Building Structure/Area 1 Conditions for Animals

[Gregorjack]

I've noticed that animals often disregard Area 1 under certain conditions. They stall for a moment and then continue to wander the map randomly. This bug is present in all vanilla animals and mod creatures(like the mecha-slimes in the screenshot). This often results in the unnecessary death of potentially valuable creatures and all of the value they would ever produce. This loss of production is potentially fatal and thus must be addressed in order to increase the chance of survival in the Merciless game mode.

I have determined that it is due to the shape of both the building and the area. The AI, for whatever reason, cannot handle irregular building shapes. The pathing is too complicated when non-square/rectangle walls are not within the larger structure because of how wandering works in the game.

Therefor an easy remedy for the problem is to simply create a compound with some variation of the one in the screenshot. If the entire base is a giant rectangle then animals will be able to find it when returning from anywhere on the map(freshly tamed or returning from caravans). Building in this way maximizes the chance that you will be able to defend your milk/cloth animals in the case of a raid and allows for efficient production and storage. Building in this shape does not prevent heating and cooling and with the advent of the Thermostat mod it is possible to build the outer wall ultra thicc. Also note that metal fences can be placed outside of it as well, totally eliminating the threat of fire and mad animals. With enough wood or chem-fuel power can be constantly provided through mad animal, fallout, mechanized ship, infestation and raid events.

It should also be noted that if you strip-mine the stone formations on your map into a grid of 4x4 squares you greatly reduce the chance of infestation with this design. Because the room in the center is so large it only counts as 1 room by the system and ALL sections of the grid you mine will be added to the list of possible insect targets.

I haven't found a post anywhere addressing this so I figured I'd make one. Thank you for your time.

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