RealismAddon: AnimalGrazing v1.0

RealismAddon: AnimalGrazing v1.0

AnimalGrazing – grazing animals

What does this mod do?
In short – this mod makes animals that have grass/meadow areas eat that grass.
Similar to the already known Grazing Feature in Seasons mod from previous FS versions, but other than the idea its completely new.

Features – a detailed explanation:
Grass is eaten in growth stages, each “grazing” step reduces grass by one growth stage.
How often/how much is eaten is dependent on the amount of animals, the amount of food used per day and the amount of grass left, but as long as there is something left in the feeding through only a maximum of one grazing step is done per day.
Since each grazing step is done over the entire meadow the resulting amount of grass is saved in a buffer and fed hourly.

As long as there is below 25% total filled volume in the feeding through it will always fill up to 25% in one go – that way grazing-only feeding is possible.
Above 25% it adds the total food usage per hour in grass, above 85% it doesn’t add any more grass to the through so there’s always some room for other feeds.

One thing to note is that the food usage in default fs22 is relatively low so it is likely that even small meadows have enough grass to feed a large number of animals or that the grass regrows as fast or faster than the animals eat it.
For that reason it is recommended to play with adjusted food usage (for example by using MaizePlus-Mod with MaizePlus_animalFoodAdditions.zip) to have a more realistic meadow-size to animal-food-usage relation.
It is also to note that by default cows have serial feeding which means they only eat one type of food at any given time – the most productive food they have.
So if you feed TMR they won’t eat the grass. This is also changed when playing with MaizePlus.

Important! – take note:
Since all default and most mod-husbandries have the short deco-grass in their grass-areas which doesn’t grow and thus can’t be eaten this needs to be changed.
You can either paint it with the ingame foliage painting – most maps have either normal grass or meadow grass as paintable foliage enabled.
Alternatively you can always plough the meadow area and seed it with grass.

Additional Info:
The mod includes the animalGrazing.xml which contains all the settigs as to which foliage areas are used to look for eatable grass, which foliages are eaten and their growth stages as well as the fillTypes that are filled. All those things can be adjusted there if necessary

Also, this is of course MaizePlus Ready.