Wyvern egg overhaul

[ACGaming]

• No more killing wyverns for eggs
• Similar to ostrich egg laying, but more rare and natural

[Paulu2015]

Oh I very like the idea ! ^-^ I think its could be amazing if they laying egg on hay block if a player set some of this blocks in the wyvern l'air with the natural laying of course

[BandanaHafoc]

I put this in issue #191 but I'll put it here as well. This version contains corrections.
Nest blocks / features could spawn throughout the WyvernLair. When a player throws meat down near a wyvern, they'll eat it and fly back to a nest site to lay an egg. You can also use meat to distract them if they're chasing you. The player has to follow the wyvern all the way to the site (might want to give the wyvern a potion effect or Glowing to make it easier to track) and stay away from it while it lays the egg so it doesn't go hostile. Then the player has to take the egg before it hatches, like with ostriches, but the wyvern goes hostile when they do, again like with ostriches. How's that for a challenge?
Alternately, the player would wait for the wyvern to leave before taking the egg. It makes a tidy little stealth challenge in the Lair. In any case, you don't have to worry about finding two wyverns to breed with each other - plenty of reptiles reproduce asexually.
(Bolding this point to reference later.) Some nest blocks can also generate with wyvern eggs on them, like how some ostriches spawn (or spawned?) with eggs nearby. Those will be of a random variety, or you could have an egg spawn with the corresponding wyvern variety also in or on the nest.

I can imagine the pathfinding working something like how birds used to go to trees (maybe they still do this) - the fed wyvern searches for a block or feature within 250 blocks (or something like that, I'm just making up numbers) to lay its egg, then flies to it and stays close to it for the next two minutes, with female ostrich behavior from there. If you don't give the wyvern a potion effect, you could probably just copy and paste the bird code (pathfinding) and the ostrich code (laying an egg and getting mad if someone picks it up), just adjusting trees for the block or feature and laying ostrich eggs for the appropriate wyvern species egg.

Here are some ways to make this harder if you want a better challenge for the players (each one will be nasty to code, though):

• Wyverns don't just leave their eggs alone, they have to be distracted with something. This could be more meat (they'll eat it even if they can't breed, like with BigCats) or a block of gold, to go with the European dragon's greedy nature... not that wyverns are European dragons.
• Wyverns only go after live food. They have to kill a mob and then eat its meat before they lay an egg. This basically forces the player to bring some sort of egg or a Pet Amulet into the Lair with them.
  (These next ones are to make mother wyverns extra exciting like they originally were, replacing their high egg drop rate with something else.)
• Only mother wyverns lay eggs. You have to find a mother wyvern and then do the stuff in the first paragraph. The type of wyvern egg she lays is random.
• Same as the previous point, but the type of wyvern that hatches is influenced by nearby blocks (jungle/acacia leaves/wood, vines/lily pads, sand, ice, stone/coarse dirt, water, stone/deep wyvstone). This means that you have some control over which kind of wyvern you get. Wyvern eggs would be generic and hatch a variant based off random chance otherwise. This would work something like how some eggs check for light sources, but checking if there are influencing blocks nearby instead.
• Same as the italicized point, but to make it more similar to ostriches, you need to breed a mother wyvern while there's a non-mother wyvern around. She'll pathfind to the nearest other wyvern (logging its wyvern type), then go to the nearest nest site and lay an egg matching that other wyvern's form, or rarely (10-33% chance) a mother wyvern egg. Alternately, she'll only lay a mother wyvern egg if there are NO OTHER WYVERNS around (within at least 100 blocks). That would mean killing the others, leading them off with food or just running for your life and losing them somehow. The only reason to do that last option would be if wyverns lay eggs on nest blocks and those blocks are obtainable (like if they're just hay blocks like Paulu suggested). A tamed mother wyvern would be super useful in that case because she could lay eggs outside of the lair and she wouldn't attack people who pick them up.

If you want wyvern egging to be completely natural, two suggestions. Option 1: Every 20 minutes, a wyvern has a chance (10% for non-mothers and 33% for mothers to match their original rates) to go lay an egg on its own. The player follows the wyvern that makes a beeline for a random location, or else needs to camp out near a wyvern nest and hope that a wyvern picks that one for its egg. Pros: Easy to understand and easier to code, plus mother wyverns are still super awesome. Cons: the player has absolutely no control over which kind of wyvern they get unless they catch one, trap it in a nest, and wait for what might be multiple weeks (or tracks one for that same period of time). Option 2: Use one of the last two points under Ways to make this harder", but every 20 minutes, a mother wyvern has a 20-25% chance of trying to lay an egg or breed with a non-mother wyvern. Pros: It's a lot easier to figure out when a wyvern is laying an egg. Mother wyverns are extra exciting, but other species are still cool. Egg laying is SUPER RARE since mother wyverns are SUPER RARE themselves - you might want to hit one with a name tag. Cons: The player has very little control over which kind of wyvern they get... unless you use the first option and fill all the nearby nests with the proper blocks.

Sorry that this post is so long, I kept thinking of alternate ideas while I was writing this. Let me know what you think!