To harvest milk from your cows, you’ll need to keep your cows happy.
And sometimes they won’t give you anything when you try to milk them after your daily feeding routine.
So why does milking fail every once in a while? There are many factors that determine if your cow will produce milk or not, along with the product’s quality.
You can figure out if your cow can produce milk each day by checking their profile in the Animal Relationships menu.
The third icon will be crossed out if milk is not available.
It can get confusing because sometimes the issue can be as simple as forgetting to feed them, or an in-game bug that can’t be explained.
But we’ve made this list to clarify the most common issues for why cows won’t give milk in FoMT – and solutions on how to fix each problem!
1. You Aren’t Feeding Them Every Day (Or You Missed a Feeding)
From the time you buy your first cow, you’ll be reminded that they need to be fed every day with fodder. This ensures that they’ll grow up and mature into cows that will ideally produce one jug of milk daily.
However, you might forget to feed them with the stress of keeping up with all your farm chores! Sometimes, leaving them out in the field to graze isn’t enough.
A cow will not produce milk if they haven’t eaten at least one piece of fodder the day before.
A couple of things can prevent your cow from grazing.
- The grass patch might be blocked off by boulders or debris that the cows can’t get through. Try optimizing your field layout before letting your cows outside.
- Another possibility is that you’ve run out of grass, and they can’t find enough to eat for the day.
During Summer and Winter, you’ll get a message at the start of the day when you try to go outside. It will say that it’s too windy or snowy to work on the farm, and you can’t do anything but go back to sleep.
In this case, it’s inevitable that you won’t be able to feed your cows. You won’t be able to harvest milk the following day, but you can continue to feed them as normal.
The day after you start feeding them again, they’ll be able to produce milk.
The best way to ensure that your cows are fed is to simply hand-feed them.
Or if that takes up too much time, you can also place the fodder in the feeding troughs and they’ll eat it automatically.
2. You Aren’t Petting or Brushing Them
Increasing your friendship level with your cows is always a must!
If your cow is unhappy, it won’t give you any milk.
Regularly brush your cows and talk to them to make sure you’re keeping those friendship points up. Having more hearts with your cows will also let you harvest higher quality products, so they sell for a higher price.
3. Your Cow Isn’t Mature Enough
Just to cover all the bases here, it might be possible that your cow hasn’t fully matured yet.
Calves that were just born or freshly bought from Mugi won’t be able to give you milk until they grow up.
Raising them can take anywhere between 9-14 days, so just be patient and give them attention every day!
To check if your cow is fully mature, just look at their profile in the Animal Relationships tab again. A cow will have different descriptions depending on their age.
- Immature calf: “A young cow. Once fully mature, it’ll produce Milk.”
- Mature cow: “A mature cow. The more it likes me, the larger size Milk it produces.”
Or you could always just look at how big they are! A young calf is already pretty big and round, but adults are even bigger.
4. Your Cow Turned Into a Turnip Machine
This sounds like a joke, but it can actually happen.
Reddit user u/justboughthisthing posted a video clip on the Story of Seasons subreddit, asking why their cows were producing turnips.
They were milking their cows, as usual. But to their surprise, instead of the cows dropping a jug of milk, a turnip started popping up from the floor instead!
This baffled a lot of players in the community, but later on it was discovered that the glitch only happens if you’re using a certain mod.
Apparently, using the “Fast Tool Charging” feature in this trainer cheat mod is the culprit. Equipping the milker while it’s enabled will cause the turnip bug.
If you don’t have any mods installed, you’ll probably never experience this bug anyway. But if you find that your cows have turned into turnip machines overnight, just turn off any mods you have running and they’ll be back to producing milk as they should.
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Story of Seasons: Friends of Mineral Town
- 4 Reasons Why Your Cows Aren’t Giving Milk in SoS: FoMT