dynamic mob hostility

[th3w4rd3n]

right now the hostility functions in the game are good, but i think a bit basic. there's zero hostility, where mobs wont fight back even if attacked. we have passive hostility, where mobs fight back if attacked or injured. and we have aggressive (default) hostility, where mobs like wolves, rust mobs (locusts, drifters, shivers, bowtorns), and the like attack on sight. this is really good on its own, honestly! but i think there is a problem with the all-or-nothing approach, because it means you can walk into the most infested buildings and ruins and just slowly pick everything off one by one with ease. this is okay on peaceful-style playthroughs, but i think passive hostility and aggressive hostility could be improved.

it would be really cool to have a system where mobs decided whether or not to be hostile based on specific factors such as time of day, whether or not they have young, the time of year, or if youre close to a home location (which right now only applies to locusts, but could easily apply to wolves and bears too). for example, rust monsters could be hostile only at night, or while youre underground, so you dont have to clear everything when the sun rises if you dont want to. they could also be set to be always hostile if you enter certain ruins, such as story locations, and maybe certain tiers of monster are always hostile, like tainted or nightmare. bears could be hostile mostly in winter, meanwhile wolves wont attack unless youre injured, too close to their pups, or its winter time. stuff like that. itd be nice to also customize behaviours in the world menu, but that might be too much at once to suggest. 

[LadyWYT]

Welcome to the forums! Creature behavior is something that is still being worked on, however, I will note that there are lore reasons for wildlife being unusually aggressive. As for the monsters...they're eldritch horrors, or machines gone rogue, so it makes sense for those to be super aggressive.

I will note that depending on the creature in question, some have somewhat unpredictable behavior. I've had several wolves growl at me when I got too close, but run away instead of attack. Bears will occasionally continue sleeping or idling instead of attacking, although this is rare. Shivers are always aggressive, however, they are quite erratic and it's not out of the question for them to bite once or twice before scuttling away to parts unknown.

On 10/10/2025 at 7:17 PM, th3w4rd3n said:

itd be nice to also customize behaviours in the world menu, but that might be too much at once to suggest. 

I think to customize creature behaviors in the specific ways you've listed, mods are probably the best way to handle it. That way the player can have a ton of different options available, without clogging up the standard settings menus.

[th3w4rd3n]

thanks for the warm welcome!

On 10/12/2025 at 2:34 PM, LadyWYT said:

I will note that there are lore reasons for wildlife being unusually aggressive. As for the monsters...they're eldritch horrors, or machines gone rogue, so it makes sense for those to be super aggressive.

don't worry, i know some of the rough lore, though i only have 123 hours in the game so i don't know everything just yet. that said, i think taking the fairly simple mob behaviour and explaining it as lore feels a little... hand-wavey, i guess? this is not to insult the game because i know it's still being worked on and doesn't have a massive team behind it, i promise. i just think it makes the game a little less interesting since, if something is always aggressive, then the choice you usually make is to always avoid them, you get me? and it sorta does a disservice to the other, more relatively complex mechanisms of the game.

in a game where one has to be careful and cautious with your resources and how you spend them, i think it'd make for a more interesting experience if one of the choices you had to make was to avoid creatures and have to take longer to get somewhere/risk missing out on resources, or risk approaching them/passing by and hope they're not feeling aggressive. it can also open the doors for a lot of other cool lore too! perhaps drifters are not hostile during the day because the light of the sun pacifies or blinds them, for example. male deer and boars could turn aggressive when it's rutting season, making it harder to hunt them, though they'll be fatter during this time too. (fun fact! did you know boars kill twice as many people in america per year as bears? boars average around 8 deaths a year, while bears average around 3-4. wild pigs are actually so dangerous that, in premodern times, they were often hunted using special spears to prevent them from running their way down the spear to continue attacking you even after being stabbed)

even if it ended up being simple day/night (or skylight access, for cave encounters) and season checks, i think it'd put things a little more on par complexity-wise with the rest of the game. it wouldn't even just have to cover hostility either, if the devs wanted. domestication could be made a more complex process using mechanics like this too (though, personally, i'd switch the requirements for being insta-klled by the cleaver and not running away. animals get habituated pretty quick irl if you feed them regularly)

On 10/12/2025 at 2:34 PM, LadyWYT said:

I think to customize creature behaviors in the specific ways you've listed, mods are probably the best way to handle it. That way the player can have a ton of different options available, without clogging up the standard settings menus.

oh i agree, actually! granular stuff like that is best handled by mods so that it doesn't overwhelm new players or people who want a quick start. but on the other hand, mods are often made and maintained by volunteers, who may or may not get paid for their work, and i'm leery of offloading too much of that kind of work onto the playerbase. maybe there could be a simple mechanism in-game, like an "advanced settings" under the creature hostility dropdown that contains a list of mob groups (bears, deer, rust monsters, pigs, etc) and a short checklist for each group (hostile during day/night/both, hostile underground/surface/both, hostile during spring/summer/autumn/winter/multiple/all). then modders can add onto that to make some super granular customizable behaviour for people who want to aim for ultra-realism or super hard survival (imagine making your world so even rabbits are hostile)

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, th3w4rd3n said:

don't worry, i know some of the rough lore, though i only have 123 hours in the game so i don't know everything just yet. that said, i think taking the fairly simple mob behaviour and explaining it as lore feels a little... hand-wavey, i guess? this is not to insult the game because i know it's still being worked on and doesn't have a massive team behind it, i promise. i just think it makes the game a little less interesting since, if something is always aggressive, then the choice you usually make is to always avoid them, you get me? and it sorta does a disservice to the other, more relatively complex mechanisms of the game.

This is true, and I do expect creature behaviors to get more complex as time goes on. However, I'm not sure that changing behaviors from "always aggressive" to "sometimes aggressive" really makes that much of an impact on the gameplay in terms of natural creatures(monsters should really always be aggressive, as they don't feel like the creepy threats they're meant to be otherwise). On the one hand, it could give players a better chance of survival should they accidentally stumble across predators like bears and wolves. On the other hand, that could also lead new players to assume that dangerous animals aren't actually that dangerous and more similar to the other block game, if the first encounters they have with them aren't aggressive. Overall though, I expect the average player to avoid dangerous creatures to begin with, or otherwise kill them, to ensure their own safety. "Might not attack" isn't the same as "won't attack", so better to be safe than sorry.

[th3w4rd3n]

31 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

I'm not sure that changing behaviors from "always aggressive" to "sometimes aggressive" really makes that much of an impact on the gameplay in terms of natural creatures(monsters should really always be aggressive, as they don't feel like the creepy threats they're meant to be otherwise).

honestly that's a reasonable concern. i'm not a game designer, though i do play a lot of games, so my critique and requests are only ever from an outside perspective. it's hard to say unless it actually gets implemented what the end effect would be. it probably would be best if the devs added a way to hook into creature behaviour, and then a modder adds the creature behaviour, and then the devs can gauge how well it would go over with the playerbase before making the choice to integrate it into the main game.

as for the varied aggressiveness, to me, in my mind, it adds a layer of realistic danger. animals irl, especially wild animals, can be unpredictable and are often much more dangerous than people give credit for. carnivores are also typically less aggressive irl than herbivores, despite common public perception, due to various factors i don't want to clog the thread up infodumping about (it has to do with food and ability to heal/recover), though their attacks are far more likely to be immediately lethal. the safe option is always to avoid, of course, but i think having the option of risk versus reward could make that a more complicated decision, especially if behaviour changes through the year or in different environments. then again, irl it's always safer to avoid than approach a wild animal unless you know what you're doing.

31 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

On the one hand, it could give players a better chance of survival should they accidentally stumble across predators like bears and wolves.

that is one benefit of a more dynamic mob aggressiveness system! it will do a lot of good for players that get unlucky during hardcore runs especially. then again, this could also be accomplished by not having them be overtly aggressive for the same amount of days as your initial no-monsters grace period

31 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

On the other hand, that could also lead new players to assume that dangerous animals aren't actually that dangerous and more similar to the other block game, if the first encounters they have with them aren't aggressive.

also true. i fully admit i did have minecraft in mind when i was thinking of this notion, specifically modpacks like technodefirmacraft, which i've played quite a bit and enjoyed as well. for that modpack, the mob behaviour is a little more simple than what i've got in mind, mostly just day/night based rather than a nested web of checks. some predators only hunt at night, others hunt during the day, stuff like that. that said, playing those packs, it did make things a little more interesting and challenging! i knew i could pass by the mountain with the cougar on it safely by the day, but at night i'd have to cut a wide berth and not linger. so i can say that at least in the other blocks game, i did find it an interesting, if simple, little challenge.

Edited October 14, 2025 by th3w4rd3n

[Metalton]

Hmm.. could probably stand more interesting behavior tweaking, but my experience so far (at least when it come to surface critters) is that Aggressive is more "mostly" than "always".

Sure, most of the time my encounters with bears/wolves end with them chasing and/or killing me.. but still have had more than a few encounters where the wolf snarled at me and continued on its way (though I didn't stick around to see if it would change its mind). Even (twice I think) been chasing a rabbit/racoon run through a bush to find I was now chasing a bear.. and wisely let him have the critter and ran back the other way..

So, it seems there may be some less hostile quirks to their behavior already, just a bit on the rare side,.. or I just got lucky with some glitches or something

[th3w4rd3n]

2 hours ago, Metalton said:

So, it seems there may be some less hostile quirks to their behavior already, just a bit on the rare side,.. or I just got lucky with some glitches or something

ive also witnessed the same! without directly studying the pathfinding behaviour, i can only guess whats happening, but i wonder if it has to do with the mob thinking it cant get to you/youre moving too fast for it to catch. then again, ive also had pigs and bucks follow me for ridiculous distances, so how robust the pathfinding is really seems to depend on how the AI feels at the moment lol. i do wonder if there's something more complex under the hood, or if it's just bugs that work out nicely