Game is less "abundant", now?

[HaleyRocks]

I remember animals like chickens, once happy, petted and fed, used to produce only Large eggs. If you tried hard to annoy them, like always forgetting to pet, or making sure they starve etc over the span of ~1 season, then they would drop the quality and revert to their product's smaller form.

Now that i take good care of them and they eat the Meadowlands blue grass, they keep producing small eggs and of normal quality, with Large eggs or higher quality, being rare to appear.

Also, i remember clay being in abundance, popping up almost everywhere you tilled. Now that i keep spamming my hoe here and there, very few pieces appear -if any- and i need them for crafting/Silos, too!

What changed?

 

[Squigglyruth]

I remember animals like chickens, once happy, petted and fed, used to produce only Large eggs. If you tried hard to annoy them, like always forgetting to pet, or making sure they starve etc over the span of ~1 season, then they would drop the quality and revert to their product's smaller form.

Now that i take good care of them and they eat the Meadowlands blue grass, they keep producing small eggs and of normal quality, with Large eggs or higher quality, being rare to appear.

What changed?

That's odd - my animals have been producing large and high quality goods as normal.

 

[Odyssey]

How long have you had the chickens? It does take a little while to increase their friendship to the point where they regularly produce large/quality eggs so you might not have got them to that point yet.

The clay pattern was changed with the 1.6 update. I don't know if the chance to get it was reduced or not though. Maybe you've just been unlucky on that front. If you were previously using an upgraded hoe to till lots of spots at once that might be related, since as far as I know if any of those spots were due to have clay in the next till you would get it. Tilling only one spot at a time gives a much smaller chance that you'll hit the correct spot.

 

[ThePerfectGarden]

That's odd - my animals have been producing large and high quality goods as normal.

So do mine. It even seems to me that they began much faster to produce better goods than before, surely because of the blue grass.

But it's true that the wriggly worms yield clay very rarely now. I had to do clay farming in my first spring to be able to build a silo as early as possible. Instead they give a lot of coal which is good, because in 1.5 I was always being direly short of coal.

 

[FilthyGorilla]

It takes a while for them to start providing better eggs. It’s not just as easy as them eating they need to have high mood and decently high friendship. What is your friendship with your chickens currently?

 

[Lew Zealand]

I didn't start with Blue Grass, instead the trusty Forest Farm with it's regular Grass and I didn't find the progress of Animal happiness and associated Large Eggs or Large Milk to stand out as being slower (or faster). Also I like to Hoe the dirt patches in the Mountains on occasion (or the same snow patches in Winter) and the Clay and Root drops didn't seem to be unusual compared to previous saves. In v1.5 saves, I'd get maybe 4-6 Clay from hoeing up the entire area (or close enough until I got bored) above Robin's house and it seems to be similar in v1.6. I never did the Clay predictor thing as it's a bit too game-cheezing for my play style.

The only impressions I've gotten that could be a change is that my Animals are producing lower quality items maybe a little more often than I'm used to after getting full with them. However this Summer and Fall (Year 3) have been very rainy compared to all of my previous saves, including 3 days in a row and it was only broken by the guaranteed sunny day for the SDV Festival. And I've not been petting my animals more than every other day, so those things seem to add up pretty quickly to slightly lower quality items. A day outside and regular pets for 2 days fixed that right up FWIW.

 

[HaleyRocks]

Okay, post 3,5 hearts (and meticulous caring for), Large eggs only appear!

Clay though seems to be much rarer than before... I used to have tons of the stuff, before even upgrading to copper hoe!