Suggestion for hunting...

[Fearsclave]

One thing that I've noticed in the gameplay vids is that the hunting model isn't terribly realistic. The deer are nowhere near as spooky and alert as real deer. In real life they're incredibly wary, have amazing senses of smell and hearing, and actually bagging them is rather difficult.

Furthermore, the yield in meat is a little off. I can see scavenging about 24 ounces of useful venison (about 1000 calories) off a half-eaten deer carcass, but dressed out, an average doe can yield forty pounds pounds of meat, or about 26,000 calories.

Also, butchering dead animals (which I have a fair bit of experience with) takes time. Last year my buddies and I bagged a large moose calf (in the 7-800 lb ballpark). It took us from 3:00 to 7:00 to gut it, quarter it, pack it out (1.5 klicks uphill over freshly logged ground) and get it to my buddy's house. It took five people until 1:00 the next morning to skin the quarters, butcher, and process it. It yielded around 250 pounds of meat. I still have a couple of roasts from my share in the freezer.

Extrapolating this to the game, I'd suggest the following:

1) Make hunting harder, requiring a stalk from downwind, or at least, semi-realistic levels of deer paranoia. If you don't kill it outright, you have to track it until it dies.

2) Have the deer yield more realistic quantities of meat.

3) Have harvesting meat from the deer work like foraging firewood; the more meat you want, the more time/calories it burns, the more exposure to the elements you get, the more you take the more encumbered you get, and the longer you take butchering it, the more risk of attracting wolves you run.

4) if you harvest just a bit of meat, you should be able to come back later (see above re encumbrance) and possibly get some more meat off the carcass, if the wolves and crows have left you any (and for that matter wolves might be hanging around the carcass).

This could leave you with a tough decision; imagine you're starving and cold, the sun is going down, snow is blowing in, you're low on ammo, and the deer you just shot has bounded off into the trees, leaving a promising blood trail. Do you follow it, at the risk of having to butcher it at night in a blizzard? Do you seek shelter and try to find the carcass at the morning, and risk getting less meat or having wasted a precious bullet completely?

Am I overthinking this?

[robdoar]

It's alpha. Animal AI is very limited, and is slated to get much better.

That being said, you're points are great.

[Fearsclave]

Just watched LordMasterGaming's latest vids, and now I am looking forwards to Eary Access even more...