A recent change in the experimental build made it so Small Game no longer drop corpses, and are pulverized whenever you kill them / use traps on them. This seems silly and unrealistic, and pretty much invalidates the usage of traps, while I preferred the way it was before I’m not dumb enough to think I speak for everyone. I’d like a compromise for those of us still trying to learn the game could still have the option for small game to drop corpses, and those who wouldn’t like that be able to leave the option on. A lot of the changes being made seems to up the barrier to entry for newer players, and I believe we should be considered too when you’re working on things. I know this is a project for the fans by the fans who have played since the games creation, but I think lowering the barrier for entry for us newbies while upping endgame content’s difficulty would be preferable.
If you can’t, or this isn’t such a simple change, would it be possible pointing me in the right direction so that I can start modifying files to create a “Newbie” mode, for those still learning the ropes.
I’d second this. Its unrealistic for small game to just explode into gore when you simply tap with a rock, and renders snare trapping, small game arrows and birdshot without purpose.
Want to throw my support behind this as well. Small animals are the primary source of food for a lot of people’s characters, and their removal just doesn’t make sense- it’s definitely not a realism tweak, and it doesn’t add anything to the game experience to remove them.
I agree too. I think the way it previously worked was fine - getting meat from animals depended on your survival skill, so if you had low survival you were more likely to waste the meat from small corpses at the start anyway. I think it would be better to limit the amount of meat from small corpses, but not remove them entirely. As it stands, small animals now do absolutely nothing apart from setting off traps and wasting turret ammo.
I believe this is a happening thing. (At least there’s momentum to revert the morale penalties.)
If it isn’t, well, I’d like to see it removed, too. Pretty confident that I couldn’t gib the rabbits that like to park around here by throwing a Bic at 'em.
Small game meat drops were fine in the previous builds, they were hardly an abundant source of food, you have to hunt several to get enough to eat, more if you’re bad at butchering.
If you absolutely must change them, make them perhaps unseen unless you have good perception/are close to them/sit and watch for some time, that makes traps more useful for catching them and makes them situational, a perceptive character can live off the land more easily than an unperceptive one.
Further, if you change their behavior to make them avoid players more, it becomes important to use proper ranged weapons to hunt them.
With those I think it’d be fine, frankly I don’t really like most of the changes in that git entry, it seems rather focused on making the game arbitrarily harder. Not sure what it adds to the fun of playing it, especially not by adding a tonne of now completely useless small animals.
Yes I’m really cold on that PR too. I absolutely respect the effort any contributor adds to enhance the game without any compensation on their part, but there shouldn’t be that many sweeping balance changes in a single pull request. Should’ve been broken up into chunks.
[quote=“Jotun, post:6, topic:3681”]Small game meat drops were fine in the previous builds, they were hardly an abundant source of food, you have to hunt several to get enough to eat, more if you’re bad at butchering.
If you absolutely must change them, make them perhaps unseen unless you have good perception/are close to them/sit and watch for some time, that makes traps more useful for catching them and makes them situational, a perceptive character can live off the land more easily than an unperceptive one.
Further, if you change their behavior to make them avoid players more, it becomes important to use proper ranged weapons to hunt them.
With those I think it’d be fine, frankly I don’t really like most of the changes in that git entry, it seems rather focused on making the game arbitrarily harder. Not sure what it adds to the fun of playing it, especially not by adding a tonne of now completely useless small animals.[/quote]
+1
More variety is good, but I’d like we screen them out somewhat by making their visibility depend of the character’s perception, similar to an idea I suggested earlier - making perceptive players have a higher chance to find strawberry/blueberry bushes or other wild vegetables/fruits.
Yeah, it may need to go in with the stealth system or something, but I think having “harmless” critters blend into the background a bit is a better solution than the newly-implemented No Corpse Never No Way Nohow.
Came to the forums wondering about this… it looks like all spiders and insects are now classed as Vermin that don’t create corpses. Seems a bit wrong doesn’t it? They are supposed to be giants.
They still exist, but they don’t create corpses, so there’s no way to get Chitin. Just checked the jsons, it’s only giant spiders that were marked as vermin, not giant insects, so those would still drop chitin. Still seems like it was a mistake to mark giant spiders as vermin.
I had the rare opportunity to observe an artifact depleting the life force. Around this artifact I found quite a few “small animal” corpses, which I was able to butcher. Don’t know if an oversight or intended!? What I was thinking of, seeing this, is: Maybe they only have one (or less) hitpoints and if you do too much damage, you most likely gib them (Just thinking of a squirrel shot by buckshot) but if you use weapons fitting for the animal, .22 rat-shot for example or maybe throwing stones / using small traps, being able to retrieve the corpse and butcher it would be a good idea?
Edit: Killed a giant jumping spider. Was able to butcher and got chiting.
As I pointed out, someone on the IRC managed to gib squirrels and rabbits using thrown rocks and lighters. Thinking .22 ratshot would do more damage.
[hr]
This also came up in the IRC. Atomic Dryad’s been going through the files more thoroughly (THANKS!) and so far it’s not clear just how the populations are shaking out.
But yeah, the existing “vermin” were Blob-mutated giants. Trapdoor spider’s supposed to be a serious encounter (spider-lair has its own loot table, including being one of the only places to find the military-grade Flamethrower), and the Giant Frog looks at you like it would a fly.
(Wolf Spiders are a staple of my character’s diet, incidentally.)
This rebalance basically flips Swamp and River spawns from “Dangerous…but somewhat useful” to “Useless and theoretically a non-threat”, since Vermin aren’t supposed to attack the player.
Major balance shift, and I know I completely missed it in the PR.
Question is: Why did the artifact kill the animals and left the corpses to butcher, and why does throwing a lighter gib them?
Just got aware that giant ants are ignoring you, shouldn’t you be food for them? Did this behaviour change most recently, because I can’t remember when last encountered some ants anyway.
Another Edit, sorry for that, this subject bothers me a bit:
Was throwing a pocket knife at a squirrel, was able to butcher it. Guess: Small game has 1 hitpoint and gibs, when doing 2 damage or something like that?!
No of course we are, but if we don’t let the publishers know what we like or don’t like then it won’t really matter. Nipping this issue in the bud while it’s experimental will mean that it won’t be an issue when .9 comes out.
