Don’t Starve Together – Early Beefalo Domestication Guide

If you ever felt beefalo domestication was either too much effort, too much food, or wanted to know a way to make it more efficient than this guide is for you. Areas covered: feeding, domestication, resources.

Guide to Early Beefalo Domestication

All credit goes to Ozzey_Lee!

Additional Resources

Because this guide is mostly about how to manage the early game domestication of a beefalo I recommend watching this video:

This covers the non mathematical side of beefalo taming and will cover tendencies as well as a more simple outlook on domestication and obedience. I also recommend looking at the wiki to understand tendencies and how domestication works outside of this very efficient method I have come up with. It will help in situations where things go very wrong.

What is Beefalo Domestication

Beefalo Domestication is the process of giving a beefalo resources, mainly food so that it allows you to ride it and or use it for combat.

It is often considered to large an investment to do at the initial stages of the game however once you know the very minimum you need, the process becomes much less stressful and very simple to manage.

With the basics out of the way we can move on to how to go about domesticating this creature that requires such a significant investment.

Requirements

To domesticate a beefalo you will need the following:

• A Saddle.
• ~280 items it can eat.
• ~20 days.

It is also a good idea to have the following:

• A beefalo hat.

How to Use the Resources You Have to Tame It

In order to tame this creature you will need to ride it as often as possible.

whenever you are moving around the map you will have to take your beefalo otherwise you will be slowly wasting resources.

The most important aspect of taming a beefalo this way is to understand what you need to manage first of all.

The two areas of beefalo taming that are essential are Domestication and Obedience.

Domestication goes up at a constant rate as long as the beefalo’s hunger is above 0 or it is being ridden at the time of the server tick.

What this means is that if you only feed it enough to ride it, you can tame it without feeding it 640 twigs/butterfly wings or 1280 cut grass.

(300/(Hunger Value))/Items fed) 1 means you have fed it enough, 2 means you are feeding it twice as much 0.5 means half as much etc

If these number seem to much for you don’t worry, there is a more complicated but easier way.

Math

• A beefalo has a maximum obedience of 100% and a maximum hunger of 375.
• Every day it will lose 50% of it’s obedience.
• Every day it loses 300 hunger or 18.75 hunger per tick.
• If it is starving it will lose 100% additional obedience per day.
• Feeding it any item raises it’s obedience by 10% for each item it is fed.

Knowing this you only need to feed it enough to keep it’s obedience at a constant % above 50%

This comes down to 15 items per day which cover the maximum 150% obedience it loses per day however since when it eats these items it’s hunger is no longer zero the number is slightly lower than 15. If you choose to feed it twigs or butterfly wings which provide 9.375 hunger to a beefalo then that will give it 15*9.375 which will give it a total hunger of 140.625 hunger. This means that the remaining 160 hunger it will lose obedience.

Since you will be feeding it 15 items it will gain 150% back and only lose 100% per day. Therefore you can feed it even less.

To figure out the number of ticks obedience drains for take the hunger after feeding and divide it by 18.75. This will give you the number of ticks that obedience is drained for.

I found 12 being the absolute minimum to work with.

300/9.375*12=187.5

187.5/18.75=10

To figure out the rate of obedience drain, take the ticks that obedience drains for and multiply it by 6.25.

10*6.25=62.5% (Because Obedience is represented as a %)

Because beefalo also lose 50% obedience per day on top of the hunger drain the total obedience lost is 112.5% however it will gain 120% from the feeding therefore allowing you to perfectly balance it’s obedience while gaining 7.5 per day should you lose any.

You can technically feed it 11 items with an extra every 4-5 days however obedience will drain very little since you can’t be riding it all the time so 12 is the best number.

You can’t feed it all 12 items at the start of the day however. If you do you will end up with it going past it’s obedience cap of 100%. You have to split the items between the day to get the most out of the items you choose to feed it.

The best way to do this is to feed it every quarter of the day:

• Feed it 2 twigs when the clock passes turquoise.
• Feed it 3 twigs when the clock passes purple.

Because cut grass give half as much hunger as twigs and butterfly wings you have to feed it twice as much cut grass as you would twigs whenever you feed it at these times of the day otherwise obedience will slowly drop if you continue to do so consistently.

Note: Beefalo will go into heat starting first winter, you will need a beefalo hat in order to continue domesticating them. During this time in heat you are most at risk of losing your beefalo to penguls, bees, and any other hostile mob. Additionally you will have your riding time significantly reduced. If you are continuing to engage in combat make sure to be very careful that you are not thrown off in an area your beefalo can’t survive because it will not de-aggro any mobs meaning you can’t ride it until you kill those mobs.

How to Get All of the Food?

Beefalo

The easiest way to get the food for the beefalo is to first know the best food to feed it.

The top 3 foods to feed a beefalo this early are:

• Twigs
• Butterfly Wings
• Cut Grass

You can mostly run around the map slowly collecting the 12 twigs you need per day and with the additional movement speed it will be very easy to do.

If you find a large area of flowers you can kill butterflies that will spawn in abundance until winter. It is a great idea to take advantage of these butterflies until winter where your saved up twigs will be enough to finish domestication.

If you are in frequently in the savannah cut grass can also be used however you have to again, feed it double the amount. of the former two.

The best area to get food at all times of the year is the dragonfly desert because it will have loads of tumble weeds spawning constantly but this shouldn’t stop you from collecting food around the map, especially butterfly wings.