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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Dallman" data-source="post: 9433976" data-attributes="member: 6999616">Assuming you mean the full sense of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastoralism" target="_blank">pastoralism</a>, with no crop-growing, just herding animals, the difficulty is that you have very few people, and they have to stay on the move or their herds run out of food and die. It's much easier to develop craft industries if people can stay in one place and mine coal and ores. You can have a separate group that stays in one place, makes stuff, and trades it for food, but they are in a very precarious position. If there's a drought and the herds are thinned out, the pastoralists will put keeping their families alive ahead of trading food for metalwork, and the craftsmen starve. I think this only works as an aftermath of the collapse of an industrial society: the remaining industry is largely automated, including the sources of its energy and raw materials, and the people are wandering herders, who have some way to convince the automated factory to give them stuff. This may result in some odd uses of industrial production, like armour made out of wire from paperclips, or a vast supply of small ceramic knives, but swords being much cruder.</blockquote>