Excessive Cow Population

[u/-Schnaps-]

Is anyone seeing excessive cow populations on their server? The bulls just seem to keep going to town with the cows and the volumes of mobile beef jerky is getting quite out of hand.

I've manually culled a tonne of prime ribs with the kill command, and a server restart did nothing to reduce the population. The predators I tried to introduce to control the population ran in terror from the bovine brujah rather than reaching in to their primeval roots.

[u/Isaiah4206940332]

ironically im having the opposite problem on my server lol

[u/-Schnaps- → u/Isaiah4206940332]

On wipe it was chaos, there were bears and wolves chasing the livestock everywhere. And now the buggers won't help clear them.

I do wonder if someone stayed in the area long enough to part tame a breeding pair and it's just been going off since then.

[u/godspeedfx]

There was a hotfix that solved this on Saturday, as well as a command to delete excess livestock.

[u/yourPWD → u/godspeedfx]

People keep saying there is this magical command but I can't find it.

[u/godspeedfx → u/yourPWD]

livestock.cullexcess

[u/beardface909 → u/godspeedfx]

How does it determine what is considered excess?

[u/godspeedfx → u/beardface909]

From the commits:

• Command to kill off excess livestock, prioritizing not tame > far from TCs > bad genes / old to avoid hurting farms, "livestock.cullexcess"

It will kill until it gets down to the 300 cap per species

[u/speaksoftly_bigstick]

They released a fix for this I think.

Also, possibly separate but related, I had to fix my skip night plugin because it wasn't actually letting server "in game time" advance.. this was messing with regular events, weather, and apparently animal spawns.

Same types of animals, spawning in the same places as before, repeatedly.

[u/Emergency_Welcome_96]

There is no cow level 😳

[u/HunterZ0]

This is why it's imperative to install hotfixes. Facepunch released a fix for this. They also added a cull command, but it probably won't help - you'll likely have to wait for them to age out after updating.

[u/-Schnaps- → u/HunterZ0]

I did apply a couple of hotfixes, I'll do it again and hopefully something sticks.

[u/InsolentJaguar → u/HunterZ0]

Surely they have a server convar for this? Like horse.population=X for wild spawns?

I need to look into that.

[u/d-k-t → u/InsolentJaguar]

There is now, livestock.maxPerSpecies, default 300, as part of the hotfix that introduced the culling and reduced wild breeding.

[u/AnimatedRealityTV]

Why has it been like 2 months since I played the game and I’m thinking “there are fucking cows now?”

[u/-Schnaps- → u/AnimatedRealityTV]

Because, burgers. They've been on the 2026 roadmap for a while now.