Addon Spotlight: Livestock
Every weekend (well, almost every weekend), Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here.
Mounts and vanity pets are a bigger part of many people's WoW than ever before. They don't take up any space in our bags (yay!), there are achievements for them (meh!), and there are a lot of cool ones to find (even if the raven mount keeps eluding me and the rest of my guildies). However, Blizzard's interface for these summonable beasts leaves a lot to be desired.
Livestock is here to fill that gap. It aims to handle all your vanity-pet and mount related needs, with the following features:
Buttons to choose a pet or mount to summon
Buttons to summon a random pet or mount
Can ensure that you always have a pet out (i.e. resummon on zoning in to an instance, ressing, etc.)
"Smart mount" feature to choose flying/ground mounts as appropriate
Keybindings for all important function
This last feature is the one that makes it viable for me; if I have to click to mount up, I'm not going to use your mod.
I'm not going to lie; I tried the mod out for mounts, and it's not my favorite for that purpose. I prefer my old standard Mounted, which generates a dynamic macro for mounting. My reason for that is a little nit-picky: if you move on your ground mount to an area that allows flying (like Krasus' Landing in Dalaran), and then press the mount button, Mounted will stick you right on your flyer. Livestock, by contrast, dismounts you on the first press in that situation; pressing the mount button again will then give you wings.
However, where Livestock really excels is for vanity pets. It lets you build a checklist of what pets you want it to be allowed to summon (for instance, I can exclude my Tiny Snowman, because he requires a snowball), it'll make sure you always have a pet out, and overall it just works, like a mod should. I probably won't keep it installed, because Mounted handles my mounts and I don't really care about vanity pets for the most part. The exception my lucky Dark Whelpling if I think a boss fight is going to be a close thing, but that's easy enough to summon manually.
Still, I know this mod fills a need people have (because they've been writing in about it), so if you're a mount and/or pet fan, and need something to help you tame the madness, give Livestock a whirl.
[thanks to a tipster who asked to remain anonymous for this one]
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