Getting a handle on meat

[Ukas]

Even just dropping the spawn rate would make it less exploity.  If you kill all the wildlife on the map, it shouldn't just come back after 2 days.

Counter this with allowing wildlife to breed.  The player is then incentivised to not over-hunt.

The best idea is to require animal products like milk (cheese?) and eggs for lavish meals. Better food comes from variety and good ingredients, instead of just taking more of the same.

These are the most logical ideas imo. If you overhunt deers, there won't be deers to hunt in the near future.

When I started to play the game and noticed lavish meals - didn't yet check what you need for them - so I thought it's probably meat, vegetables and animal products. When I did check what is needed, just more meat and more veggies was a kind of a letdown.

[Zombull]

How about something like that :
Remove (or greatly reduce) the number of animals on the map.
To balance that, you can make some kind of "hunting" caravan who can look for animals on the world map and bring back some food home.

That makes sense to me. Sending out a hunting party that leaves the map for a time and have a chance to come back with carcasses based on their skills, the time of year, biome, etc. It shouldn't be a caravan, though. That'd make it too micromanagey. It should just be a job.

[Scavenger]

I love the first idea! Good balance.

But the second.. People like seeing the animals! And what about animal taming??

[Th3Eagle85]

FYI more faction interactions mods adds a hunting lodge event where you go to by caravan and then hunt migrating animal packs.

I am not sure what the real issue is here. Do you want keeping livestock more profitable or hunting less? I usually play on desert maps and am glad if the occasional lizard or emu shows up. Keeping livestock is my main source of animal product (meat/milk/eggs). Hunting in this case does not feel overpowered.

When playing in more friendly biomes does it not makes sense that there is an abundance of animals to hunt. If it feels its OP you could always limit yourself and not kill all the animal on the map.

It feels a little bit like complaining about having a year round growing season on the more friendly biome that you chose yourself.

[Wanderer_joins]

I think the issue is why would you raise animals for food when you get free meat for manhunter packs. Also milk and eggs are not special compared to meat for fine/ lavish meals.

[Th3Eagle85]

The idea of needing milk/eggs for lavish meals with meat and veg makes sense.

[Injured Muffalo]

I totally agree with the goal, once upon a time I did a ton of analysis and balancing to try to make the farming case viable (several alphas ago), but it's hard as hell to actually get all the balance points working. Especially given how straightforward hunting is, and how manhunter packs deliver mass meat/leather. It's hard for raising animals to compete with that without being ridiculous in other ways.

I'm sure you've looked it over, but one idea is to make reproduction much, much slower. Pretty much like a special event. So they breed fast enough to increase, but if your Llama has a lifespan of 45 years, it probably shouldn't breed more than once in 10 years. No offense to Alpaca assault horde breeders, but in the sense of making it sustainable and balanced...

[tarator]

Ever since Colony Manager fixed the tediousness of slaughtering, I've raised boars for roleplaying reasons. But now with tameness decay I find it too counterproductive. I grow hay to feed them, now I have to grow even more and waste time to keep them tame... Hunting is the only way.

[Azrael_Itaru]

Since we want to force people to use farming (when this is by no means a farming simulator), and be forced to recruit multiple tamers and grow gigantic haygrass fields, as well as cooks to make them into kibble in order to feed livestock in numbers big enough to actually feed a colony...

I suppose that we should also make all trees and plants in the wild tainted too, and force people to grow their own, but by the logic shown here, that's not enough. We should probably also make the ground poisoned in general so you can't grow crops outside regardless of biome so that you have to use sunlamps and hydroponics since they are also underused.

[Bolgfred]

Suggestion #2: Make hunting more authentic. Real hunters don't have omniscient knowledge of the species and location every animal within a several mile radius. Real hunting takes patience and skill and stealth and often results in failure. Don't show wild animals on the map. Change the Wildlife tab to a Hunting tab and make it a bill system in which the player designates what animals to hunt for and the hunter goes out hunting, anywhere on the map or in designated zones. They have a chance, determined by biome and skills and terrain and human activity in the area, to sight prey and attempt to kill it.

You serious? We go into the forest with grenades, flamethrowser and a LMG, and you ask about authenticity? I think that ship has sailed.
"One hunter with a minigun is a good idea. But a second one isn't."
-Bullet Hole Bill, rotten corpse age 37

Anyway, your point is a quite good one: Hunting need patience and has a risk of failure. Problem I see in yuour idea is, that it's way too complex for rimworld. Not that it's bad, but it needs to be simpler.
Current state is, whenever you shoot an animal it will fight or flee 10 tiles and wait for getting shot again.
Let's say, whenever a shot is fired, all animals will turn "disturbed" within 25 tiles. When 'disturbed' an animal will behave like it's now fleeing, running away 10 fields and calm down again.
After being attacked few times or being disturbed multiple times, animal will completely flee off the map, making it almost impossible to catch up and kill it.
By this, a trigger happy SMG-User will empty the forest with nothing, whilst a careful aim bolt rifle, will catch animals by surprise, and a bow makes no noise at all.
Additional, fast hunting animals will greatly help, as they keep the prey busy, just as in real life (more or less).
Result: Still a lot of animals on the map, but no free meat delivery, as difficult to hunt.

Also, reducing meat a bit by damage taken sounds nice, but dont overdo it here. A skilled hunter should be able to get a shot to the heart/head, minimizing meat loss.

Already done with 'missing body parts' in vanilla: this reduces both meat & hide yield from the corpse.. possibly encouraging your skilled marksmen/hunters to take up more accurate weps?

Maybe it's not enough. When I look at my hunting results there is rarely a body part missing. And even if, it's 5-10% percent meat value lost.
It should be greatly more. Especially depending on animal size. have you ever shot a rabbit with a shotgun? You almost cannot eat it because there shot pellets everywhere.
Hunted animals should be nerved in their products. Maybe, every shot stacks up a hediff 'plumbiferous' which decreases meat/leather value by 1%. To a max of 75%
A clean sniper shot => 99% left
Maffia style hunting party =>25% left
Butcher tamed animal =>100% left

By this, Lifestock gets more instresting as they offer their full meat value.

[giltirn]

I would prefer a buff to livestock rather than a nerf to hunting. On colder biomes with short growing seasons, hunting is very important to survival, not just for meat but for clothing. On these maps livestock is already very difficult to maintain due to the requirement to stock haygrass for the long winter. I like the idea of giving more meat from tame animals.

[Aerial]

I would prefer a buff to livestock rather than a nerf to hunting. On colder biomes with short growing seasons, hunting is very important to survival, not just for meat but for clothing. On these maps livestock is already very difficult to maintain due to the requirement to stock haygrass for the long winter. I like the idea of giving more meat from tame animals.

This would be a good reason for winter forage to be possible.  The idea that animals all starve during the winter is kind of ridiculous, and though I understand the purpose from a gameplay standpoint, I think it makes a lot more sense gameplay-wise to add some realism.  Let winter forage be sparse and require more squares ingested for the same amount of nutrition compared to the other seasons.  A small number of animals on the map would then be able to survive by roaming around quite a bit to graze.

If you keep livestock and want to keep them in a small, more easily protected area, you'll need to supplement their feed with hay or crops.  The advantage is a sustainable meat source for cost, but hunting remains viable.

[Call me Arty]

 Deer are timid as hell. I could see them sticking around for a bit, but they don't overly like human company. I'd imagine the same applies to many other critters. Rats though? They don't give much of a damn. I could see a colony growing to spook animals with a higher wildness away, limiting hunting to critters like rats, squirrels, and hares, while the big game would move to adjacent tiles. It'd give more of a reason to venture out, and might give more of a feel of a big hunting trip.

Sure, it's a rough idea, but I think it could go somewhere. Better than having reliable meat-piles just wandering around a bunch of walls and constant gunfire.

[Aerial]

Sure, it's a rough idea, but I think it could go somewhere. Better than having reliable meat-piles just wandering around a bunch of walls and constant gunfire.

Both wild and domesticated animals get used to constant gunfire.  We kept horses at a ranch next door to an outdoor shooting range (so mostly rifles) and rode on the federal reserve land that surrounded the area.  Lots of deer and other wild animals, along with our domesticated horses and the barn dogs and cats.  None of them some much as blinked when they heard gunfire, including the deer we encountered on the trails.

In the game context I agree with your point that the wild animals shouldn't be such easy targets, but it's not as unrealistic as it seems.  If hunting had been allowed on that federal land the deer probably would have been a lot more skittish, but as far as they were concerned the gunfire was just noise.

[Broken Reality]

What this thread seems to boil down to is a group of people discussing ways to make things harder, take longer and be more frustrating. People are also not thinking about the whole game or even the biomes that their suggestions to nerf hunting and remove all meat from manhunter packs to make farming needed for meat and leather will effect.

They so far haven't thought about what you are to do for food early game when your meals run out and your rice has yet to grow enough on a desert or other low forage map. Are we supposed to now just not play those maps?

Had a problem and lost your food supply and no crops ready to harvest (raid, fire, loss of power) well that's GG if hunting isn't a thing. Caravanning running low on food, want to stop to hunt so you can make it? Well some of these folks think you should get less food or very little.

Can manhunter packs bring in a lot of meat and leather? Yes. But it is the last combat event that has any form of risk/reward tied to it. Normal raids your reward is a slim chance to have someone live to recruit and then you get penalised by having to bury/burn corpses and the resulting mood debuffs for corpses, late game you also get a ton of mostly useless wealth generating weapons that just increase the next raids size for you. Mech raids now give far less materials on disassembly so their risk / reward is far worse now. Manhunter packs you can choose to ignore but if you do fight them you can get rewarded with meat and leather for your risk. Don#t want the increased wealth from taking those? Don't kill them. Wealth control being a larger concern now with how expectations and raid scaling is now.