Feature Creep: Predators, Space Cows, and Whales! Oh My!

Only a few days have gone by since my last Feature Creep on the Space Hunter, and CIG drops Space Cows on all our heads. Before getting any father, let me say I’m ecstatic to hear predators will be in concept after the Space Whale. Maybe we will see some hunter gameplay sooner than I thought, but this episode of Feature Creep is going to concentrate on Ranching, Farming, and the now confirmed egg laying Space Cow.

Alien, weird, and strangely practical. Anyone who knows how useful chickens are with their eggs, but certainly don’t get steak or milk from the famous farm yard bird. If you could combine the creatures you would have quite the useful farmyard animal which brings me to the obvious: the Farmer Career path in Star Citizen.

I could be reading into this, but I think the Farming Career path is closer than we all think. Not tomorrow or next month kind of close by any means, let’s not be ridiculous here. Still, all the ingredients in this career path are slowly being assembled from collectables, to personal inventory, and now the Space Cow. Now all we need are building, homesteads, the Endeavor with the farming upgrades, plants to be replanted, and okay so there is a far more than a weekend's worth or work to get done. Can’t a man dream though?

Imagine with me the joy of loading up a freelancer full of supplies, seeds, and all the fire power a stand up Citizen like yourself needs to put some force behind your claim. You find a good spot to set up camp on a habitable planet on the edge of space with a gorgeous couple of moons that twinkle above your head in a purple haze. You’ve brought a genetically modified plant whose fruit can be turned into a popular fiz drink, and whose leaves turn into a new antibacterial cream that fights off infection when mixed with bandages. All things you have buyers for, and a nice trading route set up too. 

Things are looking up until a storm hits. Turns out your new home has a tsunami season, and all your crops were just washed away leaving nothing but wrecked dreams and plants behind. Still, you’re dogged fellow so you venture out into the stars, and return with cattle you can lead to high ground instead of fruit trees that can’t walk. Switching to leather, eggs, and meat to sell to hungry miners, and adventurers passing through your system. Before long your Ranch stretches out far enough to be seen from space, and makes enough profit you can afford an Endeavor to search the stars for even more fertile animals and harvestables.

I want to see farming not just include crops, but ranching with various alien farm animals. The gameplay around farming has had a few hints showing the need to try various crops in different conditions to produce different results. Maybe a flower whose pollen you sell to scientists works great in a pirate ridden moon, but take it somewhere less hazardous to your health the darn flower withers. So how would it look with animals?

CIG have already said they plan on making the eggs harvestable, the meat edible, and the hide able to be turned into leather of the space cow in development. A tantalizing start. Now I want to know if, like in real life, you can breed them, and increase the size of your herd, maybe sell the excess stock to space traders. Talk about volatile cargo. Cows in the back Firefly style sounds fun in a crazy kind of way, and I know I’d want to try it out. 

This might add more gamplay for cargo runners who might have to install proper animal pins or maybe cargo containers that take up more space for the living cargo. Obviously if you take too long and don’t feed them or keep their cargo space full of oxygen you're going to have some now good for nothing but leather cow carcasses. They’ve already set up a similar system with Quantum Oar so with a few tweaks this should be too difficult of a process. But getting back to the farmers I’d want to see even more unique gameplay.

In real life you can breed cattle to suit particular needs. Have a dangerous environment? Maybe some larger horns and aggression in the male bulls might add some survivability against predators. Maybe you just want a meat cow, and so go for the fattest most disease free breed possible. Is it as simple as that? By no means. My wife’s cousins have been trying to breed disease resistant lambs in Southeast Asia for years, and they’re still at it. Luckily, we’re talking about a video game here. Not only does it not have to be perfect in its realism, we can have fun, and less full nauseating birthing fluids. Yuck.

So here is my proposal. I let you and CIG use your imagination for the whole mating part, don’t be weird lads it's some kind of platypus cow that lays eggs that’s a process no one wants to know about how that process works, instead let’s talk about adapting your herd to your preferences and needs. Here I say we take a note from RPGs. More specifically, their crafting or alchemy systems and the current mining systems . 

Let’s say you have a mining claim on Microtech, and after some extensive stripping the resources are spent. You still have this piece of property in the tundra and forests. You could see it or try to introduce some cattle for profit, but the cows are going to have trouble in the cold environment. You go to a scientist Citizen friend of yours who after studying some local shaggy coat wildlife has come up with a DNA splice that if given to a newborn cafe will make the coat grow out longer increasing their resistance to the extreme cold on the planet. From there you slowly turn your whole herd into mammoth egg laying space cows for the win.

I could see whole charts on the internet popping up for what DNA or other consumable items to mix with different animals for different results. Different personalities, more fertility, more meat, more stamina, larger health pools, faster speed, you name it CIG can go crazy with them. This also I think would play well into giving the Scientist Career paths a few practical methods to make money off their gameplay. Genetic splicing of animals, and maybe less legal sentient creature alteration sounds right up Star Citizen’s ally. 

If they wanted to add even more depth they could take a taste from the X-Com series, and have different cows have different stats that play into future generations of cows. Maybe this cow is bigger and stronger so if you mix it with another massive cow you get a slightly larger cow that’s massive compared to the normal beasts with a large health pool. Add in those genetic consumables to add spice like tusks for spearing those predators we here will be in concepting after the space whale is done. 

That could feed into even more gameplay. Say you hire a hunter to catch an exotic cat predator from the reaches of space than breed them and genetically manipulate them into a wild looking pussycat for a pet. Not only could you sell it to players and NPCs alike the cool factor goes through the roof especially if you’d been killed by a few of these kitties back in the day. These options are endless, awesome, and makes all the more curious to see what CIG comes up with. Here is hoping they blow all our minds, and maybe just maybe read a silly writer's blog and his farmer/rancher wish list.

Get homesteading boys! That Universe isn’t going to populate itself. So when that farmer career path finally opens to us all I’ll see you out there Citizens.

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