False positives while tracking

[Sjustus548]

I decided to pick up the Animal Tracking perk so I could find animals easier for the group but I'm finding two problems with it so far.  The first is that there is a distinct lack of animals around.  99% of the time it comes back as not finding any tracks.  It seems like the animal spawns have been greatly reduced for A19.  The other problem is that I'm getting a lot of false positives.  It will come up with the buff saying that I have found an animal but none will appear on my compass or map.  To get it cleared out I have to stay uncrouched for the full 20s and then when I try again it comes back with not finding anything.  Anyone else having issues with this perk or is it just something on my end?

[ElCabong]

I am not having any of these issues. When I put one point into tracking animals I quit having trouble finding meat.  When is the last time you generated a new map? I have had various problems using old random gen maps.

[theFlu]

I do see some false positives occasionally, I'm thinking it might be range related - if an animal is just around the detection range, the icon doesn't show while the buff does. My suspicion comes from the fact that sometimes I can find an animal by moving around a bit. Only sometimes, but there's quite a lot of ground to cover at the detection border, so I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up missing most of these by moving to a wrong direction.

[Sjustus548]

6 hours ago, ElCabong said:

I am not having any of these issues. When I put one point into tracking animals I quit having trouble finding meat.  When is the last time you generated a new map? I have had various problems using old random gen maps.

This map is only two or three weeks old so I'm hoping I don't need to generate a new one already lol.  

 

6 hours ago, theFlu said:

I do see some false positives occasionally, I'm thinking it might be range related - if an animal is just around the detection range, the icon doesn't show while the buff does. My suspicion comes from the fact that sometimes I can find an animal by moving around a bit. Only sometimes, but there's quite a lot of ground to cover at the detection border, so I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up missing most of these by moving to a wrong direction.

That's what I'm starting to think it might be.  I'm going to have to do some testing to see how far out the map and compass icons disappear.

[Sjustus548]

So I did some testing.  I put a doe in an enclosure and marked off 10 spaces up to 100m.  While tracking the doe it will despawn at the 50m mark.  While not tracking the doe there is a 95% chance that it will despawn at the 50m as well but occasionally it will make it to the full 100m.  Strangely if I turn off the AI the deer will always make it to the full 100m without despawning.  I'm wondering if there is a setting I need to adjust to make it to where they don't despawn at such a short range.

[Boidster]

13 hours ago, Sjustus548 said:

It seems like the animal spawns have been greatly reduced for A19. 

Quite the opposite, actually. Respawn delay has been reduced from 21 days to 1 day. Animal Tracker ought to be one of the more valuable early perks. RNG might be abusing you for no good reason, as it does from time to time.

 

A19

<biome name="pine_forest">
    <spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="1" time="Any" entitygroup="WildGameForest" spawnDeadChance="0" />
 

A18

<biome name="pine_forest">
    <spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="21" time="Any" entitygroup="FriendlyAnimalsForest" spawnDeadChance="0" />
 

 

[Sjustus548]

55 minutes ago, Boidster said:

Quite the opposite, actually. Respawn delay has been reduced from 21 days to 1 day. Animal Tracker ought to be one of the more valuable early perks. RNG might be abusing you for no good reason, as it does from time to time.

 

A19

<biome name="pine_forest">
    <spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="1" time="Any" entitygroup="WildGameForest" spawnDeadChance="0" />
 

A18

<biome name="pine_forest">
    <spawn maxcount="1" respawndelay="21" time="Any" entitygroup="FriendlyAnimalsForest" spawnDeadChance="0" />
 

 

Ahh thanks for pointing that out.  I noticed the "invisibleAnimal" and "invisibleAnimalEnemy" have a high probably of spawning instead of a real animal which is probably reducing the number of animals we are seeing spawn.  The "invisibleAnimalEnemy" has almost a 10x more likely chance to spawn than the wolf, bear, or direwolf in the forest biome.  As for the regular animals it has a slightly higher chance to spawn than the rabbit or chicken but a 50x higher chance to spawn than the boar, stag, doe, and wolf.  I'm not sure what these rates were, or if they were even present, in A18 but this is the first time I've noticed them.