Bear Dens

[Bruno Willis]

Bears are mini-bosses without lairs, and without mechanisms which can be used by the devs to make them into deliberate challenges. Wolves sort of share this issue too. By tying predator spawns to dens, the devs could simultaneously make predators more realistic, and also make them more useful game tools. I've been thinking and posting about them a fair bit. This is how I'd make dens work:

Structure: When caves are generated, cave mouths with horizontal floors are assigned a den status: 1:Empty 2:Bear den 3:Wolf den. (the numbers represent approximate likelihood). If a cave mouth is assigned as a den, the game adds a dirty floor to the cave and half covers it with animal skeletons. Rarely, it also generates the remains of a failed camp: cracked vessels, owl chests, soiled bedding and gnawed on human skeletons. 

Spawning: Each den would generate with a number of animal "beds": 0-2 for bear dens, or 1-8 for wolve dens. These would be 1 block sized dry grass and rubbish nests (not necessarily realistic) which each represent spawn potential. If there was ever no animal assigned to a "bed", the game would wait 1-5 days, then spawn an appropriate replacement animal there. That would mean a built-in grace period before predators spawn at the start of the game. It would also mean that players could clear dens by destroying the beds animals have built there. At the start of every spring, the game would generate 1 "bed" on the dirt floor of each cave that was assigned a den status, maxing out at the top of the spawn score (2 "beds" for a bear den, etc.). In that way, dens would re-generate gradually if cleared, or become worse problems if left unchecked. 

Behavior:  Bears would doze in their beds briefly during the night, and hibernate there if the snow got too bad (tie hibernation to snow presence not season?) Bears would drag any large kills back to their beds to eat, finding the closest free space to leave the bones. This would lead to a growing spread of skeletons around a successful bear's den. A bear attacked while dragging a corpse back would drop the corpse and fight, giving players a way to distract bears and steal their kills. Once a bear had finished eating its meal, it would find the nearest un-scratched log block within reach, and scratch it (mark the log with obvious scratch marks). That behavior would could be interrupted if the bear saw any prey/threats to eat of course. Scratched pine or acacia logs would become resin leaking logs after 90 days or so. Wolves would doze in their "beds" during the day, or stay within 30 blocks of their beds as guards (meaning you're more likely to see wolves during the night and in winter, and bears during the day).

How this could be used: Once predator spawns are tied to specific blocks and locations, the devs can use them as realistic guardians for ruins, to justify higher loot in some places (people were too scared to go near...) and to make getting that loot a challenge. The devs might add ruin variants which are set as bear or wolf dens, to give players a nasty surprise when they see a tempting looking tower ruin on the edge of a forest. They might also hide good cave ruins behind bear and wolf dens, implying that no-one has been able to get into that cave and loot those ruins. 

Gameplay benefits: Players would get an immersive way to reduce bear and wolf spawns. Instead of trapping them in holes, players would be encouraged to follow predators back to their dens, then kill the predator and clear out the den: a challenge with a good reward: no more spawns from there until next spring. Bears would stop feeling like semi-random murder machines, and take up their rightful position as mini-bosses who are potentially guarding valuable mundane loot. Cave mouths would feel more integrated with the surface of the world. 

[williams_482]

This is an interesting idea. Some questions:

- Will dens be protected spaces? What is there to stop a player from preventing springtime spawns by digging out the floor of a den, or walling off the mouth of the cave?

- Would this mean that bears and wolves cannot spawn in areas that are too flat for caves to form? 

- How would the game determine which dens spawn additional beds each spring? For example, if you explore a region in year 0, then don't come back until year 4, are all dens going to be closed to maxed out on beds and predators because they had four spring seasons in which to spawn more?

I both like and dislike explicitly setting up bears and wolves as "mini-bosses". Right now they do serve that role to some extent if they happen to spawn in an otherwise valuable area, like an isthmus between two land masses, a large ruin, or an area with lots of huntable/capturable animals. They also serve to keep the player on their toes in areas which have been explored but not thoroughly built up. This change would mostly eliminate the unexpected bear showing up out of nowhere 100 meters from your house in July, and that's mostly but not unequivocally a good thing. It feels a little more gamified than the current highly random setup.

I'm not sure if this ultimately fits the Vintage Story vibe or not, but I'd like to try it. 

[Rainbow Fresh]

Not the original poster but lemme add my two cents to your questions aswell, for I like the general idea:

1 hour ago, williams_482 said:

Will dens be protected spaces? What is there to stop a player from preventing springtime spawns by digging out the floor of a den, or walling off the mouth of the cave?

If dens were generally claimed areas, the idea of having them as guardians in ruisn doesn't work cause then you couldn't loot the ruin. You could also not destroy the nests. On the other hand, I get where your concern is coming from cause otherwise you can just destroy the nest ez pz done never deal with them again - or worst case, have floating spawns like them good old Minecraft structures that are solely bound to invisible rectangle saying "here be spawns". So I'd suggest that dens as a whole can spawn in suitable cave entry areas. With an overall lower chance each year, so they naturally repopulate (and if the dirt floor is their main material, I wouldn't be too concerned about the balance of "infinite free dirt").

1 hour ago, williams_482 said:

Would this mean that bears and wolves cannot spawn in areas that are too flat for caves to form? 

I'll get to that aswell at the end.

1 hour ago, williams_482 said:

How would the game determine which dens spawn additional beds each spring? For example, if you explore a region in year 0, then don't come back until year 4, are all dens going to be closed to maxed out on beds and predators because they had four spring seasons in which to spawn more?

Would make the most sense, no? Enforces the immersive concept that the world keeps turning even if you don't look and nature does nature things even outside of your x blocks of simulation distance influence. Some parts, like crops, already have a "catch-up" mechanic so it wouldn't be too far stretched.

EDIT: To be more precise about this, I'd say add some randomness for wild spawns. So let's say, if the den is in a frequented area (i.e. the chunk gets loaded in every now and then by player activity), increase population guaranteed each year. If the chunk hasn't been visited in a long while, catch up with all years that past and give an x% chance for population to increase for each passed year. For freshly generated chunks, roll the dice (maybe weighed more towards the lower half than the upper max) of how many denizens get pre-generated.

1 hour ago, williams_482 said:

I both like and dislike explicitly setting up bears and wolves as "mini-bosses". Right now they do serve that role to some extent if they happen to spawn in an otherwise valuable area, like an isthmus between two land masses, a large ruin, or an area with lots of huntable/capturable animals. They also serve to keep the player on their toes in areas which have been explored but not thoroughly built up.

The solution to that (and the second point) would be to just decouple wolfs and bears from fixed spawns in general, on top of these dedicated dens. Have a pack of wolves spawn, with a suitably low chance, like any other animal (assuming a utopia where animals in general don't just spawn IN your base). Have a bear very rarely wander through a forest. Some life in the world with the same "surprise challenges" while not ultimately being a "Oh, guess my base is on a wolf spawner. I'm fucked."

Edited 10 hours ago by Rainbow Fresh

[LadyWYT]

I like the general idea, but...

1 hour ago, williams_482 said:

- Will dens be protected spaces? What is there to stop a player from preventing springtime spawns by digging out the floor of a den, or walling off the mouth of the cave?

This is probably the biggest concern for me. When creatures spawn in a very specific place, then it's very easy to build a "farm" for that creature, unless the area is placed under protection. It's not ideal to give the player the ability to make an easy "farm" like this, nor is it ideal to place everything under chunk protection as that leads to frustration when the player can't modify simple things for their own use.

I think what I would rather see, is bear behavior modified to be more dependent on the time of year. In the summer and fall, bears might be less aggressive toward the player since they've had plenty to eat, so aggression here would probably be due to players starting a fight or otherwise not respecting the bear's space. In the winter, bears might seek out caves and sleep most of the time, and be highly aggressive if they are active or otherwise disturbed. In the springtime, bears would be more aggressive due to coming out of hibernation and being VERY HUNGRY, so they're probably not going to be too picky about what counts as a meal.

Female bears with cubs would have heightened aggression, which is an even scarier prospect if the cubs are inclined to be curious and investigate the player. This behavior would probably only be relevant for the spring and early summer--by late summer/fall the cubs could have grown enough to lower that aggression back to normal levels, at least from a gameplay perspective.

Polar bears should be the exception to the above, and actively hunt the player, since they are one of the few animals to regard humans as food. Seraphs might not be human anymore, but they still qualify as a good meal, if the bear can manage to catch them. 

Wolves I'd really like to see use pack tactics more. A lone wolf will still obviously fight if it feels threatened and has no good escape options, but otherwise a wolf that's interested in hunting the player ought to howl for its pack mates and then attack with a numbers advantage. Even better if the wolves use hit-and-run tactics, taking turns harrying the player rather than all of them dogpiling at once.

[Fawkesian]

I feel this has a lot of potential after fine tuning. Bears creating resin logs is the part that jumped out at me - I like the idea of making the logs themselves a renewable resource, and it'd make resin hunting easier, but would be overpowered without any sort of restriction. Maybe they have a percentage chance to create a resin log, and/or there is a limit on how many can be created within a given area?

Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. I'd really love a world where you spot a bear and spend the day stalking it, eventually tracking it back to its den... then maybe you mark the location on your map and come back when you're geared up to deal with the problem (or bring some hunter friends if you're in multiplayer). That would be very immersive, and much more fun than what we have currently, where any given forest will contain an unknown number of predators at all times - and they don't even have the common courtesy to stay in the woods.

It boils down to... I want to be able to learn about places I visit often. It'd be awesome to note the locations of dens and know what's a generally safe forest, versus one where I need to be very cautious if I want to forage there. Heck, I would drop everything and build a woodland cabin if the predators were a little more predictable. I can live with a neighboring pack of wolves, but I cannot live with a dozen random wolves on my doorstep every other day. (I mean, I can and do, but I'm not happy about it.)

[coolAlias]

I like this idea.

Yes, it could be cheesed by digging a pit right in front of the den, but that seems to be what a lot of people advocate for as the smart way to hunt anyway.

For those of us that don't hunt via pit, however, I think it'd add a lot to the game.

[Bruno Willis]

4 hours ago, Rainbow Fresh said:

The solution to that (and the second point) would be to just decouple wolfs and bears from fixed spawns in general, on top of these dedicated dens. Have a pack of wolves spawn, with a suitably low chance, like any other animal (assuming a utopia where animals in general don't just spawn IN your base). Have a bear very rarely wander through a forest. Some life in the world with the same "surprise challenges" while not ultimately being a "Oh, guess my base is on a wolf spawner. I'm fucked."

If bear and wolf spawns were decoupled from fixed spawns in general, and then the individual animals had a new behavior which let them make dens which would then establish their long-term presence, that might get around many of the issues.

What if certain structures like ruins and cave entrances had a tag attached to them which said "suitable for den", and then we moved to slightly reduced, randomized wolf and bear spawns. Then those individual animals would get a new behavior which asks them to find the nearest suitable den location and build a den there - lets use the bear dragging a kill home as an example. The game would change the tag to "den". Those mob-built dens would then become an anchor point for that randomly spawned predator, and could generate a new predator after 5-10 days there if the original dies but the den remains intact (yes, that's still farmable, but just worse than farming pigs). An additional way for the danger to grow over time might be that once a randomly spawned bear or wolf makes a den, it doesn't count towards the mob cap? anymore, which lets the game potentially spawn another wandering predator in the nearby area. This might be more realistic for bears, but less realistic for wolves (bears are solitary, wolves are not). Maybe wolf dens would have the ability to multiply by themselves every spring, where bear dens don't?

With this change way we keep the chance for predators to just wander close to your base (which I agree is a good feature) but we also get this feeling of tracking threats to their homes and wiping them out for good (game progression not tied to tech tree or story). I also think the current spawn system simulates animals wandering into the area surprisingly well, so we get to keep that effect while adding the feeling that they can set up homes and become a worse issue if left to thrive.

And of course this:

5 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I think what I would rather see, is bear behavior modified to be more dependent on the time of year. In the summer and fall, bears might be less aggressive toward the player since they've had plenty to eat, so aggression here would probably be due to players starting a fight or otherwise not respecting the bear's space. In the winter, bears might seek out caves and sleep most of the time, and be highly aggressive if they are active or otherwise disturbed. In the springtime, bears would be more aggressive due to coming out of hibernation and being VERY HUNGRY, so they're probably not going to be too picky about what counts as a meal.

Female bears with cubs would have heightened aggression, which is an even scarier prospect if the cubs are inclined to be curious and investigate the player. This behavior would probably only be relevant for the spring and early summer--by late summer/fall the cubs could have grown enough to lower that aggression back to normal levels, at least from a gameplay perspective.

Polar bears should be the exception to the above, and actively hunt the player, since they are one of the few animals to regard humans as food. Seraphs might not be human anymore, but they still qualify as a good meal, if the bear can manage to catch them. 

Wolves I'd really like to see use pack tactics more. A lone wolf will still obviously fight if it feels threatened and has no good escape options, but otherwise a wolf that's interested in hunting the player ought to howl for its pack mates and then attack with a numbers advantage. Even better if the wolves use hit-and-run tactics, taking turns harrying the player rather than all of them dogpiling at once.

I'd also like to keep the bears marking their territory with scratch marks: 

19 minutes ago, Fawkesian said:

Bears creating resin logs is the part that jumped out at me - I like the idea of making the logs themselves a renewable resource, and it'd make resin hunting easier, but would be overpowered without any sort of restriction. Maybe they have a percentage chance to create a resin log, and/or there is a limit on how many can be created within a given area?

Maybe each bear spawns in with the ability to scratch logs 3 times total, and only starts doing that once its established a den. One of the things I like about tying resin logs to bear scratching is that it means every time you see a resin log you start thinking: "has a bear moved in here? Oh no." And you also start thinking: "Oh, the local brown bear's over there right now! I can sneak into her den and harvest all that resin that seeps out of her warning trees." I.e. this mechanic gives resin an established threat and reward system, which I think would be fun.

Another thing we get from dens which is useful is that the game can then give out information about threats. Imagine talking to a trader, and the game flags the presence of a bear den near the trader. "You want to watch out newcomer. There's something dangerous in the woods over yonder" marks on map. Or "A nasty old bear's wandered close and set up a den around here." marks on map "Makes getting supplies in a challenge. You bring me its head and you can have some of my stock, free of charge... within reason." (discount with bear head).