Husbandry & Livestock Guide

Raise cows, sheep, goats, chickens, geese and more on Rookery Isles, mature them on a climate timer, feed the right fodder, and collect milk, wool, down, eggs and meat for Cooking, Tailoring and Carpentry.

Table of Contents

• Requirements
• What Husbandry Is
• The Husbandry Loop
• The Livestock Roster
• Feed: Combined Feed vs. Ground Grain
• Climate and Maturation
• Collection Skills and Proficiency
• Products and What They Craft
• Wool, Golden Wool, and the Cloth Chain
• A Note on Leather
• Mount-Line and Special Babies
• Where to Buy Animals and Feed
• Getting Started: A Practical Plan
• On Rookery Isles

Requirements

You must be Character Level 52 to gather in the open world on Rookery Isles. Mining, Logging, Gathering, Farming, Husbandry, and Fishing are all gated at character Level 52 (the client enforces this), so you cannot mine, chop, harvest, farm, raise livestock, or fish until you reach Level 52. Bench crafting and processing have no level requirement, but their materials come from gathering. The Anya Vein adds a further gate of 50,000 Mining proficiency on top of Level 52.

What Husbandry Is

Husbandry is one of the 22 player vocations on Rookery Isles, and one of the six Harvesting-tab gathering skills (alongside Farming, Fishing, Logging, Gathering and Mining). Where Farming grows crops on a timer, Husbandry grows animals on a timer. You place a baby animal on protected land, let it mature, feed it the correct fodder, then collect a renewable product, milk, wool, goose down, eggs, on a cooldown, or butcher it for meat.

Husbandry is the supply line for three other vocations. Its milk, eggs and meat feed Cooking; its wool feeds Tailoring (the base cloth-armor material); and its goose down and goat wool feed Carpentry and several regional specialties. If you cook, sew cloth gear, or run a self-sufficient farm, a husbandry pen pays for itself.

Husbandry proficiency climbs the same shared rank ladder as every other vocation. The first five ranks are Amateur (up to 10,000), Novice (20,000), Veteran (30,000), Expert (40,000) and Master (50,000); it continues all the way to Legend at 1,000,000. Rank-ups are free in this build, your rank simply tracks total proficiency, and higher rank improves certain bonus yields (see Wool, Golden Wool, and the Cloth Chain).

Level requirement: Character Level 52. Like every world-gathering vocation on Rookery Isles, Husbandry is gated at character Level 52, and the client enforces it. You cannot place, feed, or collect from livestock in the open world until you reach Level 52. See the Requirements section and the On Rookery Isles note for details.

The Husbandry Loop

Every farm animal follows the same five-step cycle. Learn it once and it applies to every species in the roster.

• Step 1. Place the baby. A livestock item (Dairy Calf, Lamb, Chick, and so on) is a placeable object. Drop it on land you own or have permission to use. Placing a baby has no proficiency requirement, but the world-gathering action itself is gated at Character Level 52, so you must be Level 52 before you can run the husbandry loop.
• Step 2. Let it mature. The animal grows on a real-time timer. Each animal's tooltip states a fixed "Matures in" time, from under three hours for a Chick to a day and a half for a Dairy Calf or Goat Kid. Animals mature faster in their suitable climate (see Climate and Maturation).
• Step 3. Feed the adult. A mature animal must be fed the correct fodder, Combined Feed for large animals, Ground Grain for poultry. Feeding keeps the animal happy and productive.
• Step 4. Collect the product. Depending on species you Milk, Shear, Pluck, or collect eggs on a fixed cooldown, or Butcher for meat (which consumes the animal). These collection actions are what grant Husbandry proficiency.
• Step 5. Repeat or butcher. Renewable animals (cows, sheep, goats, chickens, geese) keep producing on their cooldown as long as you keep them fed. Meat animals are a one-time butcher.

Protect your land. Per the in-game text, an animal placed outside protected land "will eventually become public property", meaning another player can claim it. Keep livestock on owned, taxed land or inside a permitted housing zone.

The Livestock Roster

These are the real production animals in the Rookery Isles database. Note: there are no alpacas, the wool producers are Lambs (sheep) and Goat Kids (goats). Every figure below is the in-game tooltip text from the live server database.

Renewable producers (cows, sheep, goats, hens, geese) give a product over and over on a cooldown as long as they are fed. Butcher-only animals (pigs, water buffalo, turkeys) are raised, fed, then slaughtered once for meat.

A small data quirk worth knowing: the Goat Kid tooltip reads "Milk every 10 h" but its product line refers to collecting Goat Wool. The collected product is Goat Wool (item 19948); treat the 10-hour figure as the collection cooldown.

Feed: Combined Feed vs. Ground Grain

Mature animals will not produce unless fed. There are exactly two fodders, split by animal size.

Combined Feed is the workhorse fodder. The recipe is crafted at a Farmer's Workstation and uses farm produce you can grow yourself: Clover, Pumpkin and Hay Bale. Each craft yields a batch of ten, so a single farming run keeps a pen fed for a long time. Its base vendor value is 500 copper.

Ground Grain feeds poultry and doubles as a general Cooking ingredient. You grind 100 of a single grain into it, and this is the direct link back to Farming: Oats (a Farming crop) is one of the ten grains that grind into Ground Grain. Base value 200 copper.

This makes husbandry and farming a natural pair. Grow Clover, Pumpkin and grain → process into feed → raise animals → collect products. If you read the Farming & Crops Guide, you already have half a husbandry operation running.

Climate and Maturation

Like crops, animals grow on a timer that shortens in the right climate. Each species has a suitable climate listed on its tooltip; placing it in a matching-climate zone speeds maturation.

Practical reading: a Temperate animal raised in a Temperate zone matures faster than the same animal raised in, say, an arid desert. If maturation speed matters to you, place each species in the climate it likes. The exact zone-to-climate mapping is broad, Rookery's continents span Temperate, Tropical, Arid, Subarctic and Auroria climates, and the Farming & Crops Guide covers the same climate system in more detail, since crops and animals share it.

The maturation times are real time at 1.0× speed. There is no growth-rate acceleration on this server, so the "Matures in" figures in the roster table are the actual full-climate times. A matching climate trims them; a mismatched climate leaves them at full length.

Collection Skills and Proficiency

The collection actions, Milk, Shear, Pluck, Butcher, are the Husbandry skills. Performing them is what raises your Husbandry proficiency. The feeding and placing actions do not grant proficiency.

Proficiency points per action (how much Husbandry each milk/shear/butcher grants) and the labor cost per action are community-reported, not server-confirmed, the database does not expose a clean per-action number, so treat any specific figure you see quoted as unverified.

What is confirmed is the direction of the relationship: higher Husbandry proficiency improves certain yields. The clearest example is Golden Wool, below.

Products and What They Craft

Here is the payoff, what each animal product is actually used for. Every destination below is verified against the server's recipe data, and the item tooltips name the destination vocation directly.

The tooltips spell out the destinations: Milk is "chiefly used in cooking and husbandry," Egg is "chiefly used in cooking," Wool "can be processed into Fabric," Goose Down is "chiefly used in carpentry and local specialties," and Goat Wool is "chiefly used in tailoring and carpentry."

The big picture by vocation:

• Cooking is the biggest customer, milk, eggs, and every kind of meat (pork, chicken, goat, goose) flow into food recipes. See the Cooking Guide for what to make with them.
• Tailoring depends on wool. Sheep are the cloth-armor supply chain.
• Carpentry wants goose down and goat wool for furniture, cushions, and specialty items.

Wool, Golden Wool, and the Cloth Chain

Wool is the most important husbandry product for crafters, because it is the front of the cloth-armor pipeline. The conversion is direct and verified:

Larger batch recipes exist too, for example one that turns Wool ×30 into Fabric ×10, so a productive sheep pen feeds a tailor indefinitely. Wool can also be spun into Basic Fishing Line, tying husbandry to the Fishing Guide.

Golden Wool (item 19952) is the proficiency reward. Its tooltip states it is a rare bonus material that drops when you shear a happy (Combined-Feed-fed) sheep, with a low chance that increases as your Husbandry proficiency rises. This is the one explicit, server-confirmed case of "more proficiency = better yield." The exact drop chance and the proficiency-to-chance curve are not published in the data, treat any specific percentage as community-reported. Golden Wool itself goes into high-end Tailoring fabric and furniture.

The wool family in the database, for reference:

A Note on Leather

A common assumption is that raising cows and sheep produces leather for Leatherwork armor. On Rookery Isles, that chain is not confirmed.

The items Cow Leather (8047) and Sheepskin (8051) exist in the database, but neither is used in any active crafting recipe here, they have zero recipe usage. They behave as vendor/regional pelt items, not as part of a husbandry-to-Leatherwork production chain. So while the Leatherwork vocation is real, husbandry is not its verified leather supply.

The honest summary: husbandry's confirmed outputs are milk, eggs, meat → Cooking; wool → Tailoring; goose down and goat wool → Carpentry. Do not plan a leather-armor operation around your livestock until the chain is confirmed in-game.

Mount-Line and Special Babies

A few "baby animal" items are not production livestock at all, they are mounts or pets that you raise the same way. They are worth knowing so you do not mistake them for milk-and-wool animals.

Watch the neglect timer on mount-line babies, unlike the renewable farm animals, a released Yata Calf can die if left unattended for 60 minutes. For everything about rideable mounts, see the Mounts & Pets Guide.

Other baby items in the data (Snowlion Cub, Leomorph Cub, Elk Calf, Lilyut Foal, Donkey Foal, and so on) are mount/pet acquisition items, not milk or wool producers.

Where to Buy Animals and Feed

Most starter animals come from Livestock Merchant NPCs. The Dairy Calf and Water Buffalo Calf are acquired with Vocation Badges, the currency you earn from vocation activity. Exact NPC locations and zone coordinates are not listed in the data, ask in the Rookery Isles Discord (https://discord.gg/xYKNcfkRdR) for current merchant spots if you cannot find one.

Getting Started: A Practical Plan

A clean first husbandry setup, start to finish:

• Step 1. Secure land. Place a farm structure or use permitted housing land so your animals are on protected ground and cannot be claimed by other players.
• Step 2. Pick a renewable starter. A Chick matures in under three hours and lays eggs every hour, the fastest feedback loop. A Lamb (matures ~14 hours, shears every 8) is the best early wool source.
• Step 3. Sort out feed. For a Chick, craft Ground Grain from a stack of grain (grow Oats, or buy grain). For a Lamb or cow, craft Combined Feed at a Farmer's Workstation from Clover, Pumpkin and Hay Bale.
• Step 4. Match climate if you can. Place Temperate animals (cows, sheep, pigs, geese) in a Temperate zone, the Goat Kid in an Arid zone, for faster maturation.
• Step 5. Feed, then collect on cooldown. Once mature and fed, collect on the interval, eggs hourly, wool every 8 hours, milk and goat wool every 10 hours.
• Step 6. Feed it downstream. Sell or process your output: wool → a tailor (Fabric), milk and eggs → a cook, goose down → a carpenter. Or run all three vocations yourself for a closed-loop farm.

On Rookery Isles

Rookery Isles is an ArcheAge 3.0 "Revelation"-era roleplay private server (AAEmu 3.0.3.0 NL0bP fork). A few deviations from default ArcheAge that matter for husbandry:

• Husbandry requires Character Level 52. Like every world-gathering vocation on this server (Mining, Logging, Gathering, Farming, Fishing and Husbandry), the world-interaction action carries a character Level 52 requirement that the client enforces from its in-pak data. You cannot raise or collect from livestock in the open world until you reach Level 52. Bench crafting and processing carry no level requirement, but their materials come from gathering.
• No alpacas. The wool producers on this server are Lambs (sheep) and Goat Kids (goats). If a guide or old note mentions alpacas, it is wrong for Rookery.
• No confirmed husbandry-to-leather chain. Cow Leather and Sheepskin exist as items but are not used in any active recipe here. Husbandry's verified outputs are milk, eggs and meat (Cooking), wool (Tailoring), and goose down / goat wool (Carpentry).
• Per-action labor and proficiency numbers are unverified. The database does not expose exact labor cost or proficiency gain per milk/shear/butcher. Any specific figure is community-reported, not server-confirmed.

See also

• Gearing Supply Chain, the full path from gathered material to best gear
• Farming & Crops Guide
• Cooking Guide
• Tailoring & Leatherwork
• Carpentry, Masonry & Construction
• Labor Points & Proficiency
• Crafting & Gathering Overview
• Fishing Guide
• Mounts, Pets, Vehicles & Ships