Ability for Hunters to see Animal Tracks

[Amagous]

Hey folks. Let me preface this with; I don't think the Hunter class is underpowered by any means, so this isn't a "They need a buff" thing. With that said:

I think it would be neat if the ability was added for hunters to see animal tracks for 12 ingame hours (or 10 IRL minutes, or whatever time the devs would want to set for it) after they've placed them / walked over the area. We're hunters, that's our thing. As you hunt in certain areas, I've noticed that animals become rarer and rarer; A hunting ground that was always full of animals for my first 2 years now hasn't had more than a single raccoon in the past 2 ingame years, and I'm the only person out there. I'm having to travel farther and farther IRL hours and hours apart to find anything. If I had to feed more than just myself through the winter, we'd be in serious trouble at this point. So, I think it'd be a good idea to add animal tracking. Rather than saying what specific animal it is on the tracks, just do it the same way and size as hides; "Small Tracks", "Medium Tracks", etc.

If there's a concern about balance and coding intensity, those could be fairly easily solved as well. Make it so that tracks only show up in snow (For balance), and add one extra state to Snow in the code "Has been walked on: Yes/No.", and set the animals as the trigger. You can set it so the animal checks the state of the block below it once every second, and if it detects it's snow, set its state to "Has been walked on: Yes" and then just set the size state (Small, Medium, etc) and have it count down. You'd need 1 or 4 extra visual effects depending on if you want all tracks to look the same, or if you want 1 specific track visual per size.

That's the idea. Definitely not a high-priority concept by any means, but it'd be neat / useful and help keep hunting viable even after getting ranches and full-on farms set up.

[idiomcritter]

probably wrong in my understanding, seems in a prior version there was an intent to reduce wild spawns or the frequency of reoccurring spawning?  like i said, could be my misunderstanding..

I do like the idea and maybe to build on it, if not tracks, perhaps something added to the prospecting pick, or a different tool that would give readings on an area regarding wildlife and the density (population) along with frequency on respawn(?)

[Thorfinn]

Not sure. Seems it would give a massive advantage to Hunters when tracking down wolves and bears in the brush. There is a footprints mod, but I've never tried it, for pretty much that reason.

[LadyWYT]

I like the idea, but I would take it a different direction: tracks/other signs are visible to all classes, and instead serve as indicators of where certain animals are more likely(but not guaranteed!) to spawn. So finding a lot of claw marks on trees could indicate a high likelihood that a bear is somewhere in the area, while hoofprints would suggest a larger herbivore like a deer or goat.

I'm not entirely sure how feasible it is to code though. If I'm not mistaken, I think there are fixed spawnpoints for creatures in the world, so I would assume that a handful of appropriate tracks/signs could be generated within a certain radius of the spawnpoint, in order to prevent players from too easily building traps on top of those spawns.

The other issue I see potentially is the lack of respawning tracks/signs, should they be destroyed. Maybe there could be some sort of seasonal check around the spawnpoints to replace any missing details? I would say that perhaps the spawnpoint ceases to function if too many markers get destroyed, but I think that would make it too easy to deal with predators if that were the case.

[Thorfinn]

18 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

If I'm not mistaken, I think there are fixed spawnpoints for creatures in the world,

I don't believe that's true, at least not anymore. The spawner metas are probably still there, at least for the locusts, but I don't think they're still used for regular old spawns. I think that was probably changed when mushrooms were.

Since I was just looking at conditions for bear spawns, here's the relevant data for them:

Spoiler

                runtime: {
                    group: "hostile",
                    MinDistanceToPlayer: 30,
                    tryOnlySurface: true,
                    chance: 0.00003,
                    maxQuantity: 1,
                    "__comment": "Make them spawn away from artifical light so they don't spawn inside farmland",
                    maxLightLevel: 7,
                    lightLevelType: "onlyBlockLight",                    
                    groupSize: { dist: "verynarrowgaussian", avg: 1, var: 1 },
                    insideBlockCodes: ["air", "tallgrass-*", "snowlayer-*"],
                    maxY: 1.6,
                    minTempByType: {
                        "*-polar": -48,
                        "*-brown": -15,
                        "*-sun": 24,
                        "*-panda": 20,
                        "*-black": -5
                    },
                    maxTempByType: {
                        "*-polar": -9,
                        "*-brown": 10,
                        "*-sun": 40,
                        "*-panda": 33,
                        "*-black": 20
                    },
                    minRainByType: {
                        "*-polar": 0,
                        "*-brown": 0.1,
                        "*-sun": 0.6,
                        "*-panda": 0.5,
                        "*": 0.25
                    },
                    minForestByType: {
                        "*-polar": 0,
                        "*-brown": 0.2,
                        "*-black": 0.5,
                        "*-panda": 0.6,
                        "*-sun": 0.4,
                        "*": 0.4
                    },
 

Essentially, they've parameterized the "biome" conditions under which they will spawn. At least the light level and distance to player has to be considered at runtime. Probably maxY, too. Temperature ranges and rainfall are probably those assigned at mapgen. Forestation and shrub cover probably is, too.

Could it be coded such that, say, sleeping replaced a tallgrass block with a mattedgrass? Sure, but offhand, I suspect it will involve c, because sleeping, walking, sitting, standing, etc. are all coded as "idle" aitasks. And those signs could easily be given a timer as with eaten grass and trimmed cattails. But I don't think you could probably include the type of creature that left the sign, or you would have to have separate blocks like mattedgrassbear, mattedgrassmoose, etc. At least I think so. I don't know of an existing field in the structure that could be used that way.

Edited February 4, 2025 by Thorfinn

[LtMare]

On the predator thing, it's already kinda implemented: animal corpses.
Judging how they were killed you can find out what kind of predators are in the area.
By upping the spawns of small game, or maybe directly spawning corpses, and maybe add some sound indicators like flies buzzing by can help determine whether it's a safe area to settle or not.