It's not a big deal in this situation, but as a general good practice don't let any event run every tick if it doesn't need to (event 5).
Basically your objects don't need to change unless sprite.cows changes, and sprite cows will only change on user input.
So in this case I'd probably make it a function that gets called as an action in events 9 and 10.
Normally though, I would put the whole thing as a subevent of a trigger if I could, similar to what I did in my example.
Fair enough. Based on your suggestions, I'm going to revisit the test project and see if I can make those changes as for now, the sprite cows will only be impacted by user input.
I noticed with your example that if I go down 1, the counter hits -1, then I hit plus 1, counter goes to 0 and the plus sign goes away. I didn't try changing your coding or figuring out why that occurred but used the overall design to model my latest code. Very eye/mind-opening example, as simple as it was.
I get what you're saying and it makes a lot of sense. I just need to do some more testing it appears. Thanks for the follow-up and your time/advisement!