finally made it through the Victory Gauntlet to find no restock of signs or cake. so i thought i would restock it. went to make cake from scratch as a good player should and noticed no cows anywhere to get milk from.
I remembered Zedaph had a cake making minigame. no cows in the pen. figured I'll go restock that as well. even after several stacks of rockets, it still took what seemed forever to find just 2 free roaming cows anywhere near Hermitcraft civilization as well as in any base. only ones i've found free roaming were north/west of the Crastle. the first one I found around -2500/surface/1600, the second one around -2600/surface/1050.
Sadly easily found a few free roamers around Docm77's village starter base and had totally forgot about XB's barn/zoo section just north of Decked Out. did eventually find a farm near Hypno's area as well around -1000/surface/350
tl;dr if you need cows for anything look north of Decked Out