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Realistic Livestock RM - Overview

Realistic Livestock RM transforms the animal system in Farming Simulator 25. Instead of anonymous clusters, every animal is a unique individual with its own genetics, health history, and lifecycle.

Note: This documentation was generated with AI assistance and may contain inaccuracies. If you spot an error, please open an issue.

What Changes

Every Animal Is Unique

Each animal you buy or breed is tracked individually. They have a name tag, a birthday, and four or five genetic traits that make them different from every other animal in your herd. Two Holstein cows bought on the same day will produce different amounts of milk, eat different amounts of food, and sell for different prices.

Genetics

Every animal is born with genetic traits rated from Extremely Low to Extremely High - five for most species, four for pigs and horses, which have no Productivity trait:

  • Health - Surviving a disease, daily health, and longevity
  • Fertility - Breeding success rate
  • Productivity - Milk, egg, wool, and fleece output (cows, sheep, goats, chickens, alpacas only)
  • Quality - Sell price and meat value
  • Metabolism - Food consumption and weight gain

Offspring inherit traits from their parents, so selective breeding pays off over time. Dealer animals vary widely, and occasionally you'll find an exceptional one - or a dud.

See the Genetics Guide for the full rating scale and breeding tips.

Realistic Breeding

Reproduction requires a male and female of the same species in the same pen. Each species has different breeding ages, gestation periods, and litter sizes:

Animal Gestation Typical Offspring
Cattle 10 months 1 calf (twins uncommon)
Pigs 4 months ~12 piglets (up to 16)
Sheep / Goats 5 months 2 lambs (twins usual)
Horses 11 months 1 foal
Chickens 2 months ~5 chicks (up to 12)
Alpacas 11 months 1 young (twins uncommon)

Males and females have different fertility windows - boars retire from breeding at just 4 years while sows can breed until 8 years. Cows lactate for 10 months after giving birth, during which they produce milk but need more food and water.

Artificial Insemination is available through the livestock menu if you don't want to keep a male.

See the Breeding Guide for full details per species.

Animal Management

Individual animals can be monitored, marked, and castrated:

  • Monitoring - Put a monitor on an animal to see its health, weight, food, water and straw use, and production. Without one, these stay hidden on the Manage tab, on the HUD and in the CSV export. A monitor costs a monthly fee per animal (cow $21.60, pig $9, sheep $15.75, horse $30, chicken $1.80, alpaca $15.30). A removed monitor comes off at the start of the next month, and that month is still billed. The Monitor page in the ESC menu lists your pens with their monitored animals, fees and totals, and can apply or remove monitors for a whole pen.
  • Marking - Mark animals for visual identification in your herd
  • Castration - Castrate males for a small sell price bonus. Castrated animals grow faster but cannot breed. They keep their genetics; only their fertility reads Infertile. Roosters cannot be castrated.
  • HUD boxes - Look at an animal in a pen to see its details on the HUD, with a Genetics box, a Diseases box if it is showing symptoms, and a Monitor box if it has a monitor.

In multiplayer you need the trade animals farm permission to monitor, mark, rename or castrate an animal, or to treat, vaccinate or cull it.

Diseases

All ten of the mod's diseases:

Disease Affects Treatable? Key Impact
Mastitis Cows, Goats Yes Stops milk production (lactating animals only)
CVM Cattle (genetic) No Carrier cows produce extra milk while Diseases is on, but affected animals are sick for life
Foot and Mouth Cows, Sheep, Goats, Pigs Yes Spreads fast; milk severely reduced, major price loss
PED Pigs Yes Worst in young piglets; drastically more liquid manure
Avian Flu (LPAI) Chickens Yes Egg production severely reduced while a bird is sick
Avian Flu (HPAI) Chickens No Rare but almost always fatal; cull sick birds
BRD Cattle Yes Worst in calves; less milk
Pulpy Kidney Sheep, Goats, Alpacas Yes (cures about half the time) Never spreads, but high fatality, worst in lambs, kids and young alpacas
Colic Horses Yes (cures about half the time) Major price loss; never spreads
Footrot Cattle, Sheep, Goats Yes (cures about 9 times in 10) Never fatal, but lingers for months untreated and cuts milk and wool

Diseases can spread between animals in the same pen, but never pass between pens. An animal that recovers from a disease is immune to it for a time. Five diseases can be prevented with a vaccine - see Vaccination.

See the Disease Guide for prevention and treatment strategies.

Death

Animals can die from:

  • Old age - Each species has a natural lifespan. Old-age deaths start at about 5 years for chickens and about 25 years for horses, and most animals die well before the maximum (8 years for chickens, 30 for horses), which only the best health genetics get close to
  • Low health - Unhealthy animals face increasing death risk
  • Accidents - Random events affected by weather conditions. An accident pays about a third of the animal's sale value; chickens pay nothing
  • Disease - A sick animal can die of its disease (see the Disease Guide)
  • Birth - A stillbirth can occasionally cost the mother her life too, which is only a real risk with poor health genetics (see the Breeding Guide)

Death mechanics can be fully disabled or adjusted in the mod settings.

Configurable Settings

Almost everything can be tuned to your preference:

  • Toggle death on/off and set the Diseases difficulty (Off / Easy / Normal / Hard / Very hard)
  • Switch individual diseases off with Choose Diseases, so no new cases of them start
  • Scale food consumption up or down
  • Adjust accident probability
  • Control dealer stock size
  • Choose which breeds and age groups the animal dealer offers at all
  • Set how good - and how expensive - the dealer's animals are (Budget / Standard / Premium)
  • Customise ear tag colours
  • Display genetics values in animal names (short or detailed format)
  • Export animal data to CSV
  • Choose between individual event messages or daily summaries

All of these live in the RL Menu's Settings tab - the in-game menu's Game Settings page has an Open Settings button (under "Realistic Livestock") that takes you straight there. See the Settings Reference for all options.

Livestock Menu

Open the RL Menu with Right Shift + O in-game - or, from the ESC menu's Animals page, select a pen and press R ("Manage Animals"). It has eight tabs:

  • Buy - Purchase animals from the dealer with full genetics preview
  • Sell - Sell animals back to the dealer
  • Move - Transfer animals between your husbandries, or deliver them to a butcher (an Extended Production Point). A butcher refuses sick animals and animals outside its age range.
  • Manage - View detailed stats, genetics, and pedigree (mother, father and number of children) for each animal. Health, weight and production show only on an animal with a monitor. The pen pane also estimates how many months the pen's food will last, and turns orange, then red, when only a day or two of feed is left.
  • Artificial Insemination - Browse and buy stored semen for artificial breeding without keeping males
  • Messages - Track births, deaths, diseases, and other events. A red triangle marks a problem you can still act on, such as a disease showing, a treatment that failed or an overcrowded pen; an orange one marks a setback such as a death or a failed insemination; a green circle marks good news such as births and cures. Routine entries have no icon, and the colours follow the game's colour-blind setting.
  • Herdsman - Automate daily herd chores with rules: sell, buy, move, castrate, name, inseminate, or look after your horses - applied to the animals a saved filter picks, in the pens you choose. See the Herdsman guide.
  • Settings - Adjust every RLRM option: the death toggle and the Diseases level, food scaling, dealer stock size, how good the dealer's animals are, which breeds and age groups the dealer offers, ear tag colours, genetics display, how many animals are shown in 3D per pen, CSV export, and more. This tab also hosts the saved filter editor.

The menu shows fewer tabs when you open it somewhere else. At the animal dealer you get Buy, Sell, Manage and Insemination. With a livestock trailer at the dealer you get Buy and Sell. With a trailer anywhere else, such as at a pen or a butcher, you get a single Transfer tab for loading and unloading animals.

Saved filters let you narrow the Buy, Sell, Move, and Manage lists to just the animals you care about - and they are how the Herdsman targets animals. Press F on any of those screens to cycle them. See the Saved Filters guide.

Controls

Key Action Where
Right Shift + O Open RL Menu In-game
R Open Manage Animals Animal menu
A Select / deselect Buy, Sell and Move tabs, checklist dialogs
S Select / deselect section Choose Animals For Sale
X Mark animal Manage tab
M Toggle monitor Manage tab
I Insemination Manage tab (females only)
C Castrate Manage tab (males only, not roosters)
D Disease treatment Manage tab
N Rename animal Manage tab
F Cycle saved filter Animal lists

Right Shift + O, R, A, S, M, I, D, N and F can be remapped in the game's input settings. X, C and Space are fixed menu keys.

Map & Mod Support

RLRM works on virtually any map out of the box - it does not need to be on a list. The maps below are special only because they add their own custom animal types or breeds; for those, the mod includes built-in support and auto-detects the installed map version so the custom animals also get full breeding and reproduction. On any other map, the standard animals just work.

  • Hof Bergmann - Ducks, geese, cats, rabbits, alpacas, and quail fully supported with breeding, genetics, and reproduction. See the dedicated page for supported versions and known limitations (pasture bulls, dogs).
  • Witcombe - UK breeds (Jersey, Gloucestershire Old Spot, Texel, Suffolk, Blue Faced Leicester) plus rabbit keeping, fully supported with breeding, genetics, and reproduction. See the dedicated page for supported versions and the Hereford heritage profile.
  • Le Mechet - French breeds (Charolais, Montbeliarde, Simmental, Vosgienne) fully supported with breeding, genetics, and reproduction, using the map's native 3D models. See the dedicated page for supported versions and caveats.

If a map updates to a version that hasn't been tested yet, you'll see a warning dialog when the game starts. The dialog includes a link to report any problems.

  • Extended Production Point (EPP) - Basic support for moving animals to EPP butchers

Looking for more breeds or animal types? See the FAQ for what's possible.

Species Factsheets

Each species has a detailed factsheet with breed comparisons, production ranges, and pricing:

Guides