Animals?

[Aiden]

Funny...I have no problem finding animals when I want....HOWEVER...I live in a pretty isolated area...in the mountains.

Of course, it could just be that I miss all the wild animals wandering around heavily human-populated areas IRL.

(this is not a "everything's okay because I have animals". It's more of a "there is a system to how they behave" post). If you are surrounded by totems, you're going to see a lot less animals.

[billpaustin]

I think the devs need to clear up what kind of game this is. If they want a reality simulator, with real terrain, and real animals, then nobody would ever fight any animals. In the forest this game is set in, there are no dangerous animals that you would ever fight. If they decided to say that all the original animals came back (ie, grizzlies and wolves), then grizzlies would be invincible and wolves would leave you alone. Only a grizzly would intentionally attack a full grown human, and they would always win.

So do they intend for us to do any real fighting against animals? Then it's a fantasy game. Or perhaps it is just hunting for animals, to get their skins? Then animals being scarce and hard to find makes sense. But the game doesn't play that way; stumble upon a bear and they attack. So it's a fantasy game, and bears are like LoTRO and WOW bears, just mobs to be killed that happen to look like bears.

In the real forest, you would never see a bear or a skunk, they come out at night and scavenge. They would come onto your property at night, but run if they saw a person. Deer and elk, on the other hand, will come right into your camp and browse in front of your face. The Indians in the Appalachians would clear circles in the woods, to make round meadows. That way they could shoot the deer from the edge of the circle. If we were hunting, things like this make sense. Make a place with food for an animal, and you can hunt them there.

So I think we need either realistic animals for hunting only, or we're playing a fantasy game and anything goes. Can't be both.

quick edit: if you come across a coyote and he attacks you, the game is a fantasy game. If the coyote runs away, it is realistic.

[MrDDT]

Funny...I have no problem finding animals when I want....HOWEVER...I live in a pretty isolated area...in the mountains.

Of course, it could just be that I miss all the wild animals wandering around heavily human-populated areas IRL.

(this is not a "everything's okay because I have animals". It's more of a "there is a system to how they behave" post). If you are surrounded by totems, you're going to see a lot less animals.

You would have a point however, its not the case. You might have animals in your area, because no one lives there and you have good spawns. However, its not the case like that other places. There is little reason for how animals are. Breeding isnt working right and they stack up in groups.

Ive seen spawns of animals near active tribes, which kill them everyday and never runs out the spawns.

Ive seen huge open areas with no totems, and 0 animals. Deer I cant find anywhere. Ive found about 20 deer and over 1000 bears. How does that work?

[Book]

Just totally speculating here but... if they said the non-aggressive animals run from and/or get eaten by the aggressive ones, would all the deer be in the mist due to bear over-population?

Definitely saw a shift by my homestead since coming back. Used to be mostly raccoons, then saw a bunch of squirrels (mean little critters), but since coming back it's only bears.

I haven't been hunting them down as I hope they'll grow and put up a better fight, or maybe yield more resources per... But I guess I could test it out. Wipe them out, keep them wiped, and see if anything comes out of the mist.

Of course, that doesn't address things like stacking and so on. That's a different story.

[mrwooj]

In game i live in a very unpopulated area, right in the mountains. The only really populated areas are around the lake, basically. I wander for large amounts of time and i rarely see creatures of any sort and i almost never see players. I have witnessed the fact that they do not reproduce properly, they stack on top of each other and will not separate, no matter how many times you try to entice them off each other. They do not move rationally, and they cannot cross water.

So, basically, i have witnessed that they are broken. YOU may have seen times when there were many in an area - so did I one time out of many times exploring. When i say many, i mean months, not days or weeks. There may be certain areas where they respawn or whatever, but i can tell you that for an area the size of about 5 zones there is very little creature activity.

I dont care about people saying "well, it is realistic that they stay out of sight, etc". Is it realistic that you eat raw fish when there is a campfire next to you? Is it realistic that you cannot swim underwater? Is it realistic that you fish without bait or lure? Is it realistic that you run like you have some physical defect? Is it realistic that you die and teleport back to your home with all your gear?

This is a game people! Realism is not the point. I want to play a game where there are PVE encounters. Tell me somebody who does not? Do you people want this game to succeed? The majority of people who play games and pay money want PVE encounters - and not ones that are many hours apart and far too easy.

For the good of this game, and possibly its long term success, we need animals in much larger numbers that are better distributed, have better AI and are much more of a challenge.

Anyone who defends the current situation is delusional IMHO.

[thurgond]

There are plenty of animal AI problems mentioned here that might take a while to fix, but there are two easy fixes that would help in the short term.

Currently animals are only reset occasionally, mostly on patch days. The long time between patches means that animals are reset only once or twice a month. Animals should be reset every patch day, even if there is no patch.

In the last change of animal AI some critters were set to not wander. If one of these critters is not killed soon after a reset, it will breed until there are too many critters there to kill. Instead of wanderers spawning wanderers and fixed spawning fixed, they should spawn the opposite type--wanderer spawns fixed and fixed spawns wanderer.

Fixing the "every critter isn't agro to every other" AI so we won't end up with nothing but bears after a few days should be a priority, but the above two fixes should be easy to implement quickly.

Ravelli

[mrwooj]

There are plenty of animal AI problems mentioned here that might take a while to fix, but there are two easy fixes that would help in the short term.

Currently animals are only reset occasionally, mostly on patch days. The long time between patches means that animals are reset only once or twice a month. Animals should be reset every patch day, even if there is no patch.

In the last change of animal AI some critters were set to not wander. If one of these critters is not killed soon after a reset, it will breed until there are too many critters there to kill. Instead of wanderers spawning wanderers and fixed spawning fixed, they should spawn the opposite type--wanderer spawns fixed and fixed spawns wanderer.

Fixing the "every critter isn't agro to every other" AI so we won't end up with nothing but bears after a few days should be a priority, but the above two fixes should be easy to implement quickly.

Ravelli

Hooray for Captain Spaulding!

One of my favourite movies, hehe.

Great suggestions.

I think making them able to cross water is essential too.

[jemmus]

Fixing the "every critter isn't agro to every other" AI so we won't end up with nothing but bears after a few days should be a priority, but the above two fixes should be easy to implement quickly.

Ravelli

I'm thinking this is part of the problem. (Bears do kill deer in the game-- got screens of it). The animal vs. animal eco-system is out of balance. The top predators (bears, maybe coyotes too?) are eating/driving off the deer and maybe raccoons and taking over whole zones. But they're still spawning/reproducing. Where in real nature their population would go down due to overpopulation and therefore lack of food. Think the animal vs. animal system needs some tweaking.
On a side note, recently seems like we have more "minor" animals around, such as cats, dogs, martens, squirrels, rats and hamsters. Maybe they're outside the game's food chain, or not integrated into it much.

[VeryWiiTee]

People always have to drive it to the utmost extreme point.

True animals do not like stone surfaces on the live server, them getting caught in-between zones should be fixed. (they do on stone surfaces just fine on the test server with the combat fixes, I saw no problem at all for them to chase me over it).

They are coded to stay away from very populated areas, I suspect this means online activity in an area as they don't mind deserted tribe areas with little to no activity and to chase/flee from other animals.
If you use reverse tactic you should find animals.
That is an alright basic AI concerning realism. Then you can always add that Mule Deers like bark from trees and areas with a water source nearby. That bears prefer to stay near bushes with berries, that raccoons love scrapyards and coyotes like open plains with lots of grass.
Coyotes hunt in flock and Mule Deers stay together in flocks. Bears primarily stay for themselves and only have cubs when they are a 'pack'.
- Problem was that people found animal density too low and the current AI with chasing/killing/fleeing probably works out to favour bears and coyotes.
(No animal can go extinct as they just go into hiding until the population is sustainable again).

They don't spawn unless Devs/Guides spawn them, they breed and move around. As far as I know. Revenants would spawn as they are dead and can't breed (?)

[Book]

and they cannot cross water.

Curious about this... I know for sure that I've seen bears cross water in the past. Had a bear chase me into a river, down the river, and then across the river.

So, is it all animals that cannot cross water or just some? Perhaps this no crossing of water was implemented with the last ai changes?

Been thinking for a while that there should be some way to get away from animals in a game with player-driven resource management. If a base population is needed for animals to breed(or remain out of hiding, same effect), and animals grow in difficulty as they age over time... I wouldn't want to kill every animal I come in contact with or mistakenly aggro.

Other ways to implement that, not really looking to debate if this is the best solution, just bringing it up. Other ideas of how to address that are cool too.