Crimson Desert Guide

Farm animals disappearing from your ranch after the DLC update? Patch 2.04.04 fixes it

Goats, cows and chicks vanishing from your camp ranch since Charting the Unknown? Hotfix 2.04.04 fixes disappearing livestock. Update before you restock.

Mechanics · Updated

Steps

  1. Update to patch 2.04.04 and restart. Pearl Abyss's November 1 hotfix, version 2.04.04, fixes livestock registered at the farm disappearing. It's out on Steam (PC and Mac), PlayStation and the Epic Games Store. Xbox and the Mac App Store get it later. Fully close the game and relaunch it so the patch applies.
  2. Don't buy replacements until you've patched. Before the fix, players who restocked their pen saw the new animals vanish too, sometimes overnight. Hold off on spending camp money on livestock until you're on 2.04.04.
  3. Check your pen at camp. Go to your ranch and count your animals, or check the Manage Ranch menu. The patch notes don't say whether animals lost before the update come back, so see what's still there.
  4. Restock from Ben or catch new animals. If your pen is empty, talk to Ben, the rancher at camp, and choose Buy Livestock, or carry wild animals into the right-hand registration booth. Then check the pen again after leaving camp and coming back to make sure they stay.

The problem: since the Charting the Unknown update on October 29, animals have been vanishing from players’ camp ranches. One player had a full pen of 35 max-level goats and was down to 6 the next time they looked. Others went from around 30 animals to two or none. Buying new ones didn’t help: one player bought eight goats to rebuild their herd, and by the next morning those were gone as well. Another bought calves, chicks, lambs and goats over three days, stocked the feeder with grain, fruit and vegetables, and lost all of them too.

The fix: update the game. Pearl Abyss released hotfix 2.04.04 on November 1, and its patch notes say it fixes livestock registered at the farm disappearing. It’s live on Steam (PC and Mac), PlayStation and the Epic Games Store. Xbox and the Mac App Store versions are still in progress. The player who keeps the community bug list on the Steam forums took “farm animals keep disappearing” off the list once 2.04.04 came out.

What to do after you update

  1. Install 2.04.04, then fully close the game and launch it again.
  2. Go to your camp and check the pen or the Manage Ranch menu to see what’s left.
  3. Restock if you need to. Talk to Ben, the rancher at camp, and choose Buy Livestock. Bought animals go straight into the pen. You can also catch wild animals and carry them into the right-hand booth to register them. Here’s how to get animals to your ranch faster.
  4. Make sure they stay. Leave camp, fast travel somewhere, or reload your save, then come back and count again. That’s when animals were disappearing before the patch.

Will my lost animals come back?

The patch notes only say the disappearing has been fixed. They don’t say animals that were already gone will be restored, and nobody on Steam has reported getting their herd back yet. So expect to rebuild from whatever is left. If you have a save from before your animals vanished and you haven’t made much progress since, loading it after you’ve installed 2.04.04 is an option, but it hasn’t been confirmed to work.

Wait until you’re patched before you restock. On the old version, newly bought animals vanished just like the old ones, so buying now on Xbox or the Mac App Store, where the fix hasn’t landed yet, is likely to waste camp money.

Not the same as hungry animals

If your animals are all still there but babies won’t grow or nobody levels up, that’s a different problem. Animals need food to grow, and they only mature while you’re at the ranch. Keep the feeder in the middle of the pen stocked with grain, fruit or vegetables, or drop food straight on the ground in the pen, which they eat much faster.

Sources

This guide summarizes answers from these community threads. Credit goes to the players who worked it out.