Feature Specification

Livestock

Raising animals as a player gameplay system. Scope confirmed; detailed mechanics and delivery phase remain TBD.

Status: draft Owner: UnassignedUpdated: 2026-09-13

Purpose & Player Value

Raising animals as a player gameplay system. The owner requested inclusion on 2026-09-13.

Scope: confirmed. Detailed design: draft. Implementation and owner PIE: not verified.

Scope

Include a dedicated livestock system in Lambeer. The request confirms the feature area, without selecting its content, complexity or delivery phase. The decision matrix below defines what must be resolved before runtime work.

Out of Scope

This change delivers design documentation. Runtime implementation, asset authoring and testing are separate work. No gameplay subfeature has been explicitly excluded or approved beyond the confirmed system area.

Terminology

Livestock: animals raised through this system. Enclosure: a possible husbandry space; construction and containment behavior are not yet defined. Wild-animal hunting is a separate undecided scope question.

Functional Behavior

Design questions, not confirmed mechanics.

AreaBehavior to specifyStatus
Acquisition and housingAcquisition route, species list, housing/enclosure rules and access permissions.TBD
Animal careFood/water needs, health, neglect, movement and interactions with players or threats.TBD
Lifecycle and outputsWhich lifecycle stages and outputs exist, collection rules and any breeding or slaughter scope.TBD

States & Flows

Candidate review flow: acquire animal → establish allowed housing → provide care → obtain an approved outcome. Birth, maturation, reproduction and death states require explicit design decisions before implementation.

Exact states, transitions, interruption/cancellation and timing rules are TBD.

Rules & Edge Cases

Resolve simultaneous player interactions, inventory capacity, access changes, damage during interactions, disconnect, unload/reload and server restart. Decide offline simulation explicitly; elapsed real time must not be treated as an approved growth/care rule.

The project uses dedicated-server authority. Feature-specific state, save schemas and replication strategy remain design work.

Dependencies

Integration review targets; crop-as-feed is not part of the agriculture first increment.

Related runtime data, meshes, animations, audio and Unreal asset paths: not specified or verified in this documentation pass. This HTML is the design source of truth; runtime data authority remains to be selected.

Acceptance Criteria

  • AC-LIVESTOCK-DOC-001: the confirmed system scope and unresolved details are separately visible in the canonical document and indexed from the hub.
  • AC-LIVESTOCK-DESIGN-001: before implementation, owner decisions define the initial content set, state transitions, inputs/outputs, permissions, failure cases and offline/restart policy.
  • AC-LIVESTOCK-PLAY-001: after implementation, the owner validates the approved loop, two-client consistency and relevant restart scenarios against those decisions. No runtime acceptance is claimed here.

Open Questions

TBD-LIVESTOCK-001 — Species and husbandry loop

Which livestock species are supported; how animals are acquired, housed, fed, watered and managed; and whether breeding, growth, animal products or slaughter are included.

TBD-LIVESTOCK-002 — World rules and persistence

How ownership, enclosure permissions, escape, AI movement, damage/death, raiding, offline care, unloaded areas and server restarts work; required saved state and authority validation.

TBD-LIVESTOCK-003 — Delivery and tuning

Release phase, first playable species, care intervals, outputs, population limits, costs, progression, UI, animation/audio assets, runtime data ownership and measured AI budgets.

Revision history

2026-09-13 — Added the owner-requested system scope. Detailed mechanics, scheduling and implementation remain unresolved.