Ranching

Ranch animals turn your crops into a whole second tier of goods — wool, eggs, milks, truffles and stranger things. Unlike a mine that produces on its own, an animal only works when you feed it, which makes ranching the deliberate meeting point of your farm and your warehouse. This page covers the feeding loop, all eight animals, and why the system is built this way.

Feed-driven animals

Every ranch animal in Roblade is feed-driven: nothing happens until you feed it.

1. Feed the animal a set amount of one of its accepted crops, drawn from the produce in your warehouse.
2. The animal runs a production cycle on a real-time timer, wandering your territory while it works.
3. Collect the result: a primary product, and for most animals a bonus product on top.
4. Feed again to start the next cycle. No feed, no production — an unfed animal simply waits.

Animals are free-range: each occupies a single tile, wanders around your territory, and is walkable, so they bring your land to life without blocking your layout. Each animal accepts only specific crops, so your ranch roster effectively decides your planting plan — see Farming for how produce is grown.

The eight animals

There are 8 feed-driven ranch animals, unlocking from level 1 up to level 12 — from the humble starter Sheep to late-game exotics. Each has its own feed list, cycle length and products:

When feeding, you pick one accepted crop and pay its feed quantity for that cycle — as an illustration, a Sheep currently eats about 2 pumpkins (or corn) per cycle, while the exotic Spore Beast eats around 6 of its crops. Cycle lengths also scale up the ladder, from a few minutes for the Starlight Chicken to roughly twenty minutes for the Spore Beast.

Numbers shown here are illustrative. The live game is always the source of truth — values may change as the economy is rebalanced. See Changes and Rebalancing.

A useful pattern in the table: cheap early crops feed early animals, while late-game animals demand late-game crops. You cannot feed a Moon-eye Rabbit on pumpkins — keeping exotic animals productive means running an advanced farm.

Animal products in the economy

Animal products are materials, stored in your warehouse alongside wood, stone and crop produce, each with the same per-material cap. They fall into two tiers:

• Primary products — Wool, Star Egg, Molten Milk, Bubble Egg, Crystal Milk, Glow Truffle, Moon Wool, Spore — the guaranteed payout of every cycle.
• Bonus products — Star Feather, Molten Horn, Bubble Plume, Crystal Horn, Beast Hide, Moon Tail, Mycelium — extras that arrive alongside the primary.

Wool is already a working material today: level-up rewards use it, and the Monastery consumes it to produce Gold. The rarer animal goods are the raw materials of Roblade’s expanding production economy — as processing and trade systems arrive, the players sitting on stockpiles of exotic materials will be the ones supplying them. For how every material fits together, see Resources & Economy.

Crops and animals interlock

The link between farming and ranching is not incidental — it is the economy’s design.

Crops need somewhere meaningful to go, and animals need a real input cost. Feeding solves both at once: every harvest has a purpose, and every animal product represents real farming effort further down the chain. The full sequence reads: seed → crop → produce → feed → animal product. Each arrow is a decision you make — which crop to plant, which animal to keep, which feed to spend — and each step adds value to what came before.

This is why ranch progression mirrors farm progression. As you level up, you unlock slower, richer crops and, in step with them, animals that eat exactly those crops. Growing your ranch is really growing an integrated production line across your territory — and as future systems like produce sales and processing come online, that line extends rather than resets. See Progression for the level unlocks along the way.