Discover Top Posts Tagged with #minecraft test

So because I am an absolute Animal Agriculture nerd, I did a thing on Minecraft (and the results are kind of surprising)

So as it turns out, whether the creators of Minecraft know it or not, genetics is a thing with the animal mobs (cattle, horses, sheep, etc.). To be fair, everyone knows that breeding animals with high health together will more often than not produce more animals with high health points, and the same holds true with high strength or high speed. That’s pretty basic, but it’s written in each animals codes/statistics, both of which you can check with a “simple” command. But did you know the amount of wool a sheep gives and the carcass yield of a cow is also “genetic” within the game? I didn’t, until recently. It first started with sheep, when I realized I wasn’t happy with how much wool my grey sheep were producing on my little farm. My white sheep and black sheep were consistently producing two and three blocks of wool, while my greys were only producing one or two. I had the thought that maybe, just maybe, it would be possible to breed a sheep that consistently would produce 2-4 blocks of wool to one of my greys that was producing 2 more often than 1. So, because I was doing things the hard way on that map, I set out in search of a grey sheep that matched my criteria, and eventually found one. Mind you, I completely expected this not to work. I still decided to do it anyways. The lamb that was produced eventually grew up and I sheared it. Lo and behold, it produced a solid 4 blocks! I figured it must be some kind of fluke, so I let it grow out and then sheared it again, finding it produced 3 blocks. Again I waited and then sheared it, and it produced another 4 blocks. I was fairly amazed, and decided to test again by breeding that sheep to another grey that was consistently producing 2 blocks. The lamb from that pair ended up with a starting rate of 3 blocks, then 4, then 2, and then 3 again, but never 1. I bred that lamb back to the first lamb, and found that the lamb from that pairing consistently produced 3 and 4 blocks of wool. However, when I bred a sheep that consistently produced 1 block to a sheep that produced 2, the lamb only produced 1 and 2 blocks, and when I bred another sheep that produced 1 to one of my ‘super sheep,’ the lamb again only produced 1 and 2 blocks. The conclusion? The amount of wool a sheep produces CAN be dependent on the parent sheep.

After that, I decided to do a similar test, except this time testing the ‘carcass yield’ of cattle. Cattle in Minecraft will drop 1-3 pieces of raw beef, so for the sake of making up a term for it, that means a ‘cow’ in Minecraft will have a ‘yield grade’ of 1, 2, or 3. I spawned 8 cattle, 4 designated as bulls and 4 designated as cows. I bred multiple combinations of each and slaughtered each calf to determine the ‘production yield’ of each animal, and wrote down the results of each breeding/slaughtering. I culled whichever ones I felt were not able to produce calves with a large enough yield grade, and found something very interesting. While the animals in question were not producing calves with a high yield grade, many of them had a yield grade of 3 themselves. I guess I must’ve been doing something right, though, because after some careful culling and leaving myself with three cows and two bulls, every breeding combination between the remaining five cattle resulted in a calf with a yield grade of 3. So now I’m to the point in my experiment where I test calves born of combinations for their ability to produce more calves with a high yield grade. To determine the sex of each calf, I used an online dice rolling system to roll a six sided die and decided that 1-3 would be a bull, and 4-6 would be a cow (yes, I realize technically it’s a heifer. hush). The first two calves were both bulls. Unfortunately, neither bull could produce a calf with a yield grade higher than 1. So I did two more breedings and produced a bull and a cow (heifer. hush). I bred the two together, and they produced a calf with a yield grade of 3. I then did another trial where I bred both to one of the original bulls/cows, and bull produced a calf with a yield grade of 2 while the cow produced a calf with a yield grade of 3. There’s still a lot more trials that I have to do, but so far from what I can tell it is in fact possible to PURPOSEFULLY breed animals in Minecraft for certain traits that are not particularly obvious in the code, such as wool yield and carcass yield. Now what’s the purpose of all this? There really isn’t any, I just thought it would be a cool experiment. It’s been a lot of fun and actually fairly challenging so far, so if anyone else has an interest in testing the genetics of Minecraft, I’d highly recommend doing some neat experiments of your own.