Tame animal population affects wild spawning of animals

[Safir]

So something really strange just happened yesterday. One of my colonists was going after a squirrel for hunting and all of a sudden ALL of the animals on the ENTIRE map just disappeared. The only animal remaining was the tame dog. It's not that something killed them, there are no corpses, they just vanished. I'd say this was inspired by an episode of the X-files, but alas, it seems as though it must be a bug of some sort. I couldn't find it in mantis nor here on the forums. Right after it happened I made a copy of the savefile. And before posting this today I see that the log is also good, well I'll add that as well, but it's not from when the bug happened.

A couple of hours later, the map is starting to populate itself again, but it was kinda' strange playing without animals, especially when we needed them for the foods.

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[giannikampa]

I have this same problem in my game: A14 1249, windows7, Phebe challenge, year 5010 now, boreal mountains, -4° to 12°C climate.

It's 3 or 4 of years now that there are no animals at all in the map. I had thrumbos visits twice and alphabeavers 4 times from the crisis begin. People live on simple meals and raw corn/berries, carnivorous tamed animals struggle in starvation all the time so i have to kill one of my cassowaries to make some kibble for them.
Just for fun I spawned tons of rats a couple of times to have my wolves hunt something (And I find this a superawesome event it could  be a part of the vanilla because they go for my food and crops outside or leave the map and is not a so good or so bad event at all, just an event).

I thought the whoole no animal to be an event itself but it is lasting so long i start thinking it is a bad balancement so i commented here.

[milon]

Animals "shouldn't" just vanish into thin air.  If the temperature goes out of their range or if there's no food available, they might die where they are or walk off the map.  That's strange.  What mods are you both using?

@Safir, thanks for the log file, but it looks like it was launch-RimWorld-then-exit.  I don't see any evidence of a game being loaded.  Is there another log you can provide?

@giannikampa, did you witness animals vanishing, or just notice that there weren't any around?  Can you provide save and/or log file?

[giannikampa]

Yes, i can provide savegame and i don't use mods in this game, must say I modded numbers of the jade in xml but i can't imagine how this interfers with the animals spawnings in the map. Plus i played with devtool, because i'm lazy and curious, nothing more.
I fuond it obvius that animals don't literaly vanish.. but they never spawn back, now my game is at year 11 and still no animal at all. I remember first years of the game to be bears, wolves, foxes, muffalos and many other erbivores, they died or left the map during cold snaps or winters or fallouts but as long as overall temperature went to zero C° or more, the animals came back to populate the map as expected (well you know some won't leave the map as they survive lower temperatures, they never left cause of this), then something happened and the only meat we can see is from thrumbos, insects, alphabeavers, dropfalls or traders events.

mmm one other info could be the game was created using previous release of the alpha 14, then updated, but i found no relation with new update and animals vanishing, as it happened years later.


Not that skilled in uploading files, tell me if attached wont work (im astonished that  the savefile compressed that much..).
for the log..i just cant find it atm, if needed i'll search deep my pc for it
Thanks milion

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[giannikampa]

I want to report some update on this: my game went to year 5012 and still no huntable living meat came in the region as described before (except alphabeavers) so I got bored and thought there would be no reason to have carnivores and i sold all my timber wolves and the recently joined huskies to a trader.
Can you belive? a pack of deers spawed in a corner of the map few days after the mass carnivore selling! it was like 5-6 years of no animals now!!
So my opinion is that animals spawn at some conditions (like: IF less than x wild animls in map and season is survivable THEN spawn animals to populate) I say this because the particularity of my animals is that none of them got tamed, they all joined, and none got trained. My (fantasy based) assumption is that joining animals still count as wild and some counter in the logic of the game thinks that there are enought animals and won't spawn anymore.
so i wanted to test this and reloaded a previous autosave and now i'll wait for my wolves to starve to death to see if and when wild animals will naturally spawn again. I have no explanation for herbivores role in all of this (I have like 20 herbivores, all joined and not trained as well)
i'll post here some new discovers in this mechanics if i find any

[harpo99999]

regarding this issue, my dumb thought is there is a limit of x or less animals on the map  and if it is lower than the x then it can spawn animals up to the limit( and my guess for the value of x is approx 150 total animals before wild spawning animals (other than event spawning(eg alphabeavers & manhunter packs)) on the map)

[giannikampa]

I tested this way so far:
every time an animal goes starving i set it for slaughter (happnens only to carnivores, cause herbivores have a lot to eat in the map).
at the total value of 36 colony animals (I repat, they are all self tamed or their offspring) 12 of whom are carnivores (timber wolves and huskies in my game) wild animals appeared in the map again after years and years of zero.
My next step wil be to let actual animals reproduce and try to appreciate if no more wild spawn will happen. I'l try to understand if this happens and if it is related to herbivore/carnivore ceiling only.

[giannikampa]

I tested this way so far:
every time an animal goes starving i set it for slaughter (happnens only to carnivores, cause herbivores have a lot to eat in the map).
at the total value of 36 colony animals (I repat, they are all self tamed or their offspring) 12 of whom are carnivores (timber wolves and huskies in my game) wild animals appeared in the map again after years and years of zero.
My next step wil be to let actual animals reproduce and try to appreciate if no more wild spawn will happen. I'l try to understand if this happens and if it is related to herbivore/carnivore ceiling only.

I went on this way:
launced farmanimalwanders, got cickens. still wild animals spawn.

have up to 14 carnivores. still wild animals spawn.

other proofs: nobody else accuse this maybe-bug.

my conclusion: some strange coincidence ran my game to no wild animals spawn for a lot of years but at some point they came back, maybe related to colony animals somehow.

[eadras]

[A14] I have the same situation as giannikampa.  50+ tamed animals, and haven't seen a wild animal in about 5 years.  Kill off most of the my tamed animals, and wild animals start reappearing again.  This seems to be a bug which causes some tamed animals (possibly animals that are bred instead of tamed manually?) to count into the equation that determines if new wild animals should appear.  Wild animals population should not be related to tamed animal population in any way.

[glob]

Got the same problem with a15 on Linux. Attached the save file.

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[Zhentar]

The game assumes that tamed wild animals are still participating in the ecosystem. This is working as designed.

[glob]

The game assumes that tamed wild animals are still participating in the ecosystem. This is working as designed.

So if the animals were bought from a trader they are not participating, but when the same animals were tamed they are. Seems very illogical to me. It is even impossible to see in game which animals were tamed and which were bought.

[Zhentar]

In this context, "wild" is based on the species, not the origin of any individual pawn. Pets and farm animals won't ever count, and other species always will count.

[nccvoyager]

So, if I'm getting this right, more or less:
"Domesticated" animals do not count towards total map animal population.
(Cats, yorkies, huskies, etc.)
"Tamed" animals do count towards total map animal population.
(Colonist-tamed or bought grizzly bears, panthers, squirrels, etc.)
"Wild" animals do count towards total map animal population.
(Un-tamed grizzly bears, panthers, squirrels, etc.)

[Zhentar]

Correct. More precisely, any pawn with a PawnKindDef that includes the tag <wildSpawn_spawnWild>true</wildSpawn_spawnWild> counts towards total map animal population.