Wild animals shouldn't eat packaged survival meals

[NWCtim]

From a game play perspective, packaged survival meals are crucial for the early survival of a colony.  Having wild animals come in eat those inflates the difficulty of the early game.

From a realism standpoint, the meals are sealed in some sort of plastic.  This would both physically protect the food, making many animals incapable of actually getting at the food, as well as prevent any scent of food from getting out, making the package completely unappetizing to the animals, especially compared to that tasty, tasty poverty grass a few feet away.

[falcongrey]

From a game play perspective, packaged survival meals are crucial for the early survival of a colony.  Having wild animals come in eat those inflates the difficulty of the early game.

From a realism standpoint, the meals are sealed in some sort of plastic.  This would both physically protect the food, making many animals incapable of actually getting at the food, as well as prevent any scent of food from getting out, making the package completely unappetizing to the animals, especially compared to that tasty, tasty poverty grass a few feet away.

To a large degree I have to agree with this. MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) would be a dull colored package that was sealed in likely a tough/resilient plastic like pouch or container of some sort. Additionally, inside that resilient packaging all the contents would be individually packaged as well! Wild (and domesticated for that matter) would have no interest in this kind of food as a result unless the packaging was damaged and its inside packaging was also damaged.

In addition to this, as the game progresses, animals that are herbivores would have no interest in meals that are made of meat, only be interested in the vegetation. Place a cooked piece of steak or even chicken next to a cow and see how the cow reacts. Omnivores, like dogs and beavers, would be more interested in these kinds of prepared foods or the raw forms. Sorry people, beavers do NOT eat wood... they eat roots and fish and insects kind of like otters do...They cut the trees down and drag them to rivers to build dams and homes for themselves.

[Vas]

I've always hated that animals eat packaged survival meals, since the earliest versions of the game that I played.  This really needs a change so that it stops happening.  Animals can't even smell food inside it because they are completely sealed, so why would an animal go eat some random pile of plastic laying on the ground?

[Boston]

....you people do realize that animals are fully capable of getting into ANYTHING and EVERYTHING humans can produce? Plastic, metal, it doesn't matter.

You are supposed to leave your food (and not just your food, but cleaning equipment and suchlike as well) 200 feet away from your sleeping quarters when camping for that reason. Animals WILL smell it, and they WILL go for it. It doesn't matter what it is, or what it is made of.

http://www.toothoftimetraders.com/smellables/642/dept (not just bears)

[Vlad0mi3r]

Really they wont eat stuff in plastic. I have watched a cow eat strapping off of a pallet, Black plastic sheeting and wood. That's a cow have you spent any time around a goat? Like seriously sometimes I really do wonder.

[Aerial]

The frustration with this mechanic really stems from the fact that you have to store everything on the ground.  You can't put something inside a box or hang it off the ground with rope or even put it in a backpack and carry it around with you to keep it safe while you make better provisions.  So your only option to protect those MREs from animals is to *build an entire building* (or at the very least half a building if you have hills to build against).  In some biomes, you can lose a fair percentage to animals before you accomplish that.

[asanbr]

I was going to agree with the unrealistic part until I read about the cows and goats. Now I'm not so sure anymore. I suppose rats and squirrels would easily get into the PSM if they wanted to.

But about game difficulty, what's the problem? If you are on any biome with wild animals, you have plenty of food so you don't need those meals as much.

Only on extreme desert and ice sheet have they been critical to me to the point where I put a forbidden zone so my starting animal couldn't get htem, and kept the animal starving until I could feed them human meat or until they almost died, in which case they would get the lowest ranking food just to stay alive.

Wild animals weren't a problem because there would be 1-2 scarabs / snow hares on the whole map and I'd shoot them first thing to get more food nutrient paste.