Very worth it. So much so that it’s like night and day with imprint and the bonus from that. Imprinting is either babysitting(in-game way,) or not(S+ way with a Nanny.) But even without a nanny you can get the imprint timer every 30 min or so and either hug the baby, walk the baby, or get lucky with having the kibble it asks for. Our timers are very sped up on the servers for mating, gestation/egg laying, hatch time, imprint times and growth time. Even with poor luck, you should hit 50% imprint if you watch your “needs care in xx:xx” messages for the baby.
Having a nanny requires honey, but that’s another road to go down and takes away all the need to babysit at all.
You can literally add 30% to resists and attack on a bred dino from imprinting. In addition a bred dino will be the average level between the parents. So by the time you get a Male and female up high level, you give the baby the benefit of even better starting stats as they will be high level to start.
The breeding you read about is a little different and considered the end game approach, but it’s where you breed and breed trying to perfect whatever stats you need from a dino (health, attack, weight carry, speed, etc.) Even if you eventually try that, S+ mod makes that easy too, with a hatchery and euthanasia gun.
The first time we bred Raptors it was like night and day afterward. I had to put the eggs down between two campfires to get them warm enough to hatch. Still worth it.
To get started, get a male and female of the same dino. Put down an S+ hitching post. Put them both near it and “hitch dino.” Set behavior to enable wandering for both. Wait. You’ll get a fertilized egg if it’s a dino, or a gestation period if it’s a mammal. To hatch the egg you place it down on the ground with the O key, while highlighting it in your inventory. When you place it, the egg will tell you if it is too hot or cold. If too cold (most common) you will need either a fireplace, campfire or two, or if you have a running generator at your base, an AC unit. If it’s too hot, you can take the egg to a place that is cooler, but you’ll need to protect the baby for quite a while, making it difficult for the few hours they are growing. Babies need lots of food while they grow, usually of the same type used to tame them. Once they pass out of baby stage (but still within Juvenile or adolescent), that food no longer needs to be manually fed, and can instead be fed to them via a feeding trough. Throughout those three cycles, you get care timers, and those are how you raise imprint amount.
