Cowplant Farming

Growing Hybrid Cowplants

Hybrid Cowplant berries can be purchased from Florian Farms via my Brazen Delivery service (Core Crafting Mod) or the Grocery Stall (EP03). If you don't have either of those installed you can find them in the buy catalog by searching 'Cowplant'. Just plant them in the ground like a normal harvestable and after a few days it will grow into a full-sized cowplant. If you have planted several of them you may want to name them so you can keep better track of your relationships with them.

Caring for Hybrid Cowplants

Once  your sim has had their first chat with a cowplant it will be added to their relationship panel and they can begin to care for it. Your sim MUST have a positive relationship with a cowplant in order to feed it. If they have a negative relationship they'll need to chat with it until it feels comfortable enough to let your sim feed it. Hovering over a cowplant will show you it's friendship level, hunger, and health stats.

You can feed a cowplant different types of food from your sim's inventory, but only if it's hungry or starving. Keep in mind that these plants were bred from carnivores so their health is better when they eat meat, but they will tolerate other types of food. In general they'll eat food scraps (prepared food) and meat. If your sim doesn't have anything their inventory to feed the cowplant then there will be an option to 'Buy a Steak' for §50.

Cowplant Relationships

These cowplants were bred to be caring and are affected by every interaction that your sim has with it. Some interactions have a positive relationship effect and other interactions have a negative one. Keep in mind that your sim will have to maintain that relationship to continue to feed it and get milk from it. If your sim only feeds it scraps and milks it then that cowplant will eventually come to dislike your sim because it doesn't like food scraps or being milked.

Building a good relationship with your cowplant will open up better relationship building interactions. For example, sims can only pet a cowplant if they're friends with it, but petting a cowplant gives a bigger relationship bonus than just chatting with it. This can be helpful when your sim needs to do something they know will make the cowplant very unhappy and they need to build their relationship back up afterward. 

I've also made it so that sims will autonomously 'Chat with Cowplant' so that sims are building relationships (albeit slowly) with their cowplants even when not being directed to do so. This should make larger farms more sustainable and easier to maintain.

Cowplant Products

As mentioned, cowplants can be milked after they've been fed. What you feed a cowplant will directly affect it's health and it's health will determine what type of milk you get. Also, if a cowplant isn't feeling well your sim may not be able to interact with it until they've milked it. You'll get a large bottle of milk that can be measured into 8 individual servings that can be drank or used as ingredients in recipes.

As long as your sim has a positive relationship with a cowplant they can clip it's tendrils. This makes a cowplant very unhappy but your sim will get a rare commodity that can be sold at a high price or ground on the mill to make cowplant flour.  That flour can be used to make one of my custom recipes, Cowplant Cake, that will provide a unique buff and debuff for sims who are terrified after being eaten by a Hybrid Cowplant.

Grafting Cowplants

Unlike the original cowplant, Hybrid Cowplants can be cut and grafted to other harvestable plants to produce more Hybrid Cowplant Berries. Grafting it to certain plants can produce a different type of Cowplant entirely, which will give your sim a different flavor of milk.

Starving Cowplants

If your cowplant is starving it will do as normal cowplants do and try to entice nearby sims with it's cake tongue to stay alive. In Hybrid cowplants this evolutionary response doesn't work as well because of their emotional connections to sims. These cowplants have a hard time eating and digesting it's friends so sims who are close with their cowplants can stave off death over and over again after being eaten. If your sim has a negative relationship with it beware, that cowplant might feel good about having them for dinner! Hybrid Cowplants are also hardier and can live longer without eating than normal cowplants.

Seasonalizing Cowplants

If your sim needs a vacation from tending to their cowplants they'll have to seasonalize them to keep them from dying. This means a cowplant will no longer need food and will go dormant, limiting the interactions that sims can have with it. To make a cowplant go dormant you will need to feed it a Dormancy Meat Cube but only if it's udders are empty. To make a cowplant in-season again you'll need to feed them a Recovery Meat Cube. Have some extra food on hand when you do this because they will wake up starving and need to be fed right away!

Sims can purchase these meat cubes from Florian Farms via my Brazen Delivery service (Core Crafting Mod). Alternatively sims can learn how to make them at home by reading the Cowplant Farming: Seasonalizing book. You can access the recipes once you've unlocked them by clicking on the book itself or you can find them in the Livestock section of The Brazen Homestead Cookbook and The Brazen Homestead Craft Books.