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saldog85

Luring mobs with food on ground

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I am testing if placeing food (i.e. seed's, meat) on the ground rly dose lure mobs closer or not.

if u would like to follow these results check bak every now and then, will post results of each day for a week to start, maybe more if needed.

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Day 1 - placed 3 pumkin seeds and 6 marlin fillet's along the edge of my deed. will check if there are any animals in the vesinity b4 i log and first thing when i get on tmr.

Day 2 A - made a walk around my deed and found a scorp to the N and a spider to the SW, mind u the fillet's are on the W edge on-deed.

observing another scorp on the E side of my deed, off-deed, and have placed some fillet's on and off deed. but seems like he is moving past the deed. Will check back later to see if he is still in the area, got closer, or moved on. After a few hours passed, i went out for a stroll and found that the scorp did move on, but a spider took its place. It would seem that the lures are working as to getting them to an area u want, but they tend to get uninterested if the food is on deed.

Day 2 B - Without doute, the lures are definatly working well, I'm getting mob corpse more then i have befor, and eveyday i come on, i have a new dead mob to butcher. I am getting spiders, scorps, mnt lions, and wild cats. It seems to be working for non-agro mobs also, as i have tamed a deer already that was just a few tile outside my deed, the first one i have seen around here since i moved to the area about 2 months ago.

Day 3 - Nothing much this day, all i found was 2 dead spiders in the morning, and 1 black bear in the evening. it seems that it dose work on-deed for a while, but the mobs seem to catch on after awhile and start to stray away. I have also placed 4 more meat at the corners of my deed, and 4 barley more inside my deed. Will keep a look out for more corpses, and hopefully more deer.

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Hungry mobs attempt to path toward food to eat it, but I'm interested to find out the range of said mechanic. Not sure if your experiment will help though, unless you're actively watching your lures.

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I've tried that too for about a week two weeks ago.

The idea was born because we dropped all our low QL meat from the suicidal aggros we found every morning in the middle of our deed to feed two pigs we found. After a day a stray dog joined the pigs and stayed there. In the following days our unfenced herd grew bigger and bigger up to a max of 3 pigs, 3 dogs and 2 wild boar xD.

Interesting as it was, the intriguing thing was that many animals that strolled around in the area never met with the others at the meatpiles... not even when they walked by just a few tiles away.

I then laid a path of meat on every second tile on my road ondeed from the meatpiles to the deed border branching out halfways.

But in the whole week not one animal joined its friends.

Even the starving dogs whom I'd wanted to lure from a mine entrance up my meattrail were uninterested.

So imho the animals need to be really close if not on top of food to realise it.

On the other hand it seemed to me that the animals gathering around the meatpiles always went to the freshest piles first.

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Hi,

dunno if this helps:

A while ago we found a pheasant on a deserted deed, a few tiles from the border. We wanted him, but couldn't tame, for sure. So we made a trace of food to outside of the deed area, 1 item each tile, starting at a tile adjacent to him, ending with a pile outside the deed. At least 5 tiles long, maybe more.

One day later the pheasant was munching on the pile and could be tamed.

(Just to clarify: the deed owner was one of our friends, and we knew that he had given up)

Now pheasants don't move a lot usually, 1 tile per day if at all.

We still have this now venerable fat pheasant (cared), and even when our escaped lighthouse spider had smashed the walls to his pen, he stayed there confidently for a few days.

So I'd think that animals will follow a trace of food, yes. At least our pheasant did, clearly.

I doubt that they'd smell it & wander long ways to reach it, though (if not lead with short-distance food).

We have some mobs for high-class hunters in our area that often just filet their prey for butchering skill, and leave the piles on the ground. We've never seen other meat eaters close by more then what would be coincidence.

With the new wandering mechanism your animals might have been wandering sufficient close by, and then decided to stay in this 'cockaigne'.

Have fun!

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I've tried that too for about a week two weeks ago.

The idea was born because we dropped all our low QL meat from the suicidal aggros we found every morning in the middle of our deed to feed two pigs we found. After a day a stray dog joined the pigs and stayed there. In the following days our unfenced herd grew bigger and bigger up to a max of 3 pigs, 3 dogs and 2 wild boar xD.

Interesting as it was, the intriguing thing was that many animals that strolled around in the area never met with the others at the meatpiles... not even when they walked by just a few tiles away.

I then laid a path of meat on every second tile on my road ondeed from the meatpiles to the deed border branching out halfways.

But in the whole week not one animal joined its friends.

Even the starving dogs whom I'd wanted to lure from a mine entrance up my meattrail were uninterested.

So imho the animals need to be really close if not on top of food to realise it.

On the other hand it seemed to me that the animals gathering around the meatpiles always went to the freshest piles first.

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Even the starving dogs whom I'd wanted to lure from a mine entrance up my meattrail were uninterested.

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Even the starving dogs whom I'd wanted to lure from a mine entrance up my meattrail were uninterested.

Those are dogbats, they love their cave entrances and won't leave them for anything. Saw entrances with 20+ dogs on them starving to death and refusing to move.

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I had a deer wander into my (unfinished) barn, and stand over the olive pile I had left for my hens, not sure if it ate them, but it sure looks like it :P

It was also well into my deed, I'm not sure if animals can spawn ON a deed or not, but if not that dude REALLY wanted some olives

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Meat pile on my local steppe;

727a1.jpg

Luring away roughly 5 scorpions revealed the following;

92e5f.jpg

5 scorpions, 5 wildcats, 3 cave bugs and an anaconda

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Hungry mobs attempt to path toward food to eat it, but I'm interested to find out the range of said mechanic. Not sure if your experiment will help though, unless you're actively watching your lures.

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I had a weird thing happen today. Going through one of my horse pastures, I saw three horses gathered on one tile that they had eaten down to dirt, a "misc box" in the center of the tile. Sometimes if I am culling a lot of foals I get more meat/hides/fat/gizzards than I can carrry and drop these on the ground for later pickup with a cart.  For now though I just wanted to un-bunch the horses before they got diseased, and replant the tile with fresh crops without any animals immediately grazing on it. As soon as I led those three off though, three different horses RACED to that square. I thought it was a weird coincidence and started leading the new ones off. As I did, three more horses snap to the tile, like they were on a rubberband. Since I still thought it was butchered foal remains, I wondered if the "attracted to meat piles" code was borked, and lead them off.  Two more horses literally RAN to the square. This was getting almost freaky, no way it could be a coincidence so many times. By this time I wondered what exactly was in that misc box, and found it had a heavy load of veggies (pumpkins, corns, grains) that I had meant to pick up later with a cart.

None of these horses were hungry, not one of them touched any of the pile contents (I went through even log to see if they were eating the grains) in time they ate the tile down to dirt instead. They would have all been roughly 3-4 tiles from the pile when they were obviously triggered. It was not triggered by hunger, because they were all fat and well fed and didn't start running to the square till I had cleared the previous occupants to below 3.

I have had horses a long time and never had this occur before. I am pretty sure I have dropped veggies often in the past, perhaps it was because there were also some rye / barley this time..? I don't usually grow those..

Went to my cow yard and dropped a pile of grains but the cows nearby just ignored it (one actually ran away from the area). I'll test again in another yard filled with horses, and with my champ deer yard.

Went to a 2x2 fenced pen with three horses, dropped all the same stuff on the one tile none of them were on, and they all ignored it. So dunno what triggered the mad rush to the misc box before. It may be the AI code only checks once an hour or once a day or something, dunno.

(* note to self, test whether domestically bred animals don't respond, as my first example was a wild horse pen, the others all bred & born n a farm, so I'll test some more on that thoery.)

* retested some more, the homebred horses also RUN up to the pile but its not always immediate so must be an AI code that only kicks in periodically. The horses do not eat when they get there.

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My current experience/story.

Because of moving at leisure and not immediately having fences up and everything, I put a few animals which I came across at the new spot (roaming free, as for the pig still young so in time not to starve) in a storage-room I had mined out in an old existing mine there (in the middle of a long corridor with a few sidecorridors I had made a new side-corridor going down, a corner at the bottom, then completely out of sight the start of the 12-tile storageroom - not too far from the mine-entrance but certainly not an obvious route, other corridors in the mine or just straight-on further into the mine would be the logical route to take) (This mine also had a backentrance in a mountainside-cliff far from the storageroom - the front-entrance was in an area with terraformed fields and woods).

Into this underground storageroom went the dog, pig and pheasant I had found at the site where I wanted to build my new home. That meant leaving food on the floor meant for a meat-eater, a grains-/veggies eater, and an everything-eater.

First thing I observed, was that the pig (to my surprise I must say) prefered veggies and only very occasionaly took any meat, but that aside, the developments in later days (they have stayed in that cave for about three weeks now) were rather a bit humerous (ark of Noah anyone) as well as educating.

I went to check on these animals, to see if no-one had found them yet and to replenish food, once or twice every day.

Almost every time I would find some deer standing in the corridor just inside the mine-entrance (field-/woods-side entrance), always close to where the side-corridor leading to the storage went down. Tamed them and brought them back to the nature they came from (were free, wild deer, of all different ages) every time (untaming them once they were out again), thinking they got trapped there. Next time I checked in they would be standing in the same place again, or other deer would be wandering around in the mine near that side-corridor.

Then one day as I entered the underground storage, a totally unknown wild horse was munching away off the foodpiles there. At that point I decided to stop taming and evicting the deer up in the main corridor, wondering as I was if they might be on their way down, just taking a while to do that, also.

To make the story a bit shorter: On three diffferent occasions I was also greeted, on entering the storage with foodpiles, by wildcats and a lion who had obviously taken the back-entrance of the mine (= where their territory started) and walked all through it to get to the down-going corridor toward storageroom and then down into there (meaning a route through the mine alone of 20-30ish tiles if not more)

The deer I didn't bother taking out of the main-corridor anymore showed to find their way down to the food within one day after they entered that main mine-corridor higher up. They also found their own way out of the mine again; I would find the gathering crowd down there changed now and then, an old deer would be standing in the forest outside again, a young or aged deer would have newly found its way down, etc.

Couldn't observe how the aggroes would have acted in the longer run, obviously - as I would enter the storage, they would attack me so have to be dealt with. The starving lion seemed to have eaten well from the meat in the piles before greeting me on my entering in his wellknown manner. I don't think the wildcats had eaten much if anything yet.

One time (at the start of this unmeant experiment) I also found a cow in the main mine-corridor (at that stage I lead anything inside out again right away thinking they couldnt find their own way out). I never found a cow in the storage though, or another cow anywhere in the mine, this although there were almost half a dozen roaming around in nature in the area around the entrances to this mine - so I would put this one cow inside up to coincidence, cows just don't seem to use their nose for sniffing out food.

What I seem to be able to carefully conclude at this time: a lot of animals seem to sense food from pretty far off (up to 50-ish tiles?) and then go looking for it. Even if they are nice and fat and not hungry at all, like all the deer - grains seem like magnets to them.

The wildcats and lion must have been anything from 20 to 50 tiles away from the cliffside mine-entrance; and then 20-/30-ish more from there to get to the underground storage through the mine-tunnels. Even in a straight line disregarding going underground and through deviating tunnels, the distance must have been considerable.

Same story goes for the deer: they were in that area (free roaming) but certainly not in big numbers. Maybe 5 to 7 of them spread out through a whole valley of perhaps 500x 300 tiles. They all ended up in that underground room - and about half also left it again after a few days for some fresh grass from outside, then could or could not go back in to the piles again.

And also, what Brash was saying: never more then three on one tile with a foodpile. I have 4-5 tiles in that storage with food on them, and they would constantly be moving around between the different piles (including the pheasant, surprisingly, which would move rapidly and every minute or so at times - something I have not observed from pheasants in other circumstances at all). But they would never stay with more then 3 on one tile, as soon as number 4 came onto it, any of the 4 would rapidly move away to another tile/heap. (Btw havent seen any of them diseased yet, despite being on a tile with 2 others often - apparently moving to a tile with less then two others every so often restarts the cycle leading to disease).

I did lead the wild horse out of the mine and let it go at a good distance from there (50-ish or more tiles away) and I haven't seen him reappear in the storage yet after that. But he soon after wasn't in the area at all anymore, was hundreds of tiles away. But - also (fat) horses do get drawn in by any grain close enough to them by the looks of it.

Rolf seems to have coded in some quite intricate behaviours. :)

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