The Problem with Predators

[ShadowKatt]

Rimworld has a pretty good ecology setup. Different biomes, different flora and fauna, a fairly realistic enviroment. Biomes grow plants, herbibores eat plants, predators eat herbivores. it's good. Most of the time.

There is something wrong with predators though. I don't know what it is, but I know it's somewhere in the predator AI. Something that ranks the animals on the map from most appetising to least is broken and human pawns somehow end up at the top of the dinner list. This makes no sense. Human pawns, with armor, and guns, should be one of the last things to eat on the map and that is not the case. Nothing has shown me this more clearly than my current colony is an arid brushland.

To set the scene, it's a hot and dry enviroment. Plants are scarce and so are animals, so when a predator does show up the options are limited. This is just part of living in this area, you deal with it. My colonists have been hunted from day fucking one but that's just the challenges. I would accept this if it wasn't so stupid though.



I'll give you Exhibit A. My colony(which has been absolutely pounded as of late) was attacked by a bunch of Manhunter Geese(which I totally believe). Fortunately Bullet > Goose, so we were fine. Only injury was a colonist who decided to go berserk in the middle of it because he had gut worms...I'm not starting another thread on mental breaks. So we're cleaning up afterwards and what magic should befall us? A cheetah is hunting one of my colonists. After a manhunter pack. With fresh goose carcasses LITTERED about the ground. In what universe does this make sense that my colonists are somehow easier food than the dead birds already on the ground. They're not claimed. I have six colonists, not all of whom are hauling and there are six dead birds still outside. This is a choice by the AI and it's a stupid one.

It's hardly the first time either. Day one of my colony we had to fight off three predators hunting our people. Day fucking ONE. No shelter, no stockpile. Packaged Survival Meals sitting out in the sun, but my colonists are of a higher priority to eat than food sitting readily available. This is wrong. I don't know how the AI assesses what food gets eaten first but it needs to be fixed. Unless an animal is specificly a manhunter or there is nothing else you shouldn't even need to think about predators. It's not even a dangerous event, it's not "Drama", just an annoying one that grinds everything to a stop two or three times a day.

[Dargaron]

*Snip*

Predators will also continue to hunt living prey (including your colonists, but also random herbivores) even when there are available corpses left over from their own previous kills. This is especially noticeable in cold biomes, where the map will eventually be littered with perfectly good "forbidden" animal corpses left by marauding polar bears/arctic wolves during the winter. Even come spring, the predators will continue killing new animals (at risk to themselves) rather than eat day-old meat.

This has been a problem since at least Alpha 18, and I reported it during the Beta 19 unstable testing on a purely unmodded save. Never fixed.

[zizard]

It makes perfect sense from the point of view of inconveniencing the player

[fritzgryphon]

Maybe there is no priority.  Predator gets hungry -> attack nearest allowable target.

[Canute]

Today is human day, since the whole quadrum i waited for these day. Damn hare i can't see them anymore.

[LWM]

Having predators eat corpses (at least most predators) over living animals has been on my list of things to do for a bit.

Most predators are - at a minimum - opportunistic scavengers, so they really should eat whatever they can.  And then there are things like ferrets, weasels, (probably wargs), and housecats, who will happily murder something just because it moved...

Other notes of things predators should do:

Cats (and probably others) should sleep after killing.

Predators should guard their dead prey - after all, they went through a lot of work to kill it, and a lot of risk to kill that squirrel, they want to keep it!  This one, in particular, will require some careful logic and probably some "run away if threatened by something bigger" AI coding.

--LWM

[B@R5uk]

...housecats, who will happily murder something just because it moved...

Ha-ha! That's so true!

[Prologue]

I have a bigger problem with animals having perfect pathfinding, even around complicated obstacles, but I already made a post on that.. I think there is certainly room for improvement on the hunting aspect as well. Having a better dynamic between hunter and hunted animals on the map also creates more of a tactical choice when hunting. do you go for the easy pray first and become a pray yourself later? or do you try to keep a healthy balance in the food chain so that you are more safe in the long run? Also, should their not be a limit in distance between the hunter and the pray? Or at least line of sight? So often a predator will target a pawn that is sitting behind 3 walls on the other side of the map.

[Shurp]

Hey, be thankful you get a warning now, used to be you found out a colonist was being hunted was when the predator was already munching on his arm.  Especially aggravating when foxes would kill humans.