We already have these you say!? What!? Yeah, except nothing will step on them. So let’s add to it a bit. Let’s create a camouflage cover so that things will step on them. 
Catching that elusive dear by simply being industrious enough to cover half the forest in spiked pit traps. 
In Unreal World using fences and pit traps yields good results. The fences help guide the game into the traps.
Don’t use them far from where you sleep, otherwise nothing ever will jump in them. Maybe digging them around areas you loot or visit a lot is a good idea too.
Just make a moat of them outside your safehouse windows. So many things step in them they tend to break now and then, so I’ve dug a moat around the spikepits too. Rabbits and squirrels tend to die to the first moat, anything like zombies or moose tend to die to the spiked one, or are dead enough that I can simply open the window and smack them in the face.
As Op4 said, I’d recommend fences, but to be honest anything worth killing with spiked pits would just tear chainlink fences or picket fences.
Last I heard, large amounts of dead bodies fill up pits again.
Protip: two-by-fours can be used as bridges across pits and spiked pits. you can even remove the temporary plank bridge when you return to sleep in your spike-domed abode. 
Hmm. I used to use pit trap moats, but they got nerfed at some point; I never notice any dead animals in my pits anymore, like they’re merely an obstruction instead of a proper defence. I set up spike trap moats once or twice since, but haven’t much seemed worth the effort… a lot of work spent crafting spikes, which you need to repeat every time the pit catches something. It doesn’t help that static spawn more or less obviates the need for base defences; once you’ve cleared out the area around your base, you’re more or less good.
It’d be better if you could craft spiked pits with unworked wood and a cutting tool, instead of premade spears; cut down on the busywork, at least.
[quote=“Endovior, post:4, topic:3420”]Hmm. I used to use pit trap moats, but they got nerfed at some point; I never notice any dead animals in my pits anymore, like they’re merely an obstruction instead of a proper defence. I set up spike trap moats once or twice since, but haven’t much seemed worth the effort… a lot of work spent crafting spikes, which you need to repeat every time the pit catches something. It doesn’t help that static spawn more or less obviates the need for base defences; once you’ve cleared out the area around your base, you’re more or less good.
It’d be better if you could craft spiked pits with unworked wood and a cutting tool, instead of premade spears; cut down on the busywork, at least.[/quote]
It’s not so much that the traps got nerfed, rather it’s that basic animals got smart enough not to throw themselves into them.
That doesn’t seem to be the case, in my experience; I see animals wandering into my pits all the time, and non-spiked pits don’t seem to have any effect other than slowing movement a bit. If they are actually getting hurt a little in the process, it’s not evident… at the very least, I don’t recall seeing any injuries on anything that I attempted to shoot after it blundered into a pit.