# Pasture Grazing System (FS25)

A framework mod for **Farming Simulator 25** that adds a full pasture-grazing loop for cattle: cows live in the barn at night and graze out on pasture during the day, walking between the two on player-defined paths, with realistic feeding, health, and land management on top.

> ⚠️ **Beta — single-player only (for now).** Please report load/memory issues and any grazing oddities.

### 📖 [**→ Read the full User Guide**](USER_GUIDE.md)

New to the mod? The **[User Guide](USER_GUIDE.md)** walks you through setup, explains every feature in detail, covers the menu tab-by-tab, and has a troubleshooting section. (The same guide is also available in-game on the **Information** tab — every topic is scrollable.)

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## Features

- **Visual Map-tab setup** — click a barn or pasture on the map to register, rename, share, set the active pasture, or record a walk path. No console needed.
- **Per-barn schedule** — **Day grazing** (out by day, home at night), **Full-time grazing** (lives out), or **Housed** — animal-neutral, works for any livestock. Milk-vs-meat behaviour is detected automatically, so a dairy herd grazed full-time still gives full milk. Advisory to the Herdsman; in manual mode you move the herd yourself.
- **Daily grazing cycle** — cows move barn → pasture at sunrise and back at sunset, walking the route you record (rigged walk animations via Animal Herding Lite). Herds can also walk straight pasture-to-pasture.
- **The Herdsman** — optional automation that runs the daily cycle and (with Auto Pasture Select) rotates the herd to fresher grass, for a monthly wage.
- **One walk at a time** — a walk queue serialises herd moves across all barns, so nothing gets tangled; a second send simply waits its turn.
- **Shared pastures** — one paddock can belong to two barns, and two herds are never mixed on the same pasture.
- **Global naming** — rename a barn/pasture once and the name shows in RLRM and the vanilla menus too.
- **Feed Trough toggle** — per barn, hand-feed supplement at pasture (meat herds on / milk herds off by default; flip either way).
- **Per-pasture overrides** — animal capacity (with a clear "Default (pasture size)" option), auto-water.
- **Grazing pays off** — animals that graze **often on good grass** perform better: beef hold more weight (better sale price), dairy give more milk, built up as a per-herd *grazing condition* with per-animal variation. Tunable in Settings.
- **Overgrazing & wet-weather poaching** — grazing a paddock into the ground, or grazing on wet/soft ground, degrades soil quality faster — so rotation and resting matter.
- **Pasture renewal (reseeding)** — renovate a worn paddock back to full quality for a size-scaled cost and a ~2-month regrowth lockout.
- **Land management** — configurable meadow regrowth, soil quality (decay/recovery), and rotate threshold; grass only depletes while animals are actually grazing.
- **Fertilizer / slurry / lime spreading** — drive a spreader over a pasture and the ground reacts under the implement, with spatial coverage tracking; fertilizer boosts recovery, **lime corrects soil pH** (see below).
- **Waste drain-back** — slurry / manure / milk pulled back to the home barn's storage so you don't drive a tanker to every pasture.
- Ships its **own pasture placeable (Cow Barn Small)** — no external pasture mod required.

Open the in-game menu with **Ctrl + P**.

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## Requirements

| Mod | Why |
|-----|-----|
| **Realistic Livestock RM** (`FS25_RealisticLivestockRM`) by Ritter | Per-animal health / genetics, food-scale, cluster-level moves |
| **Animal Herding Lite** (`FS25_AnimalHerdingLite`) | Properly-rigged walking animals during barn↔pasture transitions — [releases](https://github.com/ConGan98/FS25_AnimalHerdingLite/releases) |

Without Animal Herding Lite the mod falls back to a bare-clone walker (animations less polished).

## Cooperates with

- **Precision Farming DLC** *(optional soil layer)* — with PF active, each pasture's **starting soil quality comes from the map's real soil type** (poor → premium, with a little variation), and **soil pH** modifies grass growth. PF only limes fields, so the mod detects a **lime spreader driven over the pasture** and corrects its pH toward optimal (with a lime dusting on the ground). Toggle the whole layer on/off in Settings; it does nothing if PF isn't installed. Its sprayer/effect overrides are handled explicitly, so the fertilizer boost works alongside it.
- **British Fill Units** — menu fill readouts show mass units when it's active, litres otherwise.
- **Red Tape** — if installed, this mod sets its *animal productivity recovery* to **Instant** so a moved herd doesn't suffer a productivity dip. (Without Red Tape, the same instant-recovery behaviour is applied to registered barns.)

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## Installation

1. Install the required mods above.
2. Download the latest release `.zip`.
3. Drop it in your `FarmingSimulator2025/mods/` folder.
4. Enable it for your savegame.

## Getting started

Open the menu (**Ctrl + P**) and go to the **Map** tab. Click your barn's icon → *Register as Barn*, click a pasture → *Register as Pasture*, then (optionally) record a walk path. Switch to the **Grazing** tab and press **Send Out** — or turn on the **Herdsman** to automate the daily cycle. See the **[User Guide](USER_GUIDE.md)** for the full step-by-step.

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## Status & feedback

This is a **beta**. It is **single-player only** at the moment. Bug reports and feedback are welcome via GitHub Issues — please include your `log.txt` for any crash or load problem.

## Credits

- **Author:** Conor Gannon
- Built to work with Realistic Livestock RM (Ritter) and Animal Herding Lite.
