Rework to goats

First of all: quit the philosophy of not making real-life animals useful when killed by the player. Goats are the 5th most eaten meat in the world, well above rabbit, cod, or salmon, which all have food items in the game.

I get the idea of wanting players to interact with goats differently than just treating them as bags of food, and I’ve reworked the goat to allow for this.

Goats would be a “middle ground.” They’d be an animal you’d want to keep alive but eventually kill.

Introduce goat cheese: a bucket of goat milk, a brown mushroom, and sugar would make 3 goat cheese, which feeds similarly to chicken.

Now goats would eat grass. Then, the more grass a goat eats, the bigger it gets. When killed at maximum size, the goat drops 4–6 mutton. This would take a couple of hours. If you kill the goat at minimum size, it drops 1–2. You can also kill it at any size in between.

These changes, plus the goat horn, would make goats animals you’d want to keep alive for a while but eventually kill. Other animals you either want alive or dead; with goats, you choose between keeping them for milk, cheese, and horns, or killing them later for a larger yield.

This would introduce an interesting mechanic where you interact with the goat in multiple ways throughout its life: first you find it, then you breed it to get more goats, milk it periodically for cheese, take its horns, and finally, when it’s big, you can kill it for maximum profit. This creates a more “complex” husbandry process.