Bears fish during warm season


Karzee

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I've noticed on the roadmap that there's going to be another season that I'll assume means warmer. If so, and the rivers/streams are flowing then I'd like to see the bears trying to catch fish like they do IRL. This would not only give them something to do besides just plodding about but, like a wolf when it's caught a deer or rabbit, the player could scare the bear off to steal the fish.

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Well unlike wolves, scaring a bear shouldn't be easy. I never kill the bears because they pose such a risk to me (I don't want to get a cheap kill by quickly diving into a car/hut/cabin).

How about the player has to fire an arrow that lands VERY  close to the bear for it to be spooked into running away. If the arrow hits the bear then it charges the player. If the arrow lands too far away then the bear has no reaction,  leaving the player one arrow down (no player will go to collect an arrow from a nearby bear) and deciding whether leave the arrow there or   risk firing another arrow, potentially losing that one as well or accidently hitting the bear making it charge the player.

I'm not sure. Maybe it'll be too much risk to the player to bother with. Then again, if the fish you could get was a large salmon that could give you at least 1500 calories then that might be a big enough incentive...especially on Interloper in regions without fishing huts.

Then again, who needs fishing huts when the streams are flowing?

 

 

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Maybe you can only fish where bears fish.....maybe bears are attracted to the smell of caught fish the player 'emits' when fishing or carrying fish. Maybe bears will defend their fish/fishing territory from players. I don't know if that''s normal bear behaviour.

We don't have bears here in England.

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On 2017-02-10 at 6:08 AM, Karzee said:

I've noticed on the roadmap that there's be another season that I'll assume means warmer. If so, and the rivers/streams are flowing then I'd like to see the bears trying to catch fish like they do IRL. This would not only give them something to do besides just plodding about but, like a wolf when it's caught a deer or rabbit, the player could scare the bear off to steal the fish.

Generally speaking IRL bears will tend to fish only during times of high fish concentration-- Essentially this means during salmon runs in the Fall..otherwise they wouldn't have enough chances of success to expend the effort.   Rainbow trout run in the Spring, but not usually in the numbers that attract bears.  The other difference with regards to this is that the salmon all die after their spawning run, which results in a lot of free meals for bears (and other wildlife), even if they can't catch the live fish. Trout return back down the streams to spawn again in subsequent years. 

Bears are known to aggressively defend food sources... and they could just take the fish with them if they were to flee (which seems unlikely)

Lesser known fact: Some groups of wolves are also known to take advantage of salmon runs.. :)

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A few thoughts on this, having lived in bear country and having had a few dozen encounters with bears, mostly grizzlies; almost every single encounter I've had with bears, the bear was running the other direction. Even if food was involved, including when the bear had found food, and including when I had food on me, which the bear could have certainly smelled, and including in autumn when bears are aggressively trying to find food in anticipation of the winter. This also includes scenarios where the bear and I surprised each other. The only exceptions I can think of were mother bears who had cubs that either could not keep up if she had tried to run, or where her cubs had gone up a tree and she couldn't run without leaving them stranded. You could argue that I've simply gotten lucky. But I think the point is that wild animals, including large carnivores/omnivores such as bears, try to avoid human encounters as much as possible. As frail as humans are, we are simply too smart and too well armed for wild animals to reliably prey on us; hence their primary evolutionary instinct is to leave.

The only reason I'm bringing this up here is; in terms of the game, IRL examples of animal behavior don't really make for the best gaming experience. Pilgrim mode would really be the most realistic example of animal behavior, and it's not very challenging (actually, it's still not realistic, since bears should be hibernating in winter and we shouldn't see them at all). So in the context of the gaming experience, where bears are functionally the most challenging form of opposition the player encounters, then hell yeah, I wouldn't expect the player to be able to "push" a bear off of a salmon kill at all.

Also, I do think the idea of having bears fish for salmon would be really cool to add to the game, and I would get a kick out of seeing that.

Just my $0.02

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