It's been awhile since we talked about Gazmik Fizzwidget's little trinkets. As I promised in this week's Macro Anatomy, here is an addon designed specifically for Hunters and their pets.

Feed-O-Matic handles feeding your pet, automating the process of opening your bag, finding food and stuffing into your pets face. The part I find most useful is the reminder it creates for feeding my hungry wolf. I've configured the addon to create an emote when I feed my pet, just so everyone knows how humane I am in my treatment of a pet I ask to fight on my behalf. (Ironic I know, but it helps me sleep at night.)

You can configure this addon to avoid foods needed for quests, anything that provides a "Well-Fed" buff and/or is used for Cooking recipes. You have complete control over what food your pet is allowed to eat, through a series of slash commands, so with just a bit of configuration Feed-O-Matic can streamline the entire process.

Come back after the break for some tips on setting up your new pet-feeding addon.If you're using the default unit frames, your pet will have a happiness icon, which changes to reflect your pet's current emotional state. (Based on how often you bother to feed the poor thing.) This icon is one of your options when using Feed-O-Matic, which turns this icon into a simple two-click button. Left-clicking the icon will feed your pet, right-clicking will open the Feed-O-Matic options interface. From there, you can tell the addon which foods to avoid, how much bag space to keep open and how to notify you when your pet is craving some Snausages.


You can change notification to warn you when your pet is Content, Unhappy or not at all. I prefer to be notified when my pet becomes Content, which keeps it happy and dealing 125% of normal damage. There aren't a tremendous amount of options to worry about. However, there are some important slash commands you should become familiar with, here's a list from the workshop of Gazmik Fizzwidget himself:

• /feedomatic (or /fom or /feed) : Opens Feed-O-Matic's Options panel.
  
• Also /feedomatic (or /fom or /feed) where can be any of the following:
• help - Print this helplist.
• status - Check current settings
• reset - Reset to default settings
• add <diet> <name> - Add food to the list for a specific diet (meat, fish, fruit, etc).
• remove <diet> <name> - Remove food from the list.
• show <diet> - Show food list for a specific diet (or for all).

An example of using with would be

• /fom remove [Pickled Kodo Feet]

Note that the item name is actually an item link, which means you need to shift-click the food to add or remove it from your pet's diet. (In the case you don't want your pet eating your treats from the Darkmoon Faire.) If you happen to use Fizzwidget's Linkerator, you could type /link <item name> to get a link for the food if it's not in your inventory.

There are two other ways to feed your pet; a keybinding, and a macro. To set a key to feed your pet using Feed-O-Matic, you just go to your keybindings menu and assign a binding. To use the macro, you simply create the macro and place it on an action bar for use. Here is the script for the Feed-O-Matic macro:

• /click FOM_FeedButton

Copy and paste that into your new macro, toss it onto your actionbar and you're ready to go.

The macro and keybinding are handy if you use unit frame addons like Pitbull or Xperl, which don't work with Feed-O-Matic. (In my experience.) I couldn't get the pet happiness icon method to work with HUDs either, so kudos to Fizzwidget for including other methods.

There you have it folks, an automated pet-feeding machine you can implement to save time and the hassle of pet care. I'll share one more Hunter addon on Tuesday and we'll move on to other things. Dismissed.

Tags: feed-o-matic, fizzwidget, fizzwidgets-hunters-..., FOM, gazmik-fizzwidget, hunter-pets, pet-care, pet-feeding

Filed under: Hunter, Analysis / Opinion, Tips, Tricks, Add-Ons, Features, AddOn Spotlight