#cowoftheweek

[llamafarmers]

Today’s cow of the week is the cow from The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt. The player can find cows throughout the game, often as herds in pastures. While cows are passive to the player, the player can kill cows and receive items like milk and hides for doing so. Similar to last week's post on Tauros I’m going to highlight something interesting about the cows in The Witcher 3, the Bovine Defense Force.

There’s a series of factors that eventually necessitated the implementation of the Bovine Defense Force in The Witcher 3. These factors are as follows:

-Cows are passive to the player, and are thus easily dispatched. 

-Cow hides can be harvested from killed cows and sold by the player for significant amounts of currency.

-Large herds of cows can be found in fixed locations like pastures. These cows respawn each day they are killed.

-The player can “meditate” in Witcher 3 to quickly skip to the next day. 

As you might have guessed, players soon discovered they could quickly make large amounts of currency by killing all the cows in White Orchard, meditating to the next day, and repeating the process. The developers responded to this in an update via the inclusion of the Bovine Defense Force. Now if the player killed 6 cows in White Orchard a powerful monster, known as a chort, would appear nearby and attack the player. Even if the player defeated the chort a new one would just appear to take its place. Funnily enough however this just allowed for the same exploit as the cows. If a character is a high enough level the chort might as well be a cow, as the player could fight either indefinitely. In fact the chort dropped much better materials, since it was a powerful monster. Lastly the chort would automatically respawn after the previous one was killed, therefore the player was no longer required to meditate to skip to the next day. This meant that depending on the character's level the Bovine Defense Force ended up being a better method for farming currency than the original cows.

[llamafarmers]

My first five cows from my video game cow of the week series!

[llamafarmers]

Today’s cow of the week is Tauros from Pokemon. Like Miltank, another pokemon featured on this blog, Tauros is a normal type pokemon. Normal type pokemon are often based on real world animals, in Tauros’ case a bull. Tauros premiered in the first Pokemon game, Red and Blue. For this week's post I’m going to specifically highlight Tauros’ role in the generation 1 competitive battling scene. I’m using the move-set provided by the website Smogon for reference, but breaking it down in a way that doesn’t require prior knowledge of the Pokemon games mechanics.

Tauros is known as being one of the strongest pokemon for competitive battling in Pokemon Red and Pokemon Blue. Firstly, Tauros is very fast, with a base speed of 110. For reference, even with the over 750 pokemon that have been added since Tauros’s debut, 110 speed is still considered good today. Also, in the first pokemon games a pokemon’s speed stat also determined its chance of landing a critical hit, which does additional damage. This means speed is even more coveted in generation 1. 

Each pokemon can know four moves which it uses during battle. Each move also has a type, just like pokemon do. When a pokemon uses a move of the same type as the pokemon itself that attack will do extra damage. This is called Same Type Attack Bonus, or STAB. For Tauros, because it is a normal type, STAB moves are normal type moves. Tauros uses two STAB moves, Hyper Beam and Body Slam. Body Slam hits hard, has 100% accuracy, and has a chance to paralyze the opponent's pokemon (a paralyzed pokemon has a chance of missing its turn). Hyper Beam does more damage than body slam, but has less accuracy and requires Tauros to skip his next turn if the move doesn’t knock out the opponent's move. 

Tauros’ other two moves on the other hand are what are called “coverage moves''. In Pokemon some types are more or less effective against certain other types. For example, a water type move is very effective when used against a fire type pokemon. However, electric type moves don't affect ground type pokemon at all. By teaching a pokemon moves of different types you increase the chances it will have a move that’s extra effective against the opponents pokemon. Tauros uses two coverage moves and the player has a variety of options to pick from. Tauros can learn Earthquake, Blizzard, Thunder, and Fireblast. By having these moves Tauros can still effectively fight pokemon that resist its two normal type STAB moves.

[llamafarmers]

Today’s cow of the week is the Mooshroom from Minecraft. The mooshroom is a special mushroom inspired variant of the normal cows found in Minecraft. Mooshrooms are located on special mushroom islands. These islands have large mushrooms in place of trees and mycelium blocks instead of grass blocks. 

Regular cows in Minecraft can be milked by clicking on them with an empty bucket. Mooshrooms share this functionality but the player can also “milk” them with an empty bowl, receiving a bowl of mushroom soup in the process. The player can also give some mooshrooms a flower. Instead of giving mushroom soup the next time they are milked they instead provide “suspicious stew”. When consumed these stews give the player a potion effect determined by which flower the player had given the mooshrooms.

Apologies for this week's post being a day late and shorter than usual. I’ve had a lot of work recently in my classes and haven’t had much time for these posts. The cows of the week posts will go back to Monday next week.

[llamafarmers]

Today’s cow of the week is the cattle resource from Civilization 6. Civilization 6 is a game played on a map of hexagonal tiles and these tiles can have resources on them. One of these resources is cattle.

Cattle only appear on grassland tiles and a tile with cattle gives you +1 food. In addition you can build a pasture on tiles with cattle. These pastures give you +1 production and +½ housing. Some civilizations, like Australia, even have special bonuses for getting pastures.

 The above picture is of a player playing as the Australia civilization. In the middle of the picture is Australia’s unique tile improvement, the outback station, which the player has built next to a horse pasture and cow pasture. A neat detail you can see in the picture is that when a player builds an outback station it will visually combine with any adjacent pastures to make one continuous fenced in area. 

[llamafarmers]

Today’s cow of the week is the Tauren from Warcraft 3! Warcraft 3 is a real-time strategy game released in the early 2000s and was one of my favorite games growing up. Tauren are an advanced late-game beefy melee unit that the player can recruit if they're playing as the orc faction.

Tauren are “beefy” (pun 100% intended). They have a large amount of health and make a very good “front-line” for your army. In this way they fill a similar role to the human’s knights or the night elves’ bear druids. They also have a unique upgrade, “pulverize”, that makes their attacks deal damage to nearby enemies, making them good in large battles.

Tauren aren’t without their downsides however. They’re very expensive and the player has to build a special building, the Tauren Totem, to recruit them. Also because they’re melee units they can’t do anything against flying units.

[llamafarmers]

Today's cow of the week is the pokemon Miltank. Miltank is a normal type pokemon, one of the most common types in the games and often associated with real life animals or “vanilla” pokemon. Miltank is also the in-universe source of the “Moomoo Milk” healing item. Miltank’s signature move is “Milk Drink” which restores its health and synergizes with its defensive stats. While known for its bulk Miltank can pack quite the punch with moves like “Body Slam”!