Animal packing grass seems broken

[ClericGunem 275]

Animals packing grass seems out of hand.  I have 1x1 pens with single animal (for example i had 16 cows in 16 1x1 pens) and animals are packing the tiles constantly, even when feed and piles of grass a few days later they will still pack the tiles.  Wagons/Carts perfectly positioned for 1 tile per animal even on long grass seems to get packed within a day.  The only way i can keep animals from packing grass is to park them on enchanted grass.  

 

Animals *still* bunch up on the corners, but i know that is a known issue and is not what i am talking about.

 

so to be clear one (1) animal in a 1x1 pen or hitched over a single tile regardless of health or satiety and without negative conditions where the grass is long (or steppe) on a deed with a good animal ratio and even when pile of grass is present on said tile are still packing tiles.

 

I just fixed the tile below (after wasting a vast amount of time to make sure every animals was full and healthy and replanting this time with steppe to see if any different) and no, there are no negative traits on the animals down there, and yes, i feed them before replanting, and yes i made sure they ate multiple times before replanting, and yes, they are/were all healthy, and yes, i tried leaving piles of food.........................................there is something wrong beyond control in game.  I have been raising animals a long time and this is far worse then i have ever seen.  Note on the left side (cannot see in picture) are 12 horses and 6 hell horses all cared for and all on enchanted grass, there has not been a single packed tile, it is only grass/steppe that is being constantly packed

 

 

this is really starting to degrade game play and cannot possibly be intended 

 

[Mordraug 2,542]

Half on half off topic.... how's the rate for enchanted grass randomly reverting to normal for you?  

[ClericGunem 275]

i have about 400 enchanted tiles between two deeds and i have lost 1 tile in the past 9 months

[Corsan 199]

This became a problem nearly 2.5 years ago after a 'fix' they did...it was intended to create more 'realism' in that animals would pack tiles occasionally. It came in around the time of the predator/prey mechanic. Numerous people posted about it, and showed their whole pens being devastated...it was due to the fact that they made animals run away from predators...and us Wurmians count as predators in the AI code, so every time you waltz by their pen (Or are even remotely nearby) they try and get away...and bounce off walls until they have just totally packed an area. It was really bad with bison. (There was a large thread with multiple screenshots people posted around that time, but I'd have to spend an hour digging through old threads to find it.) It was even destroying enchanted grass like mad which can only be cast once per day....so there was a huge uproar about it. I actually used to spend nearly a hour every time I logged in making thatch just to fix my pen, only to have about x5 more be packed while I was playing that day alone. It has to do with the 'free range' pens mostly. If you do 2x1, or even 1x1 pens, you don't see nearly as much packing because they don't bounce off walls as much (I still see an occasional packed tile in my 2x1's...). It's really really bad if you have a youngster in a free range pen like a calf or foal, as they move around even more than their elderly counterparts.

I very much agree this needs to be turned off/turned way down...as the grass in-game doesn't re-grow that fast even...and this mechanic was intended to keep people from keeping numerous animals in a single pen and not having to worry about feeding them. (The way to get around this for grass eaters is to plant a tree tile in the pen, which reverts dirt/packed dirt to grass by it...but even that is a extremely slow growth rate on the servers compared to how fast these animals pack things.) Mostly this was because people would complain about folks on the servers who owned 200 some odd horses and that was most of the limited amount the smaller servers would spawn...so people would be complaining about not being able to find a horse. (This was back before enclosure rule was removed...so people could do off deed holding pens and nobody was allowed to touch them as it was against the rules to do so.)

Now that that rule has been removed, and most people consider 'deed it or lose it' to be the owning mechanic...I don't see why we can't just maintain our on-deed horses without all this packing nonsense...as the ratio on deed keeps you from having too many at once/forces die-offs. I used to want to free-range my horses...but even I gave in and 2x1 penned because I was tired of dealing with the packing mechanic.

Definitely needs fixed.

[ClericGunem 275]

2 hours ago, Corsan said:

If you do 2x1, or even 1x1 pens, you don't see nearly as much packing because they don't bounce off walls as much (I still see an occasional packed tile in my 2x1's...)

 

If this were the case i would not be so frustrated, the image above if you look closely the top part of the pen is actually 24 1x1 pens, with 11 pens packed a mere 2 days after i spent wasted 3 hours feeding, re-feeding, putting down steppe as an experiment this time (because grass was not working), i also left piles of mixed grass (btw they still pack grass/steppe tiles even with pile of grass), and ensuring they were not going to pack as soon as i walked away.  i have had 6 pairs of saddled horses standing on single tile each in the past within in 1x2 on regular grass and yes they would occasionally pack the tile, but this is different, there are literally 30+ tiles around my main deed that have been packed in the past 2 days with only a single animal on the tile (13 of which were steppe, which is not most resilient to packing, but i figured i would try).  this is happening all the time.  

 

Animals will get diseased and starve when close together regardless if the tile is enchanted grass or crops, so packing the tile serves no purpose as far as i can tell to limit animal crowding further, but it does add a lot of pain to the already long list of chores on a mature deed

 

Also they have changed the behavior around animals clumping together at least as far as bred animals go, but they now seem to randomly pick a corner to pack.

 

To be clear 1x1, 2x1, saddled on tile, parked on tall grass....does not seem to help, something is wrong

[Corsan 199]

Planting something in the pen doesn't give 'top of the line' amount to it. So once they've packed it the first time around, it's at it's lowest setting...(For grass at least, never tried steppe.)...and they will promptly pack it again because the lower stages are more likely to be packed again for some reason.

 

11 hours ago, ClericGunem said:

packing the tile serves no purpose

 

It serves the purpose of depriving them of food so eventually they die off of starvation. It was more of a long term 'get rid of huge herds not being maintained' idea. But yeah, it's way too fast doing it compared to the server's growth rate for nature spread.