Factoring for the future in Factorio

We have factories and I've set up a little bit of a factory to produce the items I think I'll need for the near future. I'm going to want a small bit of science, but I also really want all those belts for what I'm going to do next. It's time to setup for mass-production.

Radar for the ground

One of the survival recipes you start with is for radar installations. Each consumes a large chunk of electricity, and will provide continuous vision for a decent chunk around it, similar to what your suit does normally. In addition, it will slowly scan chunks at long distance that are revealed for a short period of time. I'll use this for an easy way to explore the surrounding area. Even seeing things is automated!

The red tint implies pollution. The more the better

Here's a closeup view of the map. We crash-landed in what is best described as a swamp, with a good amount of resources nearby. To the left of that lank is where I'll begin placing down the foundations for mass-production, as I want a large area devoid of other features that might get in the way of my grand plan. For now, raw resources from the east will go through the small opening between the water, where it'll be refined, before being further moved to become finished goods.

Easiest way to measure size is to place things down

Bare bones infrastructure of the furnace area. Two lines of 15 furnaces, on the outside ore will come up, while in the direct middle lies a belt for the finished plates. Another line on the inside will bring up coal to power them. Simple yet effective, once I get it running. Alas, I require more technology to really get it working. That'll wait until I have turrets finished.

See? Told you they were ugly

The biter problem is getting worse. Now they come two at a time, eager for blood or smashed metal. Sadly for me, the super-suit comes with a distant lack of protection. Nanites? Check. Water and nutrient creation? Check. Power generation? Check. Superstrength? Check. Armor? Too expensive. Luckily for me, I have some beginning plans for suitable protection. It's this amazing thing that involves draping myself in iron. New invention, only had it for some thousands of years. Go to space and use nanites to boil water and make iron armor.

Thinking back, I should have had some connection between the turret and the chest

I build my first automatic turret along with a single factory to produce ammunition, as my survival supplies weren't intended for automatic weaponry. As long as I make sure to remember that I have only near-infinite ammo, I should be fine in the future. No one around, infinite ammo, fully automatic weaponry, and live targets? I'm really starting to like this place.

Annoyingly, circuit and wire factories come in a 3:2 ratio, so I can't keep everything in line

Let me explain what I'm setting up here. Each line in the middle between the furnaces and the factories will carry some good that is produced elsewhere. One line will be copper plates, another iron, etc. On the left side will be assembly plants, that will produce finished goods that are either left in a chest, or transported along. Wherever possible intermediate goods are made along the same line, like with copper wire. I'll leave some space between each line for...shenanigans. This setup isn't the most efficient, but it's simple and easy to modify.

I also made a shotgun. I'm a simple guy, with simple tastes.

Factorying Factorio

We left off last time with researching the technology for basic factories. Making objects with the nanites in our super-suit is fun, but it's not really a factory game if we don't have actual factories. Which I kind of need to use, or I don't feel at peace. Why do things yourself when you can have robots do them for you?

This is the recipe for basic science beakers

Our research finished and I build our first factory object. Factories work similar to furnaces. Supply it with the necessary ingredients, and it will produce a finished good. Factories are much more varied in what they can produce though. Basic factories can produce any recipe that has 2 or less ingredients. This one by itself isn't terribly useful. We can transfer the copper plates to it easily enough, but also making the iron gears before anything useful is done would be a pain. Instead of doing that ourselves, we'll make more factories instead.

If I were smart, I'd have put an inserter to take the beakers and put them in the science lab

That's better. I drop copper plates in the red factory, and iron plates in the chest, and this setup will work to keep producing items. But I'm still not thinking enough like I should. Automation is the goal; I want to do the least amount of work for a given point as possible.

This game has a day/night cycle. A mod I use makes it gloomier.

Much, much better. Inserters move the iron plates to the transport belts, the belts continuously move items placed on them in the direction of the belt, and at the end inserters take the plates off the belts to be used in the factories and to allow for easy pickups. Glorious! Of course, there are still holes. Each of the furnaces still has to have coal delivered, I still need to deliver copper plates to produce red beakers, and coal needs to be delivered to the boilers to keep the lights on.

In effect, this is how the game goes. I build up sections of the factory that, once I'm done with them, take no additional inputs in order to keep running. Then I move on to other parts that need work done on them, with the occasional shortcut needing additional attention.

If you're clever, try and spot where I went wrong with the new addition

Give that I want to keep the lights on more efficiently than carting fuel back and forth, I add on belts from the coal mine to the boilers. I also expand the whole bit so that I won't worry about power for a good long while. The night is dark and full of terrors. Best to keep the lights shining bright. And by lights I mean big polluting furnaces.

They look uglier when alive

With the boilers setup, we get our first guest: a weird looking thing that could only have been designed by a crazy hippy. I was able to easily put it down with my survival pistol, but I'd prefer to be better prepared for later attacks. Luckily I'm almost done researching our first military tech which will give access to a submachine gun and shotguns.

These things are crazy. No idea who spread them to this place, but they've done a number on this world's biosphere. There's the usual trees and plants, but no wildlife that I can see, outside of a few fish safe in their watery habitats. A hippy's experiment gone wrong, they work wonderfully to stop polluters. Getting a whiff of pollution (sections of the map in the minimap get steadily more red to indicate having more and more pollution) will drive them bad, sending them long distances in order to attack the source of pollution.

Even better, they'll feed off of this pollution. More pollution will cause them to reproduce, expanding in number. As well, they'll evolve into bigger and stronger versions of themselves, doing more damage and requiring more punishment to be put down. There was a whole swath of information on them in astronaut survival school. Sadly the only way to really take care of them is to eliminate the infestation one by one. We'll automate that of course, once we're more situated. For now, we kill them off by ourselves, and try to minimize damage to our factory. This hippy madness will be purged.

Factorio!

So, as a general rule, the type of games I like to play are not the ones my friends do. Because of that, today I'd like to share one game that I rather enjoy with those friends, precisely because I know that they would never play. Maybe they'll enjoy the writing, at least. If you find yourself ever interested in playing, it's sold on Steam for a round $20. (Exactly $20. They're weird in more ways than one) and it's one of the few games I've seen with a demo. It does have a multiplayer option, as well.

Factorio is a game about making a factory, or more precisely turning ever-increasing amounts of raw goods into finished products, all for a nebulous goal. This is not really a game that you can "win" in the classic sense, and even the goals and background are kind of senseless. It is most assuredly a sandbox game, one which I'd put in the "zen garden" genre of games. There is no goal, aside from managing and creating something, and in the process gaining peace. While it may be strange that my sense of peace is a massive, polluting mess of machines that exist only to create more machines may be strange, it is still peaceful.

The bright orange stuff to the top is mineable copper. This world has abundant surface deposits, lucky you!

This is you. You start on an alien planet, crash-landed with few supplies. The emergency supplies are pretty standard for the sci-fi genre. You come with a pistol, a few magazines, some random parts you were able to scrounge from the wreckage, along with an automated mining drill and furnace. And a super-suit that gives you super strength and has nano-bots capable of constructing nearly anything that doesn't involve heat or liquids.

Yep. Standard. How will you ever survive with just the bare essentials? Much less make the rocket to serve as a flare for people to rescue you?

Not only are you able to easily carry the wood from this entire tree, but you go through it in 3 seconds.

Your first step is to gather fuel. Easiest option is to chop the entire forest down. 50 trees later and we're good to start drilling. There are 5 main raw resources you can collect from the environment. Iron is used to make anything structural, and is the bulk of what we need early to make what we want. Copper is used for anything electrical, and is mostly used later when circuit production begins in earnest. Stone is essential but only used in a few recipes and is relatively scarce. Oil is very useful, but complex enough that we can't even mine it yet. Then there's coal, which we'll use as our main energy source, supplemented by oil if needed.

Each tree gives 4 wood. We're carrying 50 trees while running at full speed. Don't take this game seriously

Now we get to the actual factory portion. Our burner drill (as in, it burns it's own fuel to power the drill) will work automatically as long as it has fuel, an available resource, and empty space to put the ore it mines. In front we'll drop the furnace, which takes fuel, along with some material to produce a more refined product. In this case, our drill produces iron ore, which will be turned into iron plates. We only have the one mine, if we want more mines, we'll need to gather stone as well.

A quick bit of stone gathering and waiting, and we've produced 2 more mines. One to get us more stone, and the other to produce copper ore, which is promptly made into copper plates. Our steady, though slow, supply of copper, stone, and iron will allow us to start the next step: electric power. Electricity is used for the vast majority of machines in order to run (How surprising!) It's only in the strict beginning of the game that you use fuel directly. Aside from furnaces for which the electric version is far away.

The pump has a wheel on the side to get things started, if you wondered

With our initial supplies, we've created the first real new thing: a steam engine. Water is pumped up, fed into a boiler, then into the steam engine in order to create electricity. Super suits and space travel, and the most efficient form of electricity generation is still boiling water. Now that we have electricity, we can start our research to go down the tech tree and expand our budding factory.

To give a sense of how good your nano-bots are, it took 9 seconds to make and get it operational

Our new drill is all around better than the previous. More efficient, faster, though a little larger. It's fast enough that we can almost run two furnaces off of one drill. Look closely and next to the mine you can see 2 arm-contraptions. They're called inserters, and work off electricity to move things from one square to another. They're programmable to interact with the nearby objects if necessary. In this case it will take items from the box that the furnace needs, making sure not to overfill or give it the wrong item.

The research material the lab requires a copper plate and an iron gear, to create a red beaker. I have no idea how this works

Most objects of any complexity are made from multiple intermediate objects. In this case, we want to build our lab to begin research. The lab requires 10 electronic circuits, each requiring a metal plate and 3 copper wires, with each copper plate being made into 2 wires. An iron gear takes 2 iron plates, while the transport belt requires an iron gear and an iron plate. Luckily our nano-bots can take care of everything, once we've collected our iron from the furnaces.

I have a mod to increase research time and materials by a factor of 3, it doesn't normally take this much

Finally, with our lab done we begin our research. Our first item is for basic automated factories. Each factory we make can produce items continuously without our input, which is useful consider the number of items we'll need. Making 4 belts ourselves to create the lab is fine, but making hundreds of belts we'll want for our entire factory would take far too long and be far too tedious.

I should note that the intro bit here is abnormal for the rest of the game. Most of the time later is spent building the factory instead of bootstrapping the beginnings. They even recommend for anyone that does videos to skip the first 15-20 minutes precisely because it's so tedious. The good part about it is the introduction it gives to basic mechanics. Hopefully the silliness of the entire concept helps make it more interesting for a reader.

Let me know what you think too, if you ever get this far down.

Stellaris AAR: Introduction

Stellaris! Stellaris is a new game recently released by Paradox studios, following in the footsteps of their other grand strategy games like Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings, only this time in a fictional space setting. Their games follow a relatively similar format, but customized for the setting and allowing for a great amount of user modifications, if one is interested.

Standard play involves you commanding a government that interacts with other governments and the world (well, universe in Stellaris's case) over a long period of time. Unlike most other longer games, Paradox has a system that works in real-time, with pauses. What makes their system really special is the event system. Under certain conditions events pop up with effects, choices, and flavor text that helps fill out the setting. They can also do a lot for the replayability of the game. I'd heartily recommend any of their games.

Well, let's begin. First step? Building your race.

Here's the trait screen for the race. My race are the Savix'Qast, and on the right you can see the selected traits: repugnant, venerable, and sedentary. They on average live twice as long as humans, but like to settle down and live their lives in one location. They also freak other species out, given the lack of visible eyes and a mouth that wiggles in a disgusting fashion. Respectfully they're referred to as Starfish, given how their head looks. The more popular term for them is Suckers though, given their mouth and religious beliefs.

The other major decision for customizing your race is the government and ethos choices. Ethos define how your species sees the world, and is done on a pop (short for population) by pop basis. Some pops can have a different outlook on life, but your government ethos will stay the same. The Savix'Qast begin the game as highly spiritualist and eager to meet other aliens. Ethos choices give benefits and allow for unique choices and technologies during the game. Spiritualists gain a straight happiness bonus, while xenophiliacs gain a happiness bonus when around other aliens.

The dominant government that emerged on the Savix'Qast home plant of Shabtor is a Theocratic republic. Divinely inspired, every 5 years the Savix'Qast population elect a new Revered Elder to lead them, with an advisory council that is put together and lead by the church. In this way they have obtained harmony. Details of their religious beliefs will have to wait for another entry.

And so begins the Savix'Qast journey to the stars. As a quick introduction to mechanics: to the right is the outliner, useful for giving an overview of the empire and easy selection of objects. We start with a science ship, and construction ship for orbital satellites, a small fleet of corvettes, and of course our homeworld, the lovely tundra world Shabtor.

Up on time we have menus and our resources. From left to right we have energy, minerals, influence, physics research, society research, engineering research, strategic resources, directly controlled planets, and naval capacity. Energy in Stellaris is similar to money. Having some is nice, but most of the income goes towards paying for maintenance of other things. Minerals are used to make things; very useful if we want infrastructure and a spacefleet. Influence is used to bolster the empire in many ways, but unlike the other resources our gain is relatively static. Research is split into three categories, and is used to buy technology. Have a spacefleet that's too big for our empire and we receive extra costs. Have too many planets not managed by sectors and we're hit by inefficiences.

Visiting our home planet, we can see how planets are structured. Each tile can house 1 pop, each pop belongs to a species and has a certain ethos. All your starter pops are of your government's ethos, but this can change with time. Next to the pop can be buildings that improve the tile's production. Do note that any building that production values don't mix. Building a mine to improve mineral production on a tile that produces both energy and minerals normally will suppress the energy production entirely. Buildings cost minerals to build, and most have an energy maintenance.

The checkered zones are inhospitable and need to be removed before use. Homeworld versions are always doable and relatively inexpensive, while others will usually require technology to correct.

Hopefully that's enough introduction for you to get the basics. The first goals for the Savix'Qast? Explore their surroundings, and build up infrastructure. We'll start by having our science ship start surveying the objects in our home system, and begin construction of a fancy new science lab for the guy in the upper left, along with another science ship for additional survey speed. In addition our small little fleet will start visiting other systems, in order to check for hostiles. Don't particularly want our defenseless and expensive science ships getting mauled by space monsters.

Edit: I'll wait for more to possibly happen in this game before writing more on it. The current implementation they have is good for a game, especially given cost. But not really good enough to create a good story. Too many wonky bits especially.

The Fermi Paradox

The Fermi Paradox. For those unaware, the Fermi paradox is simply stated: Everything we know about life on other planets tells us that life should be commonplace across the stars and we should be able to see evidence of alien life. (Corollary, life should be common enough that we shouldn't have had time to develop before our planet is colonized) The problem comes that we don't have any real evidence that alien life exists. There are a few sightings that might indicate alien life, (Weird telescope sightings of other star systems that would theoretically indicate intelligent life, not the aliens in Roswell type) but they're slim and nebulous. Life should be everywhere, but we see none of it. Some sort of Great Filter stops life from being visible to us, or even existing. Therefore, the next step when talking about the Fermi paradox is to discuss why we don't see any signs of intelligent life.

Personally, I find that your reaction to this problem is the interesting bit. There's a whole host of possibilities for why our observations are different from our expectations, and little data to work on. Therefore, your thoughts on the cause are likely to be inspired by thoughts outside of this specific problem, which is why I find it fun. It's a science fiction Rorschach test, if you will.

I find it useful to split possible solutions to the paradox based on whether they come relatively after or before modern humanity. If the problem is before current times, then it likely means that humanity is special and has already passed the Great Filter. A bit of optimism is required, but also can indicate how you think humanity might be special. You could think that life is special, and exceedingly rare enough that only Earth is lucky enough for it. Maybe you see intelligence as unique, after all, life existed for some 3.6 billion years before humans came around. Maybe even it's something unique to humans where complicated industry to become spacefaring is out of reach? We did spend a long time planet-bound, and extinction level events aren't unheard of.

Problems that the future of mankind will have to deal with are often depressing and pessimistic. Maybe we'll beat them, but the evidence we see amongst the stars tells us that the odds are very much against us. What we know gives us a rough guess of just how many other civilizations have grown and likely run into the very same problems we'll encounter. Maybe you're optimistic that we'll beat the odds anyway, but good luck with that.

What kind of problems are we talking about for the future? There's the ever popular nuclear armageddon where nuclear weapons are developed, and inevitably used to end life on that planet. More popular during the Cold War though, given the circumstances. Perhaps some early idiot made self-replicating robots that kill any species that makes it into space. All it takes is one idiot species. Perhaps we run into societal traps. Is there any real point to colonizing other planets? Much simpler to keep humanity limited in scope so that we can all live comfortably on Earth. Or even better, live in a simulated dream world. No need to expand all that much if everyone only exist as programs in a machine.

There are plenty of other problems that could be a potential killer for spacefaring life. This is by no means an exhaustive list; I'd be here all day listing them if it was. For those that do read this...what do you think is the cause?

Game Combat Basics

I find myself building a small thing with combat as a creative exercise. It's not something I'd ever want to share, especially on here, but talking a little bit about specifics helps. If nothing else, writing about it helps clarify things for me, so even if no one reads this, I've still benefited from it.

Let's start with the basics. The goto basic combat system is the Dungeons and Dragons combat system, specifically version 3.5. Why? It's basic, understandable, and easy to calculate. You don't want to use a calculator for tabletop gaming, nor do you want too many numbers in the way. It works like this: Roll a d20 (a die with 20 sides, with values 1-20) and add your attack value. If this sum is greater than your opponent's defense, you hit and then deal with damage. Simple, straightforward, and easy to implement. So you drop it into your game, try it out, and find that it isn't a very good system at all for a computer game.

There's a few reasons it doesn't work well in a computer game. Chief among them is that DnD is designed around rolling dice. Rolling a die and seeing the result is an intrinsically fun action. Having a computer roll the dice for you and it's not nearly as fun. Whereas in a DnD setting you'd watch that die bounce and either come up short and succeed for you, all you see on the computer is your character whiffing or hitting, and if you're using values like those found in DnD, he'll be doing a lot of whiffing. Now you're wasting time watching the computer duke it out with itself as both parties whiff ~40% of the time. What fun.

There's other issues too, mostly relating to how offense versus defense scales. The main defense in this system has you avoiding full damage more often. Specifically, each point of defense makes you 5% less likely to be hit. Each point of attack increases your chance to hit by 5%, effectively cancelling out a point of defense. Which means if your attack scales at the same rate your opponent's defense scales, nothing will change in this system, even as both of you get stronger and stronger. Actual damage dealt and maximum health might scale as well, but the fight still looks similar. There's also issues when attack and defense values vary widely from each other. What happens if you have 100% chance to hit? 0% to hit? Could I reasonably make a monster that still stands a chance if it only hits 5% of the time? If you hit most of the time anyway, why still have this system?

(Note: DnD also has the suggested house rule that a natural 1 always misses and a natural 20 always hits. Setting a minimum and a maximum like that certainly works as a solution, but is not necessarily a solution that solves the problem)

This system as a basis for making things work doesn't do well in a computer game setting. Luckily, there are other alternatives. Instead of hitting or missing, we can take that out entirely and have defenses reduce damage. Again, we keep things simple and deduct our armor amount from any damage we take. 10 damage against 5 armor means that 5 real damage is dealt. This system works, but runs into other funky problems. Most notably that damage taken depends heavily on how much damage the opponent does per shot relative to the amount of armor. If the rate of attack can vary, slower attacks will be much stronger relative to smaller but quicker attacks. Designing a proper fight from the developer's perspective can be odd too.

Say I wanted to double the damage taken from my last example. I can't double the original damage, that'd result in the target taking triple damage instead of double. (20-5=15 or 5x3) Instead, I want to add 5 damage. As well, I need to keep damage relatively similar to armor levels. High damage makes small amounts of armor relatively useless. If I'm taking 30 damage already, would 2 more armor really help? The reverse is also problematic. Going back to the original problem, if I add 2 armor there, I'm only taking 3 damage a shot, or a 40% reduction.

All that may not be a problem though. If I have numbers setup right, things should (repeat, should) work fine. It's still a funky system though, and I might prefer some flexibility. Next attempt is percentage damage reduction. It works regardless of rate of attack, works on any number equally well, and dealing with relative increases of power are straightforward. Of course, it has its own issues.

First, it's more complex than the others. I don't need to worry about computational complexity because the computer will handle it, but I do need to worry that the player understands how much his shiny new piece of armor actually helps. I also need to get the math right. Two pieces of armor, each with 10% damage reduction, should not add up to 20% damage reduction. If they do, that means that later pieces of armor are much more valuable than they appear, and lead to silliness. Using terms like "10% damage reduction" also look silly; ideally I'd like to have a term like "armor" that turns into damage reduction after the fact, for which I'll need to tell the player somehow. Or not, and leave it to the wiki.

There's the other problem of small numbers. If I deal 10 damage, anything less than 10% damage reduction doesn't do anything, because it'd reduce by less than 1. I can keep the number as a decimal, but that looks strange if I'm using small numbers in the first place. (And leads to one of the few legitimate times where 2+2=5) It can also seem worse than it is. The rules I originally used had attack and defense values change in increments of 5%. If I'm at 50% damage reduction, an additional 5% damage reduction would reduce damage by 5%, but it'd look like it's only doing 2.5% (assuming I tell the player the total damage reduction from armor) If you don't know math, it then looks like armor gets worse and worse the more you get, even though that's far from the case.

Maybe I'll do another post sometime looking at other problems or issues. Maybe not. If you have any questions, especially about the math in this, please be sure to leave a comment and I'll get back to you.

Alien Domesticated Animals

Today, I want to think about aliens. Not the usual aliens that think and act and somehow look like humans with funny foreheads, but the dumb ones. I'm talking about the domesticated kind. What would aliens look for in domesticated animals? Preferably, what would they look for that isn't almost exactly the same as what we have on Earth? Something alien, not a space dog, yet still similar. Why am I talking about this? Because I can. And because I watched this video from CGP Grey:

(If you watched, go watch! It's a good video)

Which got me thinking: "What traits might we want from an animal, if we could imagine animals as drastically different from what we have now. What might an alien want that is very different from a human?" So lets start with something easy. Everything living needs energy to survive and be active, so it's a reasonable assumption that sentient aliens would need to eat. (Except maybe those fancy green aliens that cheat). While it's true that turning grass into meat is inefficient calorie-wise, it's pretty useful if the grass is useless to us anyway. Some calories is better than none. It's also a big bonus if you get a taste boost in the bargain.

When we look at the chemical factories we call digestive systems in Animals on Earth, we see that specialization is key. More specialization in what we eat means more efficiency. You don't need to worry about specialization when your diet consists of calorie-rich fruit, meat, and vegetables like the diet humans tended to have. Yet, if you want to eat food like grass that is minimal in effective calories, specialization is the only hope. Rather than go through the hassle to turn grass into edible material, easier to have an animal already suited for the job do it for us. Other examples of inedible food include poisonous plants, food waste, and carrion. Perhaps we're looking purely for taste, ala honey (or aphids for ants).

I'd think it a no-brainer that aliens would have some form of domesticated animal that turned inedible food into something edible. The fun part is in imagining how the alien gets the calories from the animal after. On Earth, it's most efficient for animals to produce food continuously, rather than only slaughtering them once they've grown. The big two examples are milk and eggs. Making meat is expensive, it requires the animal spend calories to make the cells, then those cells must be maintained requiring more energy the longer the cell lives before butchering. Comparably, milk and eggs are a single energy expenditure, no energy maintenance required.

Maybe we find an animal that can compromise. Lizards are an animal that can continuously regrow lost limbs, with some even using it as a defense mechanism. Why not a domesticated animal that can consistently grow meat without needing to be butchered? Or get really alien. Have the male be an omnivore similar to humans, while the female has a diet more similar to a horse or perhaps cow. (Or reverse the roles, if that's your preference) Even better if they have some foods to share that both enjoy, such as high-sugar foods like honey. What would society be like if men and women didn't ever share meals, but had the occasional dessert together?

As well as making useful calories, animals produce other useful materials. Bone, fur, feathers, wool, ivory, leather, silk; there's a lot of useful materials we derive from animals, especially before more advanced methods of production are found. We've only recently (relatively) developed alternatives to some of these items that don't require animals to produce. I'd find it incredibly likely that alien civilizations would use animal products as well, in likely similar uses as in our past. Building materials, decoration, and especially temperature regulation are all too good to pass up. Always a great choice in a story when you need a material made is to have it be made by an animal. Which seems sillyat first, but considering that guano (aka bird/bat poop) can be easily refined to become the main ingredient in gunpowder, using animals as chemical factories doesn't seem so odd.

The last major usage for domesticated animals is as workers. Preferably, they have other purposes from those listed above to be as efficient as possible. The horse is the best example. It can be used to carry things we'd rather not carry, including us. It runs at high speeds, faster than we can. Even better, it runs off of food we don't eat, and can convert it to food we can eat. Milk and meat even. Other examples are great: oxen for heavy lifting, cats for killing vermin, dogs for herding and their enhanced senses, and others. Effectively, anything your alien can't do is good grounds for employment of animals, along with anything a sentient doesn't want to do but still needs doing. Humans can certainly pull along wagons, but the oxen whine less. Dogs have different senses than us, making them highly useful for compensating to obtain a fuller range of senses. Presumably, an alien that lacks in good eyesight could have a more literal seeing eye dog as a companion.

Effectively, if you ever find yourself imagining an alien species, try to look too at what domesticated animals they're likely to have. Look for holes in their biology, then think of ways other animals could help fill those holes. Don't forget to add some variation to the animals too. Most farm animals are pretty docile, but horses have an attitude and camels are jerks. Don't horse around by making the animal the same as a cow, except In Space! Unless of course, you're making a joke about how aliens seem to like our cows so much. Please remember to milk that joke as much as possible. Hope you enjoyed the read, it's time for me to get mooving to another project.