Do (tamed) animals have temperature needs?

[khearn]

Based on watching Rhadamant's Sea Ice Community Challenge - Part One, the way it seems to work is that you go through a few stages of hypothermia: shivering, minor, and then serious. Frostbite only seems to develop when the pawn is at the serious stage, the others are fairly harmless. When the pawn gets back to a warm place, the hypothermia level gradually does down and eventually goes away.

It appears that frostbite can occur any time the pawn has hypothermia(serious), even if it is currently in a warm place. I watched him a few times bring a pawn with hypothermia(serious) back indoors and have frostbite appear after the pawn was indoors, but before the hypothermia had time to decrease to minor.

So if it's cold enough that your chickens can get to serious hypothermiaduring the course of a day, they may be in danger. The thing I'm not sure of is whether or not chickens have the sense to notice that they are getting cold and have a wam place available, and will go to it. Noticing they are cold is trivial to implement, so is going to a known warm place when they are getting cold. The problem I see is having the chicken know that it has a warm place available. That sounds computationally expensive, since it would basically require scanning the map of the entire area the chicken can get to, looking for a warm tile. If the chicken was unrestricted, you could potentially have to scan the entire map every time it got cold to try and find a warm refuge. I suppose there may be some optimizations to make it less expensive, but it's still going to use up a chunk of CPU time.

Typing the above raised a few questions in my mind. Do wild animals also suffer from cold damage? I've never noticed wild animals dropping from hypothermia, but I haven't played much in cold biomes (which explains why my knowledge of hypothermia and frostbite comes from watching someone else's video). If they do, will they try to find a warm place for refuge? This could be really expensive, since you'd have to scan the entire map for every wild animal that gets cold. If they do actually seek a warm place, can you set up a warm place to attract animals, thus bringing targets right to your hunters (who don't even have to go out in the cold any more)?

The trouble  I see with that last one is setting up a place that wild animals can get to that is warmer than outdoors. Generally, one sets up a room surrounded by walls and doors to hold in heat, and wild animals won't go through doors (although there are some real life bears and raccoons that would disagree with that concept). So setting up a warm place to attract wild animals may not be possible. If you set up a "room" (it's not fully enclosed, so the game wouldn't consider it a room) with a long narrow passage with no doors, and put a heater in the room, would you be able to warm up the "room"?

[Lys]

Typing the above raised a few questions in my mind. Do wild animals also suffer from cold damage?

I'm fairly sure that they would if you wall them in or something, but wild animals will normally leave the map when the temperature is not comfortable for them anymore (same as when they are starving and they find nothing to eat).