Monster Girl Rancher (v0.5.3.0 - Centaurs and Aging Update)

[Turbotowns]

Is this still being worked on?

I believe so, just be patient. ^^

[Sulac]

Yeah, this project is still alive. I've actually been busy moving into a new house, and I also recently got a job, so I've lost a lot of free time that I had before.

That's not to say there's been no progress though. With the game now in a pretty stable state, I've started work on the next big update. Centaurs have been added, and have full, basic functionality. They can be bought and sold, fed food and live prey, be bred with studs and the player, give birth, and compete in beauty contests. All of that was fairly simple actually. The hard part now is making centaur racing a thing.

For a more constructive comment, I have a question: how would you feel about, once things have moved on towards whatever you might consider the endgame for this project, someone taking the proverbial reins by way of modding?

I'm kind of unsure about this solely for technical reasons, actually. The game is made with Gamemaker Studio 2, which as far I'm aware doesn't really have any innate "mod" support. I could make the project files available, but you would have to have a paid version of GMS2. The free trial version severely limits the amount of resources (sprite, music, maps, etc) you can put in your game, and MGR has long since passed over that limit (I don't think a single release version was within the limit, actually...). You can purchase the full version on Steam... for $100.

Also, while Gamemaker is kinda infamous for its "Drag and Drop" programming, the game isn't actually made with it. Gamemaker does have its own programming language behind it, and you can code an entire game solely in it. It actually just translates the Drag and Drop code into it. So in addition to shelling out a decent amount of money, you also have to learn a programming language just to mod this game. Granted, as a side benefit, you can use what you learn to make your own game, but...

Can you make it so medicine can be given to a monstergirl with a full food bar? Sometimes it gets annoying to remember to give them medicines after you have fed them.

I could have sworn Medicine would be applied before hunger checks happened. I'll double check and make sure.

On more lazy ideas, can the collect option be blocked when the monstergirl doesn't have anything to give?

Honestly I really should make that option gray out when there's nothing to collect.

On more esoteric ideas for new buildings, one could be a veterinary. You let a monstergirl there to recover for a ridiculous amount of money, but you can't interact or sell her until she's released and it also lowers happyness.

Interesting idea. Specifics need to be worked out, but I can see that being useful.

Another one could be a nature reserve, where you put and check (but not retrieve or eat) monster girls you want to stop occupying a slot, yet you still want to see for sentimental reasons.

My only concern here is how handle storing the monster girls' data beyond the intended ranch slots. I can probably make it happen, sure, but right now it's a bit more trouble than I'm willing to bother with.

ooo now seems like a good time to throw more suggestions or rather a quality of life things into the pot, maybe a collect all feature for multiple monster girls in the same area or something like that could help speed things up or an upgrade to make things collect all or something which could be cool too

I intend to also add farmhands to this update, who'll take care of that. Though you raise the possibility of hiring them only to cover certain areas.

I also have another humorous suggestion, the ability to put cloths on your monsters and similarly the ability to remove the clothes from your farmer.

The former was considered for a possible future goal. The latter almost actually happened in the rework. I wanted to add the ability to remove specific parts of your outfit and tromp around town topless or pantsless or just naked if you wanted. The spritework and layering code was proving to be too much effort for what would ultimately be a pretty minor feature.

This was entirely in 4.0.8, since I've started a new game with every new version so far (this is my 4th version btw, picked it up at 3.0.9, and did 4.0.1, then 4.0.6. For all it's crashes, 4.0.1 was got me really into it. I had a lot of fun with the infinite creamy milk glitch). I'm many days down the line from that moment unfortunately, but I'll see what I can remember. There was a 3rd mermaid, a merman actually, and I might have used the breakwater cheat at the beginning of the day, though I don't think I did. I don't remember the mermaids' positions. However it was a pretty easy issue to avoid as I just used breakwater to make her give birth the next day, then fed her to the new mermaid then without issue.

Well, I still can't replicate the bug, and it didn't permanently break your game, so I'm giving it a low priority at the moment. I did find a bit of redundant coding in the feeding script that I cleaned up, maybe that's what was breaking it.

A thought occurred to me: Is there a cap to a girl's chances to eat her mate? Might be why some girls don't seem to get any more voracious if they had already hit the cap.

I'm not entirely certain what you mean by "cap". A monster at 0% hunger is 100% guaranteed to eat their mate, with the chance lowering with higher hunger. The pred stat affects how quickly this chance lowers. I haven't looked at the actual formula in a while, but I think it's actually possible for a monster to have a greater than 100% chance to eat their mate in extreme cases.

What would be cool to see are animations for your character breeding with your monsters after you go to bed and possibly animations for when your monster devours you and vice versa.

I wanted to make that a thing, but the coding was an actual nightmare. I do want to do something else for when the player breeds with monsters, but that'll have to be much further down the line.

I've been spending way too much time with this little game, but if there's is something I would suggest over small adjustments like increasing the amount of health restored by medicine or a faster recharge on health in general: Multiple save games.

Multiple saves... should be doable. I have an idea of how I'd go about it, but I'm not certain if I can make it happen in the next update.

I hope in the fighting tournaments(once we get them), that when we win, we(the player) have the option to eat the losing side's human. So both our monster AND us get a nice squirmy meal!~

Hmm...

Also, I thought of us being able to hire studs to have sex with US(if we're female obviously), though I can't think of a benefit(aside from eating them afterwards ).

If a mechanic where the player could have sex with other humans was introduced, it would logically result in the production of human children - heirs and heiresses in other words. In game mechanic terms, I could see this functioning as "extra lives" / a CK2-style dynasty system.

I don't really agree with the player character being perma-killed or a sort of generation system, especially since you have immensely low stats and have to raise them (so dying can erase a ton of progress), but I like the idea of being able to have an actual child, not just another monster on the farm.

Hmmmmm, maybe they could be able to help around the farm? (...)

Okay, so this is a pretty big feature/mechanic we're considering here, so let's take a step back.

There's an immediate issue apparent to me here: only a female player can have children, as there are only male studs. This part can be solved fairly easily, as we would just need to add female... studs? While this does have the side benefit of letting you hire folks to breed with monster boys, having sex with the male player is the only meaningful thing they'd do. The main point of hiring men to breed with your girls is to get them pregnant, so hiring women to breed with your boys would just be basic happiness increase (and vore opportunity, of course). Sure, there's the possibility of having the female stud become pregnant, much like the female player can, but now we're entering a weird technical area where foundational parts of the code would need to be changed. Studs are regenerated daily, so a female stud would need some kind of pregnancy exception to prevent that (which is doable, mind you). Basically it's the constant issue I face of "is this feature important enough to justify all this work?".

Now let's say we do go ahead and add human children. What do they do? I kinda agree with BrokenButterfly here. Losing stats that you've been building up hurts, and the setting has sort of been assuming there's some method to revive you after digestion, and I see no reason to change that. Being assistant farmhands/breeders is a natural choice, and it even leads back into having farmhands for specific areas of the ranch. However, given that A) You're getting these farmhands for a single, small payment (the stud having sex with you), and B) They have stats and are able to further breed with monsters themselves, they can end up completely obsoleting two major mechanics (hiring farmhands and studs). That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it also strikes me as too good a deal. However, there's a fairly easy way to balance this: the kids need to be fed too. Which makes sense, if they live on your ranch and have stats, you should be able to raise them, right? They can have something of a mixture of the player and monsters' stat mechanics: They have slow growth rates, but can increase their stat caps by devouring monsters like the player, but they also have the Health, Hunger (and maybe Happiness??) stats that need to be maintained, like monsters. So you'd be training monetary upkeep for food upkeep (which can become monetary upkeep, depending on where you get your food.

All in all, it's something that could feasibly be added in the future, with some further workshopping. But that's in the future. I sort of have my own timeline of features to be added, with suggestions kinda being thrown in whenever it's convenient to do.

And, finally(a feature that would require more sprites), being able to use our monsters for a beauty contest, if they've eaten someone/something, maybe there could be a judging system and some of them(or all for that particular contest) could be voraphiles, and a monster with a squirmy belly could have an advantage, BUT it could go in the opposite direction, and a full monster could be almost guaranteed to lose if they're full(OUR belly(or lack thereof) would also play into that). But if we win, I'd like a bunch of co-op victory animations(again, I know how sprite heavy this would be, I'm not suggesting YOU make them...), and if our monster's female and has a full belly, and WE'RE female with a full belly, it'd be a cute animation where we hold hands, look cute, and press our bellies together(I'm such a weeb). XD

Spritework aside, that would require a fairly hefty code rewrite. Beauty contest winners are determined by sheer number crunching. Changing to an explicit judge-based system would require severe work.

I feel that depending on how many "meals" we've had(maybe how many NPC's we've eaten), our children(monsters that WE ourselves birthed, or fathered)(and I guess human offspring that can help around the farm...), would have a MUCH higher chance of being predatory(it doesn't make sense when I'm a monstrous cannibal, eating an NPC everyday, and my LAMIA son "won't eat live prey").

Also, that's not a thing that's actually happening in your game, is it? Because it definitely shouldn't be.

[BrokenButterfly45]

I feel that depending on how many "meals" we've had(maybe how many NPC's we've eaten), our children(monsters that WE ourselves birthed, or fathered)(and I guess human offspring that can help around the farm...), would have a MUCH higher chance of being predatory(it doesn't make sense when I'm a monstrous cannibal, eating an NPC everyday, and my LAMIA son "won't eat live prey").

Also, that's not a thing that's actually happening in your game, is it? Because it definitely shouldn't be.

It happened in mine, too, also specifically with a lamia son. Even though I was heavily predatory, he acted like a bullboy and just did. Not. Want. To eat until I starved him.

[WolfieTheScapeGoat]

Hey Sulac just wanted to say your doing good job here buddy and again there are a few things I would like to ask/suggest

First is with the nude players, If your system is set up like I think it might be, with a series of sprite sheets drawn on top of each other like in this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lmezTscLHo
Then wouldnt you be able to set the draw of each layer to something like: noone, or -1
Or if those dont work you could add a blank sprite sheet and tell the game to draw that in place of the shirt or pants
Please tell me if neither of these would work as I am very new to programming and are still trying to learn

On the OP human child question, one thing I thought of would be to give them an actual childhood, one where they cant do anything but eat and grow stats, thou it would be weird that your human children have childhoods but not your monsters so that might not work all to well

And a totally out there suggestion I thought of is the ability to turn into a monster, say there is a homeless man living in one of the bushes at the front of the town and if you do enough favors for him youll find out that he is a shaman and will give you the option that the next time you get eaten by a monster, instead of re spawning with lower stats your mind will take over the monster, stats and all, and then they become the new farmer. Of course you would have one less monster

[Cobbly]

Arachne? Harvest spider silk? Also, literally all the townsfolk are men... somehow...

[WolfieTheScapeGoat]

Hey Sulac I have another question that I dont know if you have been asked before but I wanted to know if there where any reason that we cant breed two monsters of different species (Say a Harpy and a Cowgirl) other then needing more sprites for the animation. I know that it would be a whole lot to ask for hybrids (Even though that would be awesome) But what if it instead acted like how it does with Studs were it takes on only one parents species at random ( like a coin flip) it would also make the bullboys ability more useful. And on the note of bullboy would it be possible to add a way to "milk" them, that way they are still useful if your not using then to breed more cows, it would probably be best balanced if it is also tied to exhaustion like breeding is, if there to tiered to breed then there to tiered to milk and after they are milked they probably should be to tiered to breed.

[Turbotowns]

Understandable, and That raising aspect I see as an absolute win!

And yeah, as implied, the example I gave with my lamia son DID happen, had to raise his "predatory-ness" as if he was a cow. Fuck'n pussy snek boy.

[CoinToast]

Funny that, I had the same issue with a female lamia...

Also glad to have you back, Sulac. Also is there some way we can help with this project?

[Turbotowns]

After some thinking, I decided to feed his prey ass to a female lamia after he got her an egg.

[Sulac]

It happened in mine, too, also specifically with a lamia son. Even though I was heavily predatory, he acted like a bullboy and just did. Not. Want. To eat until I starved him.

Yeah I looked the code over, there was a goof preventing newborns from having their pred stat properly set. That'll be fixed. Lamias should always be capable of vore no matter what.

Hey Sulac just wanted to say your doing good job here buddy and again there are a few things I would like to ask/suggest

Funny enough, I used her videos as reference when I first started this project and I was still learning. Really, the main difficulty in the clothing layers is just all the spritework that needs to be done. I already have a general idea of how to actually implement it in the code.

Regarding childhood, that is something I've been considering for monsters in general. There's actually some base codework done already to support it. It's just, again, the amount of spritework needed makes it unappealing to actually add.

As for turning into a monster, I dunno. Not something I've considered, and not something I'm personally interested in right now.

Arachne? Harvest spider silk? Also, literally all the townsfolk are men... somehow...

I actually intend to add Arachne in the update following the Centaur Racing. And yes, all the townsfolk are men. They use the stud sprites, which are actually distinct from the player sprites. I'll do something about it.

Hey Sulac I have another question that I dont know if you have been asked before but I wanted to know if there where any reason that we cant breed two monsters of different species ...

I considered it, but the main issue I find is that some monster combinations don't really make a lot of sense to breed together. And if I wanted to make certain species breedable with certain others, I'd have to add a lot of awkward compatibility checks to the code. Right now I'm just going to leave it as no hybrid breeding.

Also glad to have you back, Sulac. Also is there some way we can help with this project?

Well, if you wanna help with spritework, that'll help make a lot of the above more feasible. PM me if you wanna know more.

[CoinToast]

I don't know if you have seen it already, but I have to recommend Game Programming Patterns, by Robert Nystrom. It's a very nice and mildy hilarious book (free online) about common patterns in video games. It makes a world of difference knowing some of those, specially state machines and why decoupling is such a good idea.

Also I don't quite remember if it has been mentioned already, but I think the player has no sound for digesting meals overnight.

[Turbotowns]

I don't know if you have seen it already, but I have to recommend Game Programming Patterns, by Robert Nystrom. It's a very nice and mildy hilarious book (free online) about common patterns in video games. It makes a world of difference knowing some of those, specially state machines and why decoupling is such a good idea.

Also I don't quite remember if it has been mentioned already, but I think the player has no sound for digesting meals overnight.

They might also not have sounds for eating monsters, but I can't remember. XD

[WhatTheNani]

I'm not entirely certain what you mean by "cap". A monster at 0% hunger is 100% guaranteed to eat their mate, with the chance lowering with higher hunger. The pred stat affects how quickly this chance lowers. I haven't looked at the actual formula in a while, but I think it's actually possible for a monster to have a greater than 100% chance to eat their mate in extreme cases.

Yeah I worded that a bit badly. What I was getting at was more of a cap on voracity. It sounded like there was a voracity stat that affected a monster's chance to eat their mate, and that would go up with each live meal consumed. I was noticing that when a monster was most likely to eat their mate didn't really go up much with each meal past a certain point and was wondering if there was a cap on this pred stat, since if there wasn't I would in theory be seeing girls eating their mates as soon as they had room, which just was not happening. Instead, even my most voracious monsters were very rarely eating their mate when their hunger bar was at half or above, and even then it was usually only the lamias that would eat their mate consistently at around that hunger.

I've done a decent chunk of experimenting since and have noticed that, outside of cowgirls, the number of live prey consumed doesn't seem to make all that much of a difference in when a girl is likely to eat her mate. The bigger factor seems to be personality. I'm assuming that the personality that gives the "___ is staring at you" check when they are hungry is the most voracious personality, since its the only one where a cowgirl can be fed another monster at green hunger. I tested how frequently and how early monsters were likely to eat their mates, comparing monsters with and without that personality. Oddly, it didn't seem to make much of a difference for studs and monsters, with the more voracious personality only tending to devour slightly earlier than the less voracious personality. With the player, however, it made a huge difference. I had already done some minor testing on how early a monster tended to eat the player vs a stud and had only found a slightly higher tendency to eat the player over the stud, but with this personality the difference was huge. I had multiple cases where a monster girl that basically never ate a stud at higher than 1/2 hunger bar (often not eating them until her hunger bar was down to about 1/4 or below) ate me while her hunger bar was still green.

This all has gotten me wondering still whether there is a cap on this pred stat and how big of a difference it can make, as well as if some personalities were more likely to eat studs than the player (since the reverse seems true). Also, in my testing the only way I found to identify this, seemingly, maximum voracity personality through checks is to get her hunger bar low enough for the message to appear. All "staring at you" girls get the "is feeling great" message before then, but not all "is feeling great" girls end up having the "is staring at you" personality. Also so far I've all seen them taunt their prey after feeding, but I've also seen girls without the personality taunt their prey. Haven't tested the message you get while they are breeding, however (they've all had "is 'enjoying' their mate" checks, but I haven't determined if other personalities can have that too).

On more esoteric ideas for new buildings, one could be a veterinary. You let a monstergirl there to recover for a ridiculous amount of money, but you can't interact or sell her until she's released and it also lowers happyness.

I thought this was a cool idea, but it would need to be significantly more cost efficient than medicine to be worth it. I also had my own idea for a twist on it: you could hire a vet to come to your farm rather than send your monster there, and they would stay and work on your monster for a few days. Your monster would have a chance of devouring the vet (though with a much lower chance than for a mate), and having that happen would result in a much more severe penalty than a lost stud (maybe more than reputation? not sure). It would probably require some sprite work for an animation of the vet seeing to your monster like this, but it would be more dynamic, and, of course, give more scenarios where vore can happen.

Sure, there's the possibility of having the female stud become pregnant, much like the female player can, but now we're entering a weird technical area where foundational parts of the code would need to be changed. Studs are regenerated daily, so a female stud would need some kind of pregnancy exception to prevent that (which is doable, mind you). Basically it's the constant issue I face of "is this feature important enough to justify all this work?"

My only experience with coding is a intro level computer science class, but would it be possible to circumvent this by having the female studs be in a separate facility and overall behave differently than normal studs? They would probably be more expensive to hire anyways, so avoiding overlapping the pools would be good anyways. You could hire one, she would breed with the monster and, if you had space for another monster, get pregnant, hang around the farm for a little while in a special facility, then give birth to the monster after a few days. Not sure how much work that would be, but it might be easier than trying to alter the existing code for studs.

and the setting has sort of been assuming there's some method to revive you after digestion

That does have to be the assumption, since u revive after being digested and eating a villager only gives a moderate reputation loss as a penalty, but (pure personal preference) this takes a bit of the fun away from vore for me. I like it fatal and final. This is part of why I suggested having the option to change your character appearance and name after being devoured, but with it defaulting to your current name and appearance, so that the player can imagine for themselves if its revival, or a new owner, or what have you. And I know I'm repeating myself, but I would reaaaaaaally like to be able to see a squirming belly on the girl that ate me, as well as any other girls that might have eaten their mates in the night, which is something I dearly miss when I get eaten. On top of that, I just find that having a time penalty on top of the stats and money is a big nuisance.

[frogcubus]

Calling them female studs is going to bother me. Would calling them surrogates be more accurate?

[Sulac]

Yeah I worded that a bit badly. What I was getting at was more of a cap on voracity. It sounded like there was a voracity stat that affected a monster's chance to eat their mate, and that would go up with each live meal consumed. I was noticing that when a monster was most likely to eat their mate didn't really go up much with each meal past a certain point and was wondering if there was a cap on this pred stat, since if there wasn't I would in theory be seeing girls eating their mates as soon as they had room, which just was not happening. Instead, even my most voracious monsters were very rarely eating their mate when their hunger bar was at half or above, and even then it was usually only the lamias that would eat their mate consistently at around that hunger.

You have that mostly correct. There is indeed a voracity stat that affects the chance to eat their mate. But there isn't actually a cap to it: rather, it only has a chance to increase with each meal. And the chance it increases gets lower as the stat gets higher. A monster with 50 Voracity (if that's what we're calling it now) has a roughly 88% chance to increase to 51; a monster with 100 Voracity has a roughly 70% chance to increase to 101. So while there technically isn't a hard cap to the stat, its growth will eventually slow down to the point where it effectively stops.

I've done a decent chunk of experimenting since and have noticed that, outside of cowgirls, the number of live prey consumed doesn't seem to make all that much of a difference in when a girl is likely to eat her mate. The bigger factor seems to be personality. I'm assuming that the personality that gives the "___ is staring at you" check when they are hungry is the most voracious personality, since its the only one where a cowgirl can be fed another monster at green hunger.

Well, for non-Cowgirls, the Voracious personality (which is the only one that gives the "staring at you" message) increases the girl's starting Voracity by 50%. For Cowgirls/Bullboys it instead sets it high enough to skip the "training" phase (but still very low overall). That personality has the most effect on Lamias, who have the highest base Voracity stat.

I tested how frequently and how early monsters were likely to eat their mates, comparing monsters with and without that personality. Oddly, it didn't seem to make much of a difference for studs and monsters, with the more voracious personality only tending to devour slightly earlier than the less voracious personality. With the player, however, it made a huge difference. I had already done some minor testing on how early a monster tended to eat the player vs a stud and had only found a slightly higher tendency to eat the player over the stud, but with this personality the difference was huge. I had multiple cases where a monster girl that basically never ate a stud at higher than 1/2 hunger bar (often not eating them until her hunger bar was down to about 1/4 or below) ate me while her hunger bar was still green.

Interesting. So, if we want to consider the chances to eat studs the "baseline", monsters are only half as likely to eat their mate if they're also a monster. The chance to eat the player, meanwhile, is affected by the monster's Happiness. 75% Happiness is the point where the chance is equal to a stud's. Above that, the chance is lower, below that, the chance is higher. This is assuming the stud doesn't have a trait that affects their own chances to be eaten (Delicious, Disgusting, and Voreaphile all affect it).

This all has gotten me wondering still whether there is a cap on this pred stat and how big of a difference it can make, as well as if some personalities were more likely to eat studs than the player (since the reverse seems true).

There aren't any personalities that affect chances to eat specific types of mates.

Also, in my testing the only way I found to identify this, seemingly, maximum voracity personality through checks is to get her hunger bar low enough for the message to appear. All "staring at you" girls get the "is feeling great" message before then, but not all "is feeling great" girls end up having the "is staring at you" personality. Also so far I've all seen them taunt their prey after feeding, but I've also seen girls without the personality taunt their prey. Haven't tested the message you get while they are breeding, however (they've all had "is 'enjoying' their mate" checks, but I haven't determined if other personalities can have that too).

The Check messages are designed so that certain personalities share messages with others, but only in specific combinations. Voracious shares the "is feeling great!" message with four other personalities (Shameless, Prideful, Moody, and Gourmand), but it shares the "taunting prey" message with only two others (Prideful again, and Fierce). Observing which messages are shared and puzzling out personalities is kinda my intention with the messages.

I thought this was a cool idea, but it would need to be significantly more cost efficient than medicine to be worth it. I also had my own idea for a twist on it: you could hire a vet to come to your farm rather than send your monster there, and they would stay and work on your monster for a few days. Your monster would have a chance of devouring the vet (though with a much lower chance than for a mate), and having that happen would result in a much more severe penalty than a lost stud (maybe more than reputation? not sure). It would probably require some sprite work for an animation of the vet seeing to your monster like this, but it would be more dynamic, and, of course, give more scenarios where vore can happen.

Yeah the vet idea is still very much in "workshop" status. I have various ideas on how it would work exactly, but it's always nice to hear some other possible takes on it.

My only experience with coding is a intro level computer science class, but would it be possible to circumvent this by having the female studs be in a separate facility and overall behave differently than normal studs? They would probably be more expensive to hire anyways, so avoiding overlapping the pools would be good anyways. You could hire one, she would breed with the monster and, if you had space for another monster, get pregnant, hang around the farm for a little while in a special facility, then give birth to the monster after a few days. Not sure how much work that would be, but it might be easier than trying to alter the existing code for studs.

Yeah that might actually be the simplest way to handle it.

That does have to be the assumption, since u revive after being digested and eating a villager only gives a moderate reputation loss as a penalty, but (pure personal preference) this takes a bit of the fun away from vore for me. I like it fatal and final. This is part of why I suggested having the option to change your character appearance and name after being devoured, but with it defaulting to your current name and appearance, so that the player can imagine for themselves if its revival, or a new owner, or what have you. And I know I'm repeating myself, but I would reaaaaaaally like to be able to see a squirming belly on the girl that ate me, as well as any other girls that might have eaten their mates in the night, which is something I dearly miss when I get eaten. On top of that, I just find that having a time penalty on top of the stats and money is a big nuisance.

I have been considering adding... I guess we can call them "difficulty settings". Things that can significantly alter the game experience, like hungry monsters going out and eating each other without your permission. A sort of permadeath setting for the player being eaten can be an option in those.

Calling them female studs is going to bother me. Would calling them surrogates be more accurate?

Yeah "female stud" isn't a great term. Surrogate might work.

[BrokenButterfly45]

Technically, the official term for the female equal to stud (for the species that use "stud") are "queen" and "bitch", though "mare" might be a better term? If you want a paired set of terms, "sire" and "dam" is also workable, though they generally just refer to the parents (but I mean, it's a monster game, bending terms is the least amout of suspension of disbelief).

[CoinToast]

Observing which messages are shared and puzzling out personalities is kinda my intention with the messages.

You probably should mention that in the game proper. As it is the effect of personalities beyond vore seems minimal.

[Cobbly]

Will there ever be crops? Maybe Dryad or Alrunes? Fairies? Maybe we could apply fertilizer, perhaps even harvesting it from predatory monster girls?

[Turbotowns]

Yeah I worded that a bit badly. What I was getting at was more of a cap on voracity. It sounded like there was a voracity stat that affected a monster's chance to eat their mate, and that would go up with each live meal consumed. I was noticing that when a monster was most likely to eat their mate didn't really go up much with each meal past a certain point and was wondering if there was a cap on this pred stat, since if there wasn't I would in theory be seeing girls eating their mates as soon as they had room, which just was not happening. Instead, even my most voracious monsters were very rarely eating their mate when their hunger bar was at half or above, and even then it was usually only the lamias that would eat their mate consistently at around that hunger.

You have that mostly correct. There is indeed a voracity stat that affects the chance to eat their mate. But there isn't actually a cap to it: rather, it only has a chance to increase with each meal. And the chance it increases gets lower as the stat gets higher. A monster with 50 Voracity (if that's what we're calling it now) has a roughly 88% chance to increase to 51; a monster with 100 Voracity has a roughly 70% chance to increase to 101. So while there technically isn't a hard cap to the stat, its growth will eventually slow down to the point where it effectively stops.

But at such a point, would they be able to ALWAYS eat their partner as long as they have room?

[WhatTheNani]

As it is the effect of personalities beyond vore seems minimal

Yeah, this was an issue I also had with personalities. Outside of the voracious personality, I haven't really noticed any differences or defining traits with them. There very well could be some, and I haven't been looking especially hard for them, but this seems like something that should be at least somewhat noticeable even just playing casually. However, one issue atm is that there really aren't that many ways to make them noticeable within the games current mechanics that I could think of. Pretty much all they could reasonably affect would be stats, which, even including voracity (arguably the most obvious one) wouldn't really jump out. Although it was fun to investigate the check messages and try and puzzle out personalities, the lack of obvious effect means its not much more than a curiosity.

I did a bit of brainstorming to try and think of simple mechanics that could be used to make personalities distinct, but wasn't able to come up with much. One of my better ideas was possibly having the monster's personality affect who they will mate with and how often they will mate, with monsters breeding more or less frequently, or otherwise outright refusing to breed with, partners with clashing personalities, or too low/high stats, or studs with undesirable traits. The personalities might also affect the girl's chances of eating a partner based on these factors, though that would be a bit less obvious since its still rng based (unless there were matchups that would lead to a 100% chance of eating the mate). Might also make personality affect what foods you can feed them and when, with some personalities perhaps rejecting some foods or refusing to eat food/medicine until their hunger/health bars were below a threshold. Outside of that, the only thing I could think of that could fit smoothly into the game's existing framework would be having personality affect contests, but contests will need to be developed a lot before that would likely be worth it. At best now, it could perhaps affect the happiness/health effects of participating in contests. Alternatively any existing stat effects personalities could (if they don't already) have would probably need to be massively increased to make them noticeable. Which could work, but seems like a stopgap solution at best.

I have been considering adding... I guess we can call them "difficulty settings". Things that can significantly alter the game experience, like hungry monsters going out and eating each other without your permission. A sort of permadeath setting for the player being eaten can be an option in those

Sounds like fun, though it would probably be best to make them individual toggles rather than full packages so people can customize. Monsters going out and eating each other is something that would be fun at some times and really annoying at others. Also hungry or unhappy monsters coming at night to rape/eat you if you don't already have a mating partner sounds hot as hell for prey types like me. I could also see adding adjustment features to stuff like stat, money, and time loss on death. However, a true permadeath where you completely lose your save and have to start over seems like a bad plan for this type of game. It could still be an option of course, in case that's someone's thing, but the two biggest appeals of the game (for me at least) are getting attached to specific girls and getting eaten, and absolute permadeath makes those mutually exclusive.

That being said, we could go back to the idea of human children and combine them with difficulty settings and surrogates/queens/bitches/sires/female studs/whatever term we decide on (could also just call them studs and not bother adding female for true gender equality, I suppose) for a more holistic permadeath system. The player could be given the option of hiring studs for themselves (which would of course give the option to eat said stud as well) and that could lead to a human child. These children could live in your home (which has plenty of space), would open the possibility of introducing more mechanics for raising them at some point, and could inherit the ranch from you if you get eaten. To simplify it, the inheritance could automatically go to the oldest child, regardless of who the parent was. Whether feeding the kids is necessary or not (I wouldn't mind them acting the same as the player and not needing to eat), you could always choose to feed them in order to raise their stats as a backup in case you get eaten, since they would become the player character in the event of your death. They would inherit your inventory and money (with a possible money penalty, though any time, money, or other penalties seem unnecessary at this point) and you would continue on with your life. However, if you got eaten when you don't have a successor the ranch would pass to someone else (probably with a time penalty) and you would lose all your money and inventory, effectively starting you at the beginning characterwise but keeping your ranch intact.

On a separate note, since I still just don't like the time penalty on death (both from a game feel and fetishistic point of view), I was thinking of other possible negative effects on death and went back to, and expanded upon, an older idea of mine: a fear debuff. It would need some tweaking, but what if getting eaten gave you 3 debuffs: terrified, fearful, and nervous. The terrified debuff would make you unable to collect from the type of monster that ate you (or your parent/previous ranch owner if it got incorporated into my previous suggestion, since it would still make sense there) for a few days, let's just say 5 offhand (I came up with this on my way home from class so none of these numbers are well thought out). The fearful debuff would then make you unable to breed with that type of monster for a longer amount, we'll just say 10 days. The third debuff, nervous, would last a long time, like 20 days, and wouldn't have any direct effect, but, if you got eaten again while you had it, would cause it to gain a stack and make the other debuffs last longer. At higher stacks it might also have negative effects of its own, like making you unable to hire studs to breed with that monster type (or perhaps just the last type to eat you if there were multiple) at 2 stacks, and unable to feed that monster type for a shorter period at 3 stacks (though it would be darkly humorous if that let you hire studs again, since you'd effectively be intentionally feeding the monster studs to cover for your own cowardice). I don't know how plausible any of this is from a programming perspective, since it seems like it could take a fair bit of work, but it would be fun and would give a more dynamic and engaging penalty to being eaten. Could also fit in with monster personalities, where some monsters might refuse to breed with you/breed more often or be more or less likely to eat you if you had any of these debuffs.

On a somewhat miscellaneous note, it might be cool if a monster's stat cap rose by eating humans in the same way yours does from eating monsters. That would give you a gameplay incentive to feed your monsters studs (not that I need one), and could be useful for higher level competitions should those get implemented. It would also add a dark twist to said competitions since it would imply that any monster with a chance at winning would need to have eaten a fair number of people.

Will there ever be crops? Maybe Dryad or Alrunes? Fairies? Maybe we could apply fertilizer, perhaps even harvesting it from predatory monster girls?

I'm not a fan of scat, personally, but that seems as good an implementation of it as any, and I'd never say no to plant girls.

So, if we want to consider the chances to eat studs the "baseline", monsters are only half as likely to eat their mate if they're also a monster. The chance to eat the player, meanwhile, is affected by the monster's Happiness. 75% Happiness is the point where the chance is equal to a stud's. Above that, the chance is lower, below that, the chance is higher. This is assuming the stud doesn't have a trait that affects their own chances to be eaten (Delicious, Disgusting, and Voreaphile all affect it)

I had noticed that monster girls ate monster boys less but it never seemed like anywhere near half the chance, though it is hard to tell without a lot of trials cause rng. The happiness affecting the monster's chance to eat you is a cool mechanic. I had no idea that studs had traits though. Is there some way to tell? It'd be nice if there was at the very least some indicator of what traits a stud might have and something to let you know what those traits do.