Has anybody else noticed an absurdly high animal spawn rate?

[Stranded_Napkin]

So, I will preface this with the fact that I have added a few small mods. The mods DO NOT touch spawns though. Just a vehicle storage mod, drone storage mod, stacknumber increase mod, a mod to extend loot timers so they don't despawn, and a mod that I made that added two new endgame quests. I made an Adams Family treasure quest where you get doubloons and a Treasure of Sparta treasure quest with kinda everything. Both are meant to be extreme endgame loot. Simply added two treaures, no touching of spawns, just added them to the list.

 

Now, in regards to the weirdness I've been seeing. The forest biome doesn't have a lot of big animals during the day. Night time is slightly different as you might see one or two. My map has 4 traders in the winter biome though. That biome is like a freaking zoo. I see mountain lions, bears, and dire wolves every 30 meters or so. I don't know if this is because I just roll on past them and the game has its quirk where it just respawns the animal again in a different location or what. I do know that I've had three of the things spawned in at the same time. I had over 2500 meat at one point. I play on Nomad so the bears aren't too difficult to kill, and the others have never been that bad. They are easy enough to deal with but it does feel like the spawn rate is way high. I mean, games have their weird hiccups and who knows maybe one of the values listed in one of the mods did it. It would be weird as like I said none touch spawns but I just feel like an oversight like this wouldn't have gotten past the devs so I'm hesitant to rule it out.

[Ornias]

It is there mea culpa for borking the new farming scheme. Don't roast me Roland, pretty please. 

[Krougal]

The hostiles are very common now and they just lend themselves to becoming food since it's you or them. It's a tough call to nerf them or not. The amount we get per animal is already pretty small, especially when it isn't like it's free. Bears especially a @%$#ton of ammo and dangerous. Should there be less of them? Maybe.

Boar and deer not so much. I rarely see them. Very little of my meat comes from either in A20. It has been a long time since I played A19 but I hunted both a lot and I think I got most of my meat from them.

Chickens and rabbit seem common enough I suppose but I seldom can be bothered with them unless they all but run across my path, but only because the bear/cougar/wolf deliver themselves to me.

 

[Death Wish]

Yup! way too many bears and wolfs, esp 1st week. After that it doesnt matter

[Pernicious]

Wish I had saved the screenshot, but I had the carcass of a bear, a mountain lion, two wolves and a stag when my team sent me to hunt in the snow biome. This was literally a few metres into the snow from the forest one.

 

It has made starvation less of a thing if you're into keto or the carnivore diet.

[Viktoriusiii]

A19:
A: "I am going hunting for meat!"

B: "Really? Ok but don't stay away for more than 2 days!"


A20:
A: "I am going hunting for meat!"
B: "Ok! Scrap some cars when you already head to the city!"

If you want meat, the city (especially snow biome) is the place to go. Non snow are rabbits and chickens en masse, snow biome has every animal, many of them big ones.

You come home with 2000 meat after a short hunting trip.

[ricp]

I can clear out the area around my base and days will go by without me seeing a single animal, either large or small. That's in the temperate biome, in the snow it's like they chuck bears, and whatever those cats are meant to be, at you like there is no tomorrow.

 

I'd perhaps like to see that evened out a little, but if it's a case that "if you want to hunt, you need to do it in the snow biome" then I'd be happy with that.

 

Got to say, since it's inclusion in the game I have never once put points into the tracker perk.

 

 

 

[Boidster]

The XML appears to show hostiles in the Snow biome having the same max count (per area) as they do in Pine Forest and that they should respawn 1/3 as often.

 

The difference is that there is only a 15% chance of a successful spawn from EnemyAnimalsForest, but that jumps to a 45% chance of success for Snow biome enemy animals. So yeah, you ought to see about 3x as many spawns in the Snow biome. But they will repopulate about 1/3 as quickly so in the long term you ought to encounter approximately the same # of enemy animals per unit time, if you are hanging around the same area and killin' 'em when you see 'em. If you're traveling through the biome, then 3x as many hostile animals in Snow.

 

Ya gotta take the risk with the reward (higher lootstage).

 

    <entitygroup name="EnemyAnimalsSnow">
        <entity name="animalMountainLion" prob="25"/>
        <entity name="animalDireWolf" prob="10"/>
        <entity name="animalBear" prob="10"/>
        <entity name="none" prob="55"/>
    </entitygroup>

 

    <entitygroup name="EnemyAnimalsForest">
        <entity name="animalWolf" prob="9"/>
        <entity name="animalBear" prob="3"/>
        <entity name="animalDireWolf" prob="3"/>
        <entity name="none" prob="85"/>
    </entitygroup>

Edited January 8, 2022 by Boidster (see edit history)

[Rotor]

I concur forest biomes, so far........are mostly empty or full of chickens and rabbits.  I do see the ocasional bear/deer or boar.  By ocasional is may once every 2 blood moons.  I do like it when I get a crit bow hit on a dire wolf :).

[Viktoriusiii]

I think this is sooo weird.

There are already no trees so you can see further...

 

3x seems about right, but just by instinct, I'd say it is between 5-10x more.

[ricp]

I was watching someone play Ravenhearst a while back. It was on A19, but the streamer kept on saying the spawning of animals was broken and that they spawn then get immediately killed off, and that this was a vanilla issue not with the mod.

 

I'll be honest, it sounded a bit odd (although as a dev, it does seem a "solution" to too many animals spawning, just not a very elegant one) and I've never heard anyone else mention it.

 

I presume if there was anything to this, people would have mentioned it already, and perhaps A20's spawning routines are different anyway.

[BFT2020]

26 minutes ago, ricp said:

I was watching someone play Ravenhearst a while back. It was on A19, but the streamer kept on saying the spawning of animals was broken and that they spawn then get immediately killed off, and that this was a vanilla issue not with the mod.

 

I'll be honest, it sounded a bit odd (although as a dev, it does seem a "solution" to too many animals spawning, just not a very elegant one) and I've never heard anyone else mention it.

 

I presume if there was anything to this, people would have mentioned it already, and perhaps A20's spawning routines are different anyway.

 

Sounds like a mod issue actually as I never saw this happen in game (and the majority of time in Alpha 19 was vanilla for me).

 

In Alpha 19, the controlled animal spawn numbers by having an invisible animal spawn as a chance.  So you got a new entity in the game but it was invisible. 

    <entitygroup name="WildGameForest">
        <entity name="invisibleAnimal" prob="50"/>

 

In Alpha 20, it just doesn't spawn anything now

 

   <entitygroup name="WildGameForest">
        <entity name="none" prob="50"/>

 

I wonder if that has overall caused an increase in animal spawns compared to A19.   The invisibleAnimal entity would count against the total entities in an area from Alpha19 while now it doesn't spawn anything and so the total entity count doesn't increase by one in Alpha 20.  So now the total amount of animal spawns will be actually entities you can interface with while Alpha 19 was a combination of actual animals in the game plus invisible animals.

 

 

 

 

[ricp]

8 minutes ago, BFT2020 said:

I Alpha 19, the controlled animal spawn numbers by having an invisible animal spawn as a chance.  So you got a new entity in the game but it was invisible.

 

I mean on the surface that does back up what they were saying, animals were spawned but you couldn't kill them.

 

In A20, I think we all have found out that if you want animals, you go to snow!

[Crater Creator]

I haven't dived into the files, but anecdotally I do feel like animals are abundant.  After just casually hunting when I would stumble on something, I was selling an extra stack of meat to the trader in week 2, because I really didn't need it (not that my cup runneth over in general - the money from the sale was important).  That didn't feel right to me for week 2, balance-wise.

 

The snow biome in particular is teeming with animals.  I could spin several narratives to explain this.

1. TFP wanted the snow biome to be harder in A20.  But they only had a few enemies, including just one zombie (the lumberjack) that work particularly well, thematically, in the snow.  So they over-rely on bears and mountain lions due to a lack of other appropriate options.
2. TFP weren't any more concerned with the cold theme than before.  They just added the gamestage multiplier for the biome, and this was the result.
3. When you're cold in 7DtD, you consume more food.  So increased animals and the meat they offer is a deliberate way to keep up with the higher caloric needs of living in the snow biome.

I've spent most time in the forest biome and I don't use animal tracker, so take this with a grain of salt.  But I would say:

• chickens: somewhat too many
• rabbits: about right. Could have fewer if they were easier to see.
• deer: a bit too rare relative to everything else
• wolves/dire wolves: mostly a night-only hazard.  Feels about right, though dire wolves could replace regular wolves a bit later.
• snakes: never see them outside the desert or specific POIs.  Could work in the forest, unless they want to have biome-unique animals.
• boars: haven't seen them outside of POIs.  Seems they're hostile without provocation now.
• dogs: I think they've been POI-only so far.  People either loved or hated dog pack days.
• vultures: kill it with fire.  Their frequency would be fine if they weren't automatically more attracted to a player when they get on a vehicle.  That behavior should only occur on horde night.
• bears: you pass by too many of them in the snow biome.  They should be rare as one of the biggest/toughest animals.  Could drop more testosterone to compensate if necessary.
• mountain lions: also too many, but they could occur more often than bears
• fish: still waiting

 

Edited January 9, 2022 by Crater Creator (see edit history)

[Boidster]

14 hours ago, Crater Creator said:

TFP weren't any more concerned with the cold theme than before.  They just added the gamestage multiplier for the biome, and this was the result.

 

A small nit: animal spawns aren't (yet) tied to gamestage or lootstage. Or at least there's no evidence of that at all in the XML. No probability distribution for animals - just the numbers posted above.

 

I looked at 19.3 for the Snow biome and it's actually not all that different. It's actually a little more likely (60% vs 45%) that you'd get a successful spawn in A19.

 

    <entitygroup name="EnemyAnimalsSnow">
        <entity name="invisibleAnimalEnemy" prob="40"/> (this is 55 in A20 - for "none" animals)
        <entity name="animalMountainLion" prob="40"/>
        <entity name="animalDireWolf" prob="10"/>
        <entity name="animalBear" prob="10"/>
    </entitygroup>

 

That said, if your impressions are animals are more common in Snow in A20 vs A19, then there is something else going on. I think the spawn cap idea above - where the A19 "invisible" spawns actually contributed to the cap, but A20 "none-imals" don't?

[ElCabong]

I don't even go hunting. I had a dig quest in the polar biome and got jumped by a direwolf. I was diseased, a little less than half health, major abrasion. But I had the meat. Then I ninja laddered out of the hole to look down at the circle to see which way it had moved and got jumped again by a direwolf. This time I had elevation.

 

That same day I had a mission in a house on the polar biome and I noticed a cat prowling nearby and didn't want it to intrude on me while I was in side the house. Damn near had two full stacks of meat at the end of that day.

 

Yeah there's too many animals.

Edited January 10, 2022 by ElCabong (see edit history)

[WilliamHeadings]

I'm fine with the high rate. It's hard enough to get food.

[Vaeliorin]

On 1/9/2022 at 5:15 AM, Crater Creator said:

I haven't dived into the files, but anecdotally I do feel like animals are abundant.  After just casually hunting when I would stumble on something, I was selling an extra stack of meat to the trader in week 2, because I really didn't need it (not that my cup runneth over in general - the money from the sale was important).  That didn't feel right to me for week 2, balance-wise.

 

The snow biome in particular is teeming with animals.  I could spin several narratives to explain this.

1. TFP wanted the snow biome to be harder in A20.  But they only had a few enemies, including just one zombie (the lumberjack) that work particularly well, thematically, in the snow.  So they over-rely on bears and mountain lions due to a lack of other appropriate options.
2. TFP weren't any more concerned with the cold theme than before.  They just added the gamestage multiplier for the biome, and this was the result.
3. When you're cold in 7DtD, you consume more food.  So increased animals and the meat they offer is a deliberate way to keep up with the higher caloric needs of living in the snow biome.

I've spent most time in the forest biome and I don't use animal tracker, so take this with a grain of salt.  But I would say:

• chickens: somewhat too many
• rabbits: about right. Could have fewer if they were easier to see.
• deer: a bit too rare relative to everything else
• wolves/dire wolves: mostly a night-only hazard.  Feels about right, though dire wolves could replace regular wolves a bit later.
• snakes: never see them outside the desert or specific POIs.  Could work in the forest, unless they want to have biome-unique animals.
• boars: haven't seen them outside of POIs.  Seems they're hostile without provocation now.
• dogs: I think they've been POI-only so far.  People either loved or hated dog pack days.
• vultures: kill it with fire.  Their frequency would be fine if they weren't automatically more attracted to a player when they get on a vehicle.  That behavior should only occur on horde night.
• bears: you pass by too many of them in the snow biome.  They should be rare as one of the biggest/toughest animals.  Could drop more testosterone to compensate if necessary.
• mountain lions: also too many, but they could occur more often than bears
• fish: still waiting

 

You forgot coyotes.  Which, admittedly, is pretty easy as they're fairly rare.  Except the coyote pack I got attacked by today.  In the snow biome.  Wandering coyote horde, I assume.  Wasn't a big deal, but was kind of surprising as I was at least 1 km from the desert.

 

Anyway, I'm on Day 24 (2 hour days) and I've got over 4k meat.  Granted, I've been spending basically all my time in the winter biome and keep killing bears/dire wolves/mountain lions so they don't end up chasing me since they're pretty trivial at this point.  So yeah, there are lots of animals, but it doesn't bother me.  Food isn't really an interesting challenge in any game I've ever encountered.  It's usually hard at the start, then either mostly forgettable or just plain tedious (and I'll take forgettable over tedious any day of the week.)