How do I get live birth animals to live longer?

[Geawiel]

I'm breeding doggos and spicy cats.  I'd like to be able to play some BG3 and come back and check for the stats I want every couple hours.  I go back and there are no babies.  I think they're dying before I can check again.  How can I get them to live long enough to sort through them on a private server?

[Penguin73]

A baby's ability to hold weight when first born is very limited.  This limits how much food it can hold.  So in the beginning you must stay close and constantly feed it a few pieces at a time. As it grows it will be able to hold more food, and you can walk away for longer periods of time.  It won't eat from a trough until it is 10% mature.  If you have new babies and you're logging out for a couple hours to play something else...they will die every time.

[Pipinghot]

5 hours ago, Geawiel said:

I'm breeding doggos and spicy cats.  I'd like to be able to play some BG3 and come back and check for the stats I want every couple hours.  I go back and there are no babies.  I think they're dying before I can check again.  How can I get them to live long enough to sort through them on a private server?

You either have to take care of them like Penguin said, or find a mod that will feed babies for you.

[GrumpyBear]

On ASE, we can use maewings to feed unclaimed babies by having an unclaimed maewing by them.  Since they are both unclaimed, they are in the same tribe.  So this is a way to keep babies alive until you get back to base to claim them.

[Boyheat]

Set up timers to remind you of the birth time, about 5 minutes before they are due should give you plenty of time to finish whatever you're doing and get back into ARK.

[CityDuke]

Different possiblities on private server with own configuration, you can use in:

game.ini
BabyFoodConsumptionSpeedMultiplier=0.0

so babies have no hunger, also unclaimed not, further configurations:

TamedDinoCharacterFoodDrainMultiplier=0.0

gameusersettings.ino
RaidDinoCharacterFoodDrainMultiplier=0.0

so technical no dinos except wilds needs food (have advantages and disadvantages of course, for example with 0.0, phiomia force feed dont work anymore to make much poop, but with dung beetle no problem in ASA, because dinos poop normal without hunger too and dung beetle catch much poop)

Standard value is 1.0, so you can also make e.g. 0.5 or 0.25 for half or quarter hunger.
 

Another possiblity is set EggHatchSpeedMultiplier in game.ini to a very high value, maybe EggHatchSpeedMultiplier=1000.0 ... so babies (also normal babies, not only eggs of course) will born after some seconds and you dont need logout to play BG3 .

Edited March 19 by CityDuke