PetFeeder

The biggest pain in the ass for a hunter with a pet is cleaning up the poop.  The NEXT biggest pain is feeding the pet.  The clicking that you must do for a single feeding is enough to induce a repetative motion injury.  PetFeeder comes to the rescue by automatically feeding your pet and keeping them at a threshold you set based on the pet’s happiness.

The icon that you see most of the time is a small one.  It contains a lot of info, however.  From left to right: A pet icon that contains the level of your pet, as well as a level bar (which you can’t see in the pic because my pet had so little XP into it’s current level).  The current happiness level of your pet, with a loyalty bar, and finally, a food button that shows the next food your pet will eat, and the total number of food items you have allocated for your pet.  In the example pic, I have 63 food items, NOT necessarily 63 apples.

 By clicking on the mini-bar, you can bring up the main PetFeeder window, and this is where the configuration can begin.  One nice thing this add-on offers is the ability to turn itself off.  That way, you can choose to feed your pet on your own terms, if the need arises. 

The FOODS tab is where you get a list of all consumables in your bags, and are then able to approve, or ‘dislike’ a particular food for your pet.  By clicking on a consumable item, it will ask you if it is approved or not, and you can then approve it.  Don’t worry, if your pet doesn’t like a particular food, it will move it to the ‘unliked foods’ tab automatically for you.

You can also set your happiness threshold that you want your pet to maintain as well as tell it to not use your food that provides you with buffs, a nice extra.

 The approved foods tab is exactly that, your list of approved foods.  To remove a food from the approved list, just click it, and it moves to the ‘unliked’ list.

Finally, there is the unliked foods tab, which is simply a list of all of the consumables that your pet won’t eat, including the one’s you approved, but your pet chose not to eat.

It’s a pretty basic add-on with a lot of power.  When you press the FEED PET button, it will feed your pet up to the threshold that you had set.  Pretty nifty.  No more multiple clicks for hours on end.

All in all, I found this to be a very useful add-on.  There wasn’t any documentation with it, and the description on the download site left a lot to be desired.  For instance, when you get a new pet, it starts going through your consumables as little icons on the screen, that you must click through to approve or disapprove.  It took a minute to figure that out, and is still somewhat confusing, considering I end up coming into these screens to reconfigure everything anyway.  Perhaps just a simple ‘You have a new pet, configure PetFeeder?’ dialog would be better.

You can grab it here.

I give it 3 and a half Murlocs.  It’s a basic add-on that is slightly confusing, yet still very helpful.  It would benefit from a help text, or readme file included within the zip.

24 September 2006 | 3.5 murlocs, Class | Comments