[Wild animal behaviour] Getting tired of colonists getting eaten suddenly?

[Numar]

Situation:
There are wild and roaming animals in Rimworld. From time to time under certain circumstances they attack colonists and pets as well.

Annoyance:
It can happen out of nowhere. Suddenly you get the warning that a grizzly is attacking one of your colonists/pets and most of the time, it's lethal. Especially if no other colonist or defensive structure is nearby or the victim isn't your super melee fighter or even Son Goku.
Of course you can have a watch over your colony and kill wild animals, but you never know if you missed one or when a wild animal wanders into your colony area (again). Mods with auto hunting help a little bit, but let's be honest, a colonist with a pistol alone against a grizzly is no certain win.

Solution #1 (easy and fast):
Expand the danger and flee behaviour of your pawns to wild animals in general. You don't want to ignore that grizzly right next to you, do you?
Additional: warning message if a wild animal wanders into your home zone.

Solution #2 (more complicated):
From a real world perspective, most wild animals avoid humans. So why not give wild animals each their own territory in which they roam to find food. If there is no food, the territory gets wider. If there is enough space on the map, the territory of wild animals won't be near the colony and wild animals try to avoid colonists (the danger and flee behaviour can be used for it). If, however, humans wander regularly into the wild animal territory, it increases the chances for an attack.
You could even prepare food for the wild animals if their prey becomes spare (e.g. during winter) and you don't want them to come near your colony because of that.

Solution #1 and #2 combined would be the most plausible scenario.

[Kagemusha12]

I agree ...
especially with regards to getting a warning message when a wild animal attacks a colonist

[Wex]

Solution 2 doesn't make sense ANYMORE.
I'll explain.
Do you know why wolves keep away from humans?
It's because we hunted them, for centuries.
Not attacking humans has been a positive evolutionary behaviour for wolves. Non attacking humans equals not being hunted.
On a rimworld human are scarce, they cannot form huge hunting party to kill predators (and this assumes there ARE humans on the planet to begin with).

[Kegereneku]

Myself I always considered predator incompatible with the concept of "no event" nuild periods. But I can guess why Tynan did anyway : how would we tame them otherwise ?

I'm more bothered with the idea of Manhunting pack aggregating precisely around your colony, forcing you to systematically build Bastion. I had hoped they would simply roam around the way predator do now, but more numerous (and eating all other prey not just human)

This bother me because there's "This game is convincingly difficult" features, and there's "I coded that to make your life hell" features.

[Numar]

Solution 2 doesn't make sense ANYMORE.
I'll explain.
Do you know why wolves keep away from humans?
It's because we hunted them, for centuries.
Not attacking humans has been a positive evolutionary behaviour for wolves. Non attacking humans equals not being hunted.
On a rimworld human are scarce, they cannot form huge hunting party to kill predators (and this assumes there ARE humans on the planet to begin with).

Solid point, but aren't those wild animals somehow brought from earth lore-wise? Which would kinda negate your point.

No matter the reason, as long as it's plausible and good for gameplay, I don't care about a detailed explanation.

[b0rsuk]

Every little bit helps: animals assigned to your hunters will escort them when hunting. If Tynan accepts my suggestion, this will be added to animal tamers too (animals escort tamers who tame dangerous animals).

[SpaceDorf]

Solution 2 is allready possible.

Just put some meat / corpse stockpile far away from your colony and let the dangerous animals eat there.

Trap them and they become self sustaining ^^

[Numar]

While I started this topic with colonists in its title, I'm currently more angry at all the wolves, foxes etc. for eating my baby dogs away. That's no free food you damn bastards! And it always happens so fast I can't do anything against it. Two bites and another little dog gone, I'm so sad

R.I.P. Kenzo, my little baby timber wolf, the last victim in a long line of victims.

[Havan_IronOak]

Had a similar but less traumatic problem when I tried raising chickens.

I ended up setting up three areas well behind my outer wall and had all fertile eggs stored in the one furthest back. Course I had to periodically assign all the chickens to a different area or they'd eat it clean. When I rotated them is when I'd make sure I got all the chicks restricted.

[Boston]

Contrary to what you see in-game, most predators are actually really stealthy, up to and including large grizzly bears. They are more than capable of sneaking up on and ambushing the hell out of a human.

Instead of viewing the attack from our nearly-omniscient POV, view it from the POV of the colonist: you are walking through the woods, when all of a sudden you get bumrushed by a predator.

This is why I kill most predators near my colony as a matter of course, and stockpile dead raider corpses far away in order to keep them away.

[Numar]

Contrary to what you see in-game, most predators are actually really stealthy, up to and including large grizzly bears. They are more than capable of sneaking up on and ambushing the hell out of a human.

Instead of viewing the attack from our nearly-omniscient POV, view it from the POV of the colonist: you are walking through the woods, when all of a sudden you get bumrushed by a predator.

This is why I kill most predators near my colony as a matter of course, and stockpile dead raider corpses far away in order to keep them away.

Solid point, yes. But we have to look at it from a gameplay point of view. Since I installed a mod which adds more animals to the game, the problem became very frustrating. Of course, the mod added more predators too and it became very frequent that my colonists and pets got eaten, even inside my base. That's because until recently, I didn't walled my colony completely, to lure raiders in through my death area. Sadly, predators can enter the same way without being shot at by the turrets.

The process is always the same: I get the message (XY is being attacked by CV), zoom there and I can only watch my colonist die. Zero chance to react with bigger predators and that's exactly what I criticize the most. If the message would appear then the predators decide to hunt down one of my colonist, I could at least react and try to save my colonist, that would be totally fine!

Another annoyance to this topic is that if you don't completely wall your colony, you can't keep it free from wild animals. Not only your colonists are being eaten, but your crops by critters too. This can be solved by letting turrets have the option to shoot any wild animal or simply shoot anything within a certain area (which colonists shouldn't enter too ;o ).

For these reasons I suggest following vanilla changes:

- Colonists will try to keep to keep a certain distance to wild predators. When predators go into hunting mode, the chance for colonists to notice the predators will reduce drastically (a little stealth mechanic). This way, the predators can still close in.
- Warning if a predator starts to hunt a colonist, not when they're already in a melee fight (current).

- Additional setups for turrets:
-- Shoot every wild animal to keep your base wild animal free (more convenient option).
-- Shoot everything in a certain area. Can be setup with an area or a trigger device, but really shoots everything there (more realistic option).

[TheMeInTeam]

Solution 2 doesn't make sense ANYMORE.
I'll explain.
Do you know why wolves keep away from humans?
It's because we hunted them, for centuries.
Not attacking humans has been a positive evolutionary behaviour for wolves. Non attacking humans equals not being hunted.
On a rimworld human are scarce, they cannot form huge hunting party to kill predators (and this assumes there ARE humans on the planet to begin with).

I've put most of the real arguments about notification into my own suggestion thread for this, but one thing I'll comment on here is that on the evolutionary scale, the game's year of 5500, even if that's a "years from the date the player is playing) is quite low.  You must assume that genetic engineering or some other force is modifying the animals for the behavior to be plausible, and even then it's not very plausible on the whole.  There's too much uneven abstraction.  The reason this mechanic gets more complaints than other uneven abstraction standards is that it creates an adverse gameplay outcome with pretty inconvenient/gameplay-poor QoL countermeasures.

[Dargaron]

Solution 2 is allready possible.

Just put some meat / corpse stockpile far away from your colony and let the dangerous animals eat there.

Trap them and they become self sustaining ^^

That would be great...IF predators would prioritize corpses over all else. But my miners have been attacked by wolves even while the remains of the last Tribal Raid were still sitting out in the open, undecayed and ripe for the eating.