Animal weights

[cactusmeat]

They are currently very odd. I did some googling to see what earth equivalent animals are. Keep in mind Rimworld is not on earth, but biology functions within the laws of the universe. It is known that an atmosphere of more oxygen allows insects to be larger, where dragonflies could have wingspans of 2 feet.

Some of these just seem horribly off.



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[pablo603]

Yeah when I went to rescue a guy on the world map I got attacked by yorkshire terriers. I wanted to take some of the corpses back home for food, but then I realised they weigh..... 20 kg...

[sadpickle]

If a corpse weighed 2000 kilos could a pawn even pick it up? I think carry weights are ignored for hauling those but not sure.

[AileTheAlien]

All the animal sizes look like they've been adjusted to fall into a middle-ish range, so they're all useful to the player. If squirrels weighed half a kilo, no player would want them clogging up the wildlife/hunting UI, because they would offer practically no meat for their colony. On the other hand, a single bear or muffalo should be able to stock a handful of pawns for at least a month of food, but they only give you a couple days. Unless Tynan's going to make muffalos extremely rare, or re-work small animals to not be player-interactible, these animal sizes are what we need to have in the game.

[Aerial]

All the animal sizes look like they've been adjusted to fall into a middle-ish range, so they're all useful to the player. If squirrels weighed half a kilo, no player would want them clogging up the wildlife/hunting UI, because they would offer practically no meat for their colony. On the other hand, a single bear or muffalo should be able to stock a handful of pawns for at least a month of food, but they only give you a couple days. Unless Tynan's going to make muffalos extremely rare, or re-work small animals to not be player-interactible, these animal sizes are what we need to have in the game.

I think these could be made realistic without too much heartburn.

One month (real) = 1/12 year.  In Rimworld 1 year = 60 days, so 1/12*60 = 5 days.  I think a muffalo now would make 15-ish fine meals, so if it made 30 instead, that would feed 3 pawns for that 5 day month.  And squirrels, hares, chickens, turtles, etc should make 1 or 2 meals, tops.

It would definitely change hunting dynamics but I don't think it would make it worse, especially if those small animals were non-revenge and herd sizes were adjusted.

[Grimelord82]

Upward adjusting the caravan animals to match real world would honestly be a nice change. I doubled Muffalo/Rhino/Elephant/Thrumbo sizes in B18. It doesn't have to affect meat qty too much, honestly. How much USABLE meat could you putt off a Thrumbo, accounting for organs, etc. if it doubled in size?

Increasing size + increasing meat drop also creates a negative pressure on hunting. Right now I hunt my maps down to vermin whenever possible, and it rarely feels like enough. Hunting a muffalo and feeling set for 3-6 days would pair well with the extra micromanaging we have to do in 1.0, like trap and turret fixing.

[Klomster]

Currently the animal weights are..... special.

How hard would it be for someone to try this out, for example mod an elephant for being a few tonnes, a cat being 20+ kilos is rather...... let's just say it's a big cat. Around 3 is way more reasonable.
All in all, put in the averages and see how it plays.

It would be fun to see how the game dynamics change and how hunting and animal husbandry changes.
Since i remember the times mum got half a moose or so for making minced meat....
I helped with that several times.
The amount of food from a single moose is a whole lot. But games often just makes meat drop in small quantities from animals.
I guess it's some form of balance, but it honestly mostly feel silly that i have to wipe out everything on the map constantly to feed my 5-6 colonists. Especially if some of those animals are like 6-7 deer.
A male red deer apparently goes as high as 260kg's.... let's say that half that weight is unusable (i don't know how much is reasonable), that's 130kg's.

That's a lot of meat, from a single stag.
True, if such weight was added, hunting would need to be reworked, since if one wanted it could get silly and the whole animals not reacting to gunshots is a bit odd.

I mean, this muffalo herd isn't bothered that a madman with a minigun is shooting at them?
Hitting like all of them? Later leaving them dying from infections where i needed to try and save as many as possible from the infections, barely any of them made it. It was really harsh........
This might have happened in a game once.....

Anyway, meat and leather is rather scarce, which is weird since from a healthy cow you could probably get enough leather to make a good jacket or two. Now you need several cows for a single t-shirt?
I know there's a lot of balance with all of this, but i'd rather see a more realistic take on this than the current.
Not go SUPER REALISM, that's boring. We're here for a firefly western space opera after all.
But Kenny beating the crap out of that cougar that pounced him and later making pants out of it to wear is just proper.
(Right now one would need several cougars. Which takes away from the thing.)

[Grimelord82]

I suppose I think that meat and leather drops are reasonable...with a GOOD cook.
I have not looked at the production curve for this, but rarely feel out of leather.

That said, even with a 10+ cook, a MEGA-SLOTH boi only gives enough leather for a duster+hat.
Adjusting spawn rates down and material drops up would be acceptable, to go along with size increases.

Tangent - since we're talking animal hunting, anyone want to start a thread about Animal Handling = Stealth? It's seeming overpowered to me right now, with a 75% stealthed shotgun wielding maniac chasing deer and muffalo. But some Rhino just showed up, so I sense fun incoming.