TotalCheckRange   = 15

More animals allowed in one area before breeding stops, and they can pair up from further apart so a big pen works properly. Raise MaxCreatures carefully on a shared server — every extra animal is more for it to keep track of.

Safe to add to an existing world. Nothing about your current animals changes until you hand-feed them.