Getting your first animal
You need somewhere to put an animal before you can buy one, so the coop or barn comes first — a Small Coop is 1,500g for the blueprint plus 75 wood and 50 stone. Chickens and cows are in stock from the very beginning; ducks, horses, rabbits and sheep appear once Hayden's farm is repaired, and capybaras and alpacas need that plus Winter 1 of your first year.
Feed is the running cost. Large animals eat hay and small ones eat small-animal feed, and you can grow the raw material yourself rather than buying it — see the crop planner for what fits in a season.
Hearts, and what ten hearts really does
Every animal is scored once overnight. Petting it is worth 5 and feeding it is worth 5 plus a bonus for how good the food was, so an ordinary good day is +10. Skipping is not neutral: an animal that was not petted, not fed and left outside loses 15 in a night, so a missed day costs more than a good day gains.
Better food is the fast lane, though the ceiling is lower than it looks. A one-star cooked dish hand-fed to an animal is worth 10 heart points, exactly matching ultimate feed, and each further star adds one more: a five-star dish is 14. Against plain hay or seed, which is 5, that is nearly triple — but against ultimate feed it is only 1.4×, so save the expensive dishes for when you are pushing the last heart or two.
The part that surprises people: at ten hearts the ordinary product stops completely and the animal produces only the golden version. It looks like a downgrade in the barn, because you collect fewer items. It is not. A ten-heart hen is worth 66g a day where a nine-heart hen is worth 46g — the single biggest jump in value the animal ever makes. The table above shows the exact figures for every species.
Breeding, coats and the festival
There are 123 coats across the eight species, graded tier 1 to 6, and the tier sets both the price and the festival score. Only the tier-1 coats are in stock; everything above that you breed for. Put a male and a female of the same species in one building, both at two hearts or more, feed each the right Heart Shaped treat and leave a free stall — plus a free incubator for chickens and ducks.
Offspring tier is rolled from the parents: two parents of the same tier give you tier + 1, so climbing to the top coats is a ladder rather than a lottery. The four seasonal coats can only be conceived during their own season, which is worth planning around on the calendar.
The Animal Festival on Winter 10 scores one animal as 15 + tier × 5 + (hearts − 1) × 5. Tier and hearts matter equally, so a well-loved common animal can beat a neglected rare one — but a high-tier animal at ten hearts wins outright.
