a bolt from the (chicken) cordon bleu.

[Veewatch]

I'm sure it's happened to all of us. We innocently pick up a few chickens and suddenly the map is packed with them to the point that they eat all the grazing grass up and wander around racing each other every time a blade of grass begins to sprout. If you filled the map with hay grass it wouldn't keep up with them. They don't need a chicken coup, they need a skyscraper -meets-hanging-gardens. The farmers whisper that they're gathering, trying to form a caucus and worry they'll vote to deport the human colonists. Bandits tried to raid my colony, but they couldn't figure out how to get past the army of chickens. The mechanoids dropped in and it overloaded their internal hard drive so bad they overwrote their day memory 16 times just trying to count the chickens before them. They reported back to the mother ship that they'd landed on a giant chicken instead of a planet. We just scrapped them while they were still trying to count feathers with their motion sensors.

Now, normally it doesn't get this bad. Normally I pick temperate forest and the chicken problem takes care of itself each winter. Normally I have to slaughter those that don't die of starvation to feed my colonists during the winter. Normally I don't decide to tone down the events for a nice, relaxing run where I can set up my economy and let it go forever. Normally I try to separate them by gender early on.

Oh, I tried to separate them. I tried. Hours spent scrolling down a list of new chicks trying to determine gender and separate them into groups by map quadrant to slow the spread. Every few minutes I would pause and go down the list again on the off chance that one of the newly-hatched chicks were MALE in the FEMALE segment of the map. *shudders.* And this is what I do for fun, folks. This is what I do for fun.

It got so bad They were dying right left and center from having over-grazed the ENTIRE MAP on permanent summer. They were starving. Thank you, thank you, thank you Thyan for not making animal starvation a mood debuff or my colonists would be having mental breaks inside their mental breaks with "300x innocent baby chic has died because they STARVED TO DEATH because the person running the colony is an INHUMAN MONSTER!" -1,500 mood. My poor colonists couldn't get anything done for butchering the little monsters. I was glad when a predator started hunting a baby chic because it was more humane to be torn to death by a fox than to starve to death trying to compete with the full-grown chickens for food. I had to butcher chickens just to get their bodies off the map, using the unforbid command every 3 minutes, waiting for the segregation of chicken genders to balance the map automatically by attrition. I didn't have the manpower to slaughter them preemptively to balance it with the colonist's other needs. "you have a new message! chicken 374 has died!" "Chic 238 has died" "chicken 764 has died." Hour after hour. It wouldn't have surprised me if I missed a transport pod crash because it just never showed on the screen.

I hope you all found the above entertaining, but that's just the backdrop for the epic 'de-bawk-le.' I wanted to share with you today. the AI is fairly predictable in its pathing, especially around rivers. They would gather in large bodies running back and forth looking for grass to feed on in the best of times, and they were still starving when disaster struck like a bolt from the blue. Because, you know, it was a bolt from the blue. A flash storm struck chicken 568 and although the initial fire never really spread far... oh the humanity! The chickens KEPT WALKING THROUGH that small patch of fire!!! they would panic, wander off burning, die and then "light little candles of their own." The farmers arrived to find the wilderness ablaze, little chics running, chirping, burning. Each chicken seemed to run a little further than the last, and even when they didn't walk through the original fire, they might accidentally wander too close to another burning chicken. The whole corner of the map became one giant rotisserie oven.  I couldn't even solve it by rezoning them away from the area, because 1) the roosters were on the other side and 2) they would pass through that point to cross the river!

I guess the game decided I didn't already feel bad enough with the constant parade of "chic 374 has died of malnutrition." Perhaps in the end it was a mercy, though. Better to burn up than fade away. I'll see if I can dig up the save, but it's most likely deleted by now. That was a year or more ago, but when I told my brother about it he made me put it up on here. Anyway, happy gaming and I hope you found this entertaining.