How to Change Livestock Settings on a Project Zomboid Server
Project Zomboid livestock settings control how animals grow, reproduce, produce resources, and interact with the world. These options can make animal husbandry a slow, realistic long-term project or a much faster source of food and materials for a busy multiplayer server.
Change Livestock Settings on Your Project Zomboid Server
Navigate to your Nodecraft dashboard.
Locate your Project Zomboid server and click Panel.
Stop the server.
Click Game Settings in the menu on the left.
Open the Livestock tab.
Adjust the livestock settings for the experience you want.
Click Submit to save your changes.
Start the server.
Project Zomboid Livestock Settings Explained
The available choices depend on the option. Speed settings generally range from faster to slower values, chance settings control how frequently something occurs, and behavior settings can be enabled or disabled.
Animal Stats Modifier: Controls how quickly active animals lose condition-related stats such as hunger and thirst.
Animal Meta Stats Modifier: Controls how quickly animal stats decrease while the animals are being simulated outside the active area.
Animal Pregnancy Time: Changes how long a pregnant animal takes to give birth.
Animal Age Modifier: Changes how quickly animals grow and age.
Animal Milk Increase Modifier: Changes the rate at which milk becomes available.
Animal Wool Increase Modifier: Changes the rate at which wool grows back.
Animal Egg Hatch: Changes how long fertilized eggs take to hatch.
Animal Ranch Chance: Controls how likely farms are to contain animals.
Animal Grass Regrow Time: Sets how many in-game hours grass takes to return after it is eaten or cut.
Animal Meta Predator: Allows predators simulated outside the active area to attack vulnerable owned animals, such as chickens left exposed overnight.
Animal Mating Season: Restricts breeding to the appropriate season when enabled. When disabled, animals can reproduce throughout the year.
Animal Sounds Attract Zombies: Determines whether animal calls can draw nearby zombies.
Animal Track Chance: Controls how often animals leave tracks that survivors can discover.
Animal Path Chance: Controls the chance of animal paths appearing for hunting.
Choosing Livestock Settings for Your Server
For a casual or smaller server, faster growth, pregnancy, hatching, milk, and wool settings can keep animal husbandry useful without requiring players to wait through a long in-game season. Servers built around long-term survival may prefer normal or slower rates so livestock remains an investment.
Enabling mating seasons, predators, and zombie-attracting animal sounds creates a more demanding and realistic system. Disabling those options makes livestock easier to maintain, which may be a better fit when the survivors are already struggling to remember which chicken coop has water.
Do Livestock Changes Affect an Existing World?
Most rate and behavior changes begin affecting animals after the server restarts. However, settings related to ranch discovery or world generation may not replace animals or ranches that have already generated. Test spawn-related changes in unexplored areas, or use a new world when you need the setting to apply everywhere from the beginning.
Final Thoughts
Livestock settings let you decide how much time, risk, and attention animal husbandry requires on your Project Zomboid server. Faster production supports a relaxed community, while slower growth, seasonal breeding, predators, and noisy animals can turn the farm into its own survival challenge.
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