Animals eating like there's no tomorrow / cared for animals dying

[Kasumi 967]

I don't know what changed but the last couple of weeks it is like my animals have become ravenous! I can't keep up with feeding them. 

I've had enchanted grass tiles trampled, been having to drop food every day where I used to have to do it once every couple of weeks; I even hand fed the dogs every day since I noticed they lost their 'fat' status just to make sure they are eating (and still dropping food in their pens too). I've had to unpack and replant grass or re-enchant grass a couple of times now but the grazers are so far surviving. I have however lost 5 carnivores, 4 of them being dogs.

These animals were all cared for and on a deed with lots of upkeep and under the animal ratio cap thingy.

 

I've managed to kept them alive for multiple years, so it's not like I'm new to taking care of them. The behaviour or something is definitely different than to what it used to be.  

Can this please be looked into and fixed before I loose more animals; or if changes have been decided on an made, a notice to inform players would be nice. 

 

 

Final Death Count : 11

RIP : 

• Jingle Claws the crab
• 2x Champ tortoises
• 2x Gingerbread tortoises
• 3x Champ dogs
• Worshipper the dog
• Ratatouille the champ rat
• Vienna the pig

 

 

Edited July 15, 2021 by Kasumi

[Brash_Endeavors 4,735]

One thing I found with breeding was the mares would seem to lose fat layers while pregnant, and if i kept breeding over and over it would have an adverse impact. So if you DO do a lot of breeding, or maybe recently started breeding a lot more often, maybe try giving the mares some timeout between births?

 

[Kasumi 967]

Yup, I always have. 3 of those I lost recently have been male. 

[crimsonearth 477]

Hey Kas, 

 

Sorry to hear about your dogs.

 

I've seen a couple of posts over the last month about food decaying faster on the ground than before - I have about 70 cared for creatures on my deeds (mostly GM named ones that can't be replaced) so I've gone and checked all mine out. I seem to have lost a champion wildcat (Tom) - no body, nothing showing up in my animal management tab - just vamoosed. I guess that must've been starvation but there's always food in their pens and I feed them regularly (the wildcats often by hand as well as leaving food on the ground).

A couple of my alliance have lost cared for creatures recently too, but I don't know if that was server glitches or starvation.

 

Zakalwe and I noticed last summer when we were running sermons that creatures eat a lot more when they're within a number of tiles of active players - it's smaller than local - maybe 20-30 tiles - whatever range they continue to be active and observable in the event window I guess? One of two main reasons for moving all my creatures to a wildlife park at the other end of the deed was to stop them chomping through 5 meat each in an hour while I pottered about nearby. Don't know if this helps you at all but I've had a lot less healthy cared for creatures suddenly hit starving since I did this.

But yeah - all these mentions of cared for creatures dying makes me super anxious. Most of my time and investment in this game has been around finding and making spaces for animals. I hope if this has been the result of a back-end tweak or a bug it gets fixed soon.

[Kasumi 967]

Thank you Crimson,

That's quite interesting actually, not something I took notice of or even considered before - my neighbour has been back the last couple of weeks and they are in local of those animal pens... 

Difficult to get them further away, my neighbour is kinda on top of me tho but I'll see what I can do!

 

I'm sorry you lost your cat too   Good luck with the rest of the animals, may they all stay safe!