The easiest solution for covering the details for this, is to share a more readable version of my main spreadsheet, that you can look at here[docs.google.com].

I partly made this just in case any other modders were interested in making any mods complimentary to this one, or simply wanted to make a mod based off of similar value calculations. I've also included a second sheet called blackboard, for anyone who might be interested in testing or experimenting with the dairy calculation without needing to make a new sheet.

---

One of the oddities about the milking system in dwarf fortress, other than the current blanket default milking time for all creatures, is that it is restricted by how often rather than how much you can milk a creature. Using my values works out pretty well, but does lead to some odd results, such as smaller creatures not living long enough to be milked more than once. However, in the end it amounts to about the same thing in terms of balance, so achieves its goal.

I decided to use the cow as the baseline reference for the ticks-to-milking value for all other creatures. This was on the assumption that cows, being the most obvious and commonly used dairy animal, were what the default 20000 ticks was based upon. This was just an assumption, but seems pretty balanced to vanilla, and seems to even make sense with some of the expansion mods to this one that add things like giant elephants and weasels as milkable.

---

Specific Creature Calculations

One of the key things I've added, for balance to all of this, is a multiplier to the value for each creature, based upon how plausible or well documented they are for use as dairy animals.

The cow gets 1 for an unadjusted, vanilla, value (17 days), by comparison, a two-humped (bactrian) camel gets 0.2, meaning it produces milk 5x less often for it's size. Oddly enough, a one-humped camel (dromedary) gets only a 0.75 multiplier decrease. I was surprised to learn that they have been bred for a very long time as dairy animals, and unlike bactrians can often produce nearly as much milk as some dairy cows.

I've chosen 1 to be the 'normal' multiplier for common dairy animals, and 0.2 to be the guideline number for animals with no data backing up their use or notability as milk producers.

Only a few of these multipliers were based on a 'best guess' criteria, as there is data and research out there about the milk production of a surprisingly large number of non-dairy mammals - dogs, cats and pigs for instance - and that data led me to the settings for dromedaries, as mentioned above, but also for some surprising ones.

---

Values and Reasoning for Specific Creatures

Goats and sheep (1) (4 months) are the only other mammals that get the same multiplier as cows.

Pigs (0.5) (8 months) produce a surprising amount of milk, and there is a niche artisanal pig's cheese industry out there in the real world, but apparently it is very labour-intensive (apparently, partly due to the unusually large number of teats a pig has) so has never really caught on.

Llamas and alpacas (0.3) (4 months, 10 months) despite being milkable in vanilla DF, have been given a much lower multiplier as it turns out they produce very little milk, even by general mammal standards, and have never really been bred or used as dairy animals.

Horses (0.5) (1 month) have been, surprisingly, widely and regularly used for their milk throughout history, but that has always been a secondary role to being domesticated as beasts of burden. Their setting is based on them not being nearly as productive for dairy as Cows, Sheep, Goats etc.

Donkeys (0.5) (2 months) get the same as horses.

Water buffalo (0.9) (12 days) get almost the same multiplier as cows, they are a major contributary to the dairy industry around the world. Probably the most well-known buffalo dairy is in the form of mozzarella cheese.

Reindeer and yaks (0.75) (2.5 months, 19 days) have also been bred for dairy, but not to the same extent as more common domesticated dairy animals such as cows.

Vanilla DF reasons I don't consider my more unusual dairy mods to be 'meme' mods:

Tapirs (0.2) (7 months). What? Why? If you thought cat milking was weird, then I don't know how you can handle vanilla DF. This almost seems like it might be a typo when copying in a new creature file in the game. I could find no evidence that literally anyone has ever convincingly domesticated a tapir species, let alone actually milked one.

Kangaroo (0.2) (1 year). They are a marsupial, so the mechanics alone of trying to obtain kangaroo's milk, boggles the mind. However, they are native to Australia, so I hesitate to claim that no one has ever actually milked one.

---

And that concludes the explanations for the new milking values for specific animals. Hopefully, at least one person other than me might find this vaguely interesting, but either way, if you made it this far, well done, and I hope you enjoy the mod.

(reserved for part 3)

(reserved for part 4 and future update info)