Living Livestock System brings a Medieval Dynasty-style farm to your game. Animals eat, drink, sleep, grow up, breed and give products; stables get dirty and need straw; feeders and troughs empty; gates left open let animals escape, and wolves frighten the herd. Fish grow in the ponds you farm and wait in wild rivers for your line. The whole farm keeps living while the player is far away, and costs almost nothing.
Documentation: https://www.zerstorengames.com/living-livestock-system-docs.html | Playable demo (Win64, 253 MB): Google Drive
A farm that lives everywhere
Every animal is a small record: 10,000 animals update in about a millisecond, on any part of the map.
Needs: food (grass first, then the feeds each species eats), water, rest, a roof at night or in the cold, comfort temperatures, room.
Life stages from newborn to old age; a lifespan you can scale to short or long game years.
Breeding only in the best conditions and with room. Young simply appear.
Products: eggs laid in nests, milk, wool, manure, waiting in the pen until collected.
Dirt and straw bedding, feeders with their accepted feeds, troughs, roofs, nests, gates.
Skipping a day gives the same farm as living through it.
Animals that look alive
Near the player, pooled bodies driven by StateTree, EQS and DetourCrowd; farther, thousands drawn as instances.
Herds keep together, animals flee threats, sleep under their roofs, go to the feeder and the trough, swim.
Habits per species (how long they graze, how often they eat, how shy they are) and sound sets (calls, eating, alarm, hurt, death, a hen after laying).
An AI that never gets stuck: fallbacks and watchdogs on every query and move, with live statistics.
Fish farming and fishing
Ponds and tanks you farm, wild rivers and lakes: growth on feed and on the water's own food, water quality, spawning, predators, traps and nets.
Fishing with bait, by the hour (dawn and dusk bite best) and skill.
Water zones on any water: fit to a Water plugin lake or river, a mesh or a volume; the real shape and depth measured from the bed; fish swim at their own depth, in shoals.
For farming, survival, colony and RPG games
A Work API for your game's own AI: villagers and farmhands find, claim and do the farm's work, or do it on paper when nobody watches.
Lead animals home; return runaways; threats, feared actors, damage, "take from" (a creature feeding on livestock) and slaughter.
Open world first
World Partition: every farm lives on paper from the start, cells stream in and out, tested.
Navmesh only around invokers; pens need no navmesh at all.
Bodies appear only on loaded ground; far animals as one draw per species.
Plugs into what your game already has
Your inventory through one interface, your clock and weather through one class, your building system through one interface and one component, your save system through one block of bytes (or slots and autosave).
No UI and no input forced on you: Animal, Pen and Water Info for your own interface, and events for everything.
Ready for your game
Every species is a data asset: right click a skeletal mesh > Create Livestock Species.
All the numbers of all your species in one Data Table, editable as CSV.
Your meshes, animations, sounds, far meshes, StateTrees and EQS queries per species; Blueprint StateTree tasks.
Nine blocky example animals, five fish, farm props, and a playable showcase with eleven stations.
Technical details
C++ source, a complete Blueprint API, English text ready for localization.
21 automation tests, among them 10,000 animals.
Single player; Windows.
Requirements: the engine plugins StateTree, Gameplay StateTree and Enhanced Input (enabled by Living Livestock System; Enhanced Input is used by the example character only).