Oak’s Pet Animals and Guards

Here is a quality of life ‘server side only’ mod called ‘Oak’s Pet Animals and Guards’ by Oakraven with kind assistance from Dayhawk Mod.

Thank you also to Dre for giving it a good run through to check for functionality and potential issues.

A21 NPC Mod Compatibility

For anyone wanting to use the NPC Mod and Oak’s Pet Animals and Guards for A21, it is necessary to make a small change to match the NPC Mod since it overwrites base files. NPC Mod uses its own ai package. Go to A21-ServerSideOnly-Oaks-Pets-and-Guards/Config/utilityai.xml and change from:

<insertBefore xpath="/utility_ai/ai_packages/ai_package[@name='Zombie_Dumb']" >

to

<insertBefore xpath="/utility_ai/ai_packages/ai_package[@name='NPCModCore']" >

This will allow compatibility.

Human Guard Update for A21: The Human Guards do not have a collision on their mesh. It means they are basically immortal. This is a TFP asset and things changed for A21. If this is a problem for your server, they can be removed from the loot.xml airdrops and removed from game. They will explore this issue for another way around once the experimental and stable loop cycle ‘stabilises’.

‘killall all’ console command to remove Human Guards

If you have added the Human Guards and they are being a problem, it is possible to eliminate them. This may be something Admin would like to do where it is becoming a problem for your server. Login to the ‘dm’ debugmenu in the F1 console, and go to the area where the problem Human Guards are located. Type ‘killall all’ and enter in the console and the Human Guards and a few other things in the surrounding area will be eliminated. A post showing some images of this being activated is here.

Vehicle Update for A20 and A21: The Farm Jeep is no longer viable because it is a scaled down version of a jeep, and when a player enters the vehicle they are permanently scaled down by the same amount (40% of original). This is cumulative for each and every time the player enters the vehicle. Again, the developer will reintroduce the Farm Jeep at the first opportunity. It still functions just fine for A19 version.

This mod provides:

1) 9 Pet Animals – These include Boar, Rabbit, Stag, Chicken, Pig, mini Bear, Wolf, Coyote, and Doe. (These animals show no fear when approached and will stay within their confines. It is strongly recommended to always have 3 blocks above the highest perimeter point because the animals can climb up onto objects and each other and will be over the wall before you can notice.)

7 are purchasable from the Trader’s with a starting base price of 800 or found in plane supply drop crates and use the Quest system to switch to a place-able animal. These include Boar, Stag, Pig, mini Bear, Wolf, Coyote, and Doe. 2 are only found by using a Coop for the chickens or a Trap for the rabbits. The rabbit trap will also provide a small amount of seeds on the principle that they will be trapped in rabbit paws and fur.

2) 5 Animal Guards – Guard Hell Bear, Guard Hell Boar, Guard Hell Wolf, Guard Hell Lion, and Guard Rabbit. All 5 are purchasable from the Traders with a starting base price of 800. They can also be found in Air Supply Drops.

3) 12 Human Guards – All 8 can be found in Air Supply Drops.

4) Mushroom Planter that requires Mushroom Mycelium to begin the fruiting process.

Pet Animals

Purchasing and Supply Drops

Visit the trader and check the traps and tools section. On this occasion the trader was very generous with offerings and the animal icons have a description of what animal is being offered. The pet animals have been integrated into a default group and on some occasions you will get a lot of choice and on other occasions nothing. The base price of 800 has been lowered to reflect skill and buffs.

Here is how arramus place a Pet Boar he purchased at a later time using the Quest feature. First, perform a ‘Read’. Accept to Release the Pet Boar for Placement. A Quest Started prompt will appear and it will automatically be completed. Check you inventory for a ‘dog house’ icon and the name of the animal available. Place the animal on ground just as you would a vehicle and stand back. Incorporating a feature found in the Dayhawk Mod (thank you), a tile will appear on the ground which in turn will spawn the animal placed.

If the animal drops onto the tile, the tile will break and a cobweb will appear to finalise the process. If the animal doesn’t drop onto the tile, you can always walk on it and it will break. There are occasions where you may get lucky and a second animal will spawn. You may also get unlucky and nothing spawns; however this is incredibly rare and based on what they have experienced so far, blanks are less than 1 in 50, whereas doubles, and even triples on one occasion occur 1 in 10. He expect this depends on netcoding, latency, or any other factor relating to server processes.

You can either harvest the animal for meat and other resources, or simply allow it to have a sedate life of roaming.

Pet animals have been integrated into default supply drop settings and will be chosen from a select list of supply drop groups.

Upon finding a Supply Drop Crate, you may get lucky and find a pet animal.

There are also 2 Pet Animals that cannot be purchased or found. These include the Pet Chicken and the Pet Rabbit. oakraven introduces a method using default features in a novel way as follows:

a) Construct a Rabbit Cage Trap or Chicken Coop and place them. The Chicken Coops can be placed next to each other but the Rabbit Traps need some spacing.

b) Make some Chicken Feed and Rabbit Feed in your campfire and take them to your Chicken Coop and Rabbit Trap respectively.

In this case, right mouse click and it will change the Chicken Coop status.

Once receiving Chicken Feed the Chicken Coop moves to its Nesting Stage.

And finally it is time to harvest. We can always receive feathers and eggs and regularly receive Pet Chickens.

Pet Chickens are placed exactly the same as other Pet Animals.

The chickens are prone to resting on ledges above the ground and your imagination can take that wherever you want it to.

Pet Rabbits follow the same system beyond the reward and housing.

Make some Rabbit Feed. Take it to your Rabbit Trap and right click. The Rabbit Cage Trap is Baited and Set.

Here’s one they trapped earlier.

Activate and Release as with other animals. And should you ever lose your pets and have the skill in place, crouch.

Guard Animals

Purchasing

Just as with the Pet Animals, the Traders will stock Guard Animals. The Guard Animals can be purchased for the same price and placed exactly the same as Pet Animals using the quest system. The Guard Animals will remain passive in the spot you place them until a Zombie gets to close. The guard animals can be used to protect your Pet Animals, general base protection, or even during a Blood Moon event.

An unwelcome guest. 2 Animals Guards; Guard Hell Wolf and Guard Rabbit are released using the tile placement system and very quickly recognise the threat. After opening the shutter, the zombies attempt to enter the farm compound and are met by the Guard Animals. arramus got lucky on this occasion and 2 Hell Wolves spawned from a single tile.

The skirmish ensues. One of the Hell Wolves was overcome and is ready to be harvested. The Guard Animals that survived will see their health restored.

The Guard Animals also fare well during a Blood Moon event. Four Guard Animals remained until first light. Players will receive no XP for Guard Animal kills.

There are 4 additional human Guards that are currently being tweaked for a future build. There was an issue with the Trader compound causing NRE for certain classes and that needs to be tweaked to ensure they function well with the few classes that are compatible.

Vehicle (Current Unavailable)

Farm Jeep

The farm jeep is your tractor. It is pretty slow but will get you from A to B without running down your stamina. It fits the concept and can be constructed on the Workbench with less resource demand than a regular vehicle due to its limited functionality. It’s just a bit of fun. And is scaled to match pathways. Carries 2 players…

There will undoubtedly be updates in time, but this is a fully functional ‘farming’ mod and may serve you well as a break from looting, questing, and skirmishing.

Note: These Pet Animals and Guards will not be hurt by Electric Turrets. However, just as the Junk Turret will attack regular animals, it will also attack your Pet Animals. Please do not place a Junk Turret within attack range of your Pet Animals and Guards unless you purposely want to eliminate them.

Installation

If you’ve never installed a mod before it is necessary to create a mod folder in the main directory or in an area suggested by your server host if they have modified the installation. Simply make a new folder called Mods (with a capital M to reflect standard nomenclature). If you drag the mod folder directly out of the zipped file it can be placed directly into the Mods folder and the game will look in there as you launch your World. If you allow your unzip function to extract the folder, it may make another unnecessary folder and place the mod inside it. This will not be recognised by the game/server if you place it in the Mods folder like this. Please take it out of the extra folder level. The top layer will be a single folder and in the second layer you will see a ModInfo.xml file with or without additional folders depending on the mod. This will become elementary once you’ve launched a few mods.

The magic of this mod is that is only needs to be installed in the server/person who has launched the main environment that others join. It is a technical work of art. Enjoy.

Changelog

Oak’s Pet Animals and Guards have been updated to A21…

However, and this could be a game changer for some servers.

Human Guard Mesh Collision

The Human Guards do not have a surrounding mesh collision. This means they are impervious to attack and are pretty much immortal. A21 removed a number of features related to how the guards are made and this is one of them.

If this is a problem for your server or play through, the Human Guards can be removed from the loot.xml to allow only the Animal Guards to be accessible. Unfortunate, but this is a TFP asset and one that keeps it Server Side Only.

DOWNLOAD Oak’s Pet Animals and Guards (This download contains A21 A20 and A19 versions.) (176 KB)
DOWNLOAD Wild West Mod Version for A20 (It provides just the NPC humans and ‘rabbit’ guards. They can be found in Air Balloon drops and the Traders.) (20 KB)

The forum topic of the mod is here.

Credits: arramus, Oakraven, Dayhawk, Dre