Animal Stamina

[VaelophisNyx]

Mostly spurred by my perturbation at a bear chasing me *2,500 blocks* in a straight line like some sort of demon driven purely by bloodthirst, but!

Animals should have some sort of maximum stamina value, after which they slow down until they can rest and recover it. When low, predators should give up the chase, as well. The player doesn't really need this system since we constantly burn hunger while running, but animals are good to chase you for literal days if their AI decides to keep doing it (or keep running from you forever, which also sucks for similar reasons)

 

If animals will always be faster by default, and nonsensically fast in water, then we need some way to deal with that without being forced to wear armor 24/7 for predators and build huge ugly pits for prey.

Edited July 9 by VaelophisNyx

[VaelophisNyx]

Also, on the topic of overly-aggressive predators...why ARE they so bloodthirsty? real bears (polar bears aside*) aren't usually going to be a rage fueled murder machine to a loosely human shaped creature. Same with wolves, who would NEVER mess with a human Alone unless they're absolutely starving. Animals in this game do not act even remotely realistic, in a way that feels awful to deal with.

 

(*Polar bears will just hunt humans anyway, but they're also not ceaselessly chasing a human so much as lazily following until they think they're close enough to go for the kill)

 

Edited July 9 by VaelophisNyx

[LadyWYT]

15 hours ago, VaelophisNyx said:

Animals should have some sort of maximum stamina value, after which they slow down until they can rest and recover it. When low, predators should give up the chase, as well. The player doesn't really need this system since we constantly burn hunger while running

If animals have stamina, so should the player. "The player burns hunger" isn't a good argument against it, since the player can continue to sprint even with no hunger points. Even Minecraft has a balance for player sprinting, since sprinting gets disabled when the player runs too low on hunger or is in the process of eating.

Not to mention that by adding creature stamina but not player stamina, you get players ignoring ranged weapons entirely and just running prey down. If the player wounded the animal first in order to slow it down, that's fine, but otherwise it's just free food.

 

13 hours ago, VaelophisNyx said:

Also, on the topic of overly-aggressive predators...why ARE they so bloodthirsty?

Aside from "because lore that hasn't been explained yet", it's a videogame. There needs to be some teeth to it, especially for Homo Sapiens mode. Making the animals entirely non-aggressive, making them always avoid the player, or otherwise always letting the player avoid aggression every time leads to a pretty dull game, as well as encourages the player to play rather recklessly since they know nothing is going to hurt them. Otherwise what exactly is there to threaten the player? Starvation? Cold? Falling in a hole? Those are all quite easily mitigated.

I also think that the wildlife isn't actually as bloodthirsty as the community makes it out to be. I've seen wolves and bears both in the game content to ignore me and continue sleeping/wandering around, despite me being fairly close to them. I've also seen them up and run away instead of attack. In the event one does attack, a couple moments of sprinting away is usually all it takes to get away. What tends to happen in most encounters, I think, is players are sprinting around everywhere(because there's not much drawback for doing so) and not really paying attention, and thus stumble into the wildlife and provoke a fight by getting too close.

 

15 hours ago, VaelophisNyx said:

forced to wear armor 24/7 for predators and build huge ugly pits for prey.

I will note that neither of these is necessary to deal with predators. Wolves can be kited rather easily, bears too, provided it's not a brown bear or polar bear since those are faster with more reach. And if the predator isn't near your base then you don't really need to worry about it. Paying close attention to your surroundings will let you spot threats in advance so you can either prepare to deal with them or avoid them.

[Bumber]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

If animals have stamina, so should the player. "The player burns hunger" isn't a good argument against it, since the player can continue to sprint even with no hunger points.

Even normal humans have better stamina than most animals, due to sweating. Seraphs are probably a moderate improvement over humans. (Skin tone hints at physiological changes.) I'd say it's optional.

Predators that never give up to look for easier prey probably end up starving to death. Presumably it's a territorial behavior to begin with, and not full-on rust rabies.

Edited July 9 by Bumber

[LadyWYT]

16 minutes ago, Bumber said:

Even normal humans have better stamina than most animals, due to sweating. Seraphs are probably a moderate improvement over humans. (Skin tone hints at physiological changes.) I'd say it's optional.

Predators that never give up to look for easier prey probably end up starving to death. Presumably it's a territorial behavior to begin with, and not full-on rust rabies.

From a gameplay standpoint though, it's not ideal to just let players ignore ranged weapons and simply run down the animals. I wouldn't say it's particularly realistic either to allow the player to just sprint around with impunity.

A better solution would be to simply give animals more nuance to their behavior. Let the predator animals give more warning to the player so the player has more time to react, or retreat if the player lands a couple good hits(since an easy target is preferable to one that will fight). More animal variety would help tremendously, since not all animals are equal and some are more dangerous/aggressive than others. Bears and wolves don't need to be nearly as aggressive if we have things like crocodiles, big cats, bovines, geese, etc. Geese might not be particularly dangerous themselves but are notoriously aggressive, and large herbivores also tend to be more inclined to aggression since there are lots of things that would like to eat them. Venomous animals don't need to fight--they just need to bite once and then let nature take its course. Predators tend to play it safer since an injury likely means they can't feed themselves, while herbivores can still find food in spite of injuries.  Many animals also tend to be more aggressive during breeding season or with young, so those would be good factors to account for as well. There's also the fact that animals do have their own personalities, and some individuals are just plain mean despite the species as a whole being unaggressive.

Injuries in particular are a rather interesting solution since injuries mean the animal no longer needs to kill the player in order to be dangerous. The player could easily be left alive with plenty of health after encountering a bear or other dangerous animal, but they might have an injury that requires time and attention to heal properly and avoid more serious consequences. A more serious injury such as a broken leg or arm could reduce movement speed or affect the player's ability to fight in melee or used ranged weapons, making certain activities more difficult. A bite or scratch might count as a minor injury, but if the player doesn't take the time to treat it then it could get infected and cause more serious problems.

In any case, my point is that there are better, more interesting ways to improve animal behavior and player survival rates. Limiting animal stamina without limiting players in the same fashion isn't particularly interesting and creates more problems than it solves.

[MKMoose]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

15 hours ago, VaelophisNyx said:

Also, on the topic of overly-aggressive predators...why ARE they so bloodthirsty?

Aside from "because lore that hasn't been explained yet" [...]

One thing that really frustrates me about the lore side of it is that, sure, there is technically a vague suggestion that there might be something that makes animals agitated which the Seraph isn't aware of, but at the same time their behavior is completely unaffected by temporal stability, storms and any of the related mechanics (not even by realistic weather, for that matter). This can make it seem like the lore explanation actually has nothing to do with the most important established lore and instead references something else, which could be basically anything that we know nothing about. I could see the vague one-sentence suggestion as remotely acceptable if it had any mechanical reinforcement. And that's not even mentioning how unlikely the average player is to find that lore in the first place, so as it stands the player has practically no reason to believe that the animals aren't just aggressive like that in the wild for no reason.

 

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

I also think that the wildlife isn't actually as bloodthirsty as the community makes it out to be. I've seen wolves and bears both in the game content to ignore me and continue sleeping/wandering around, despite me being fairly close to them. I've also seen them up and run away instead of attack.

Wolves and bears become saturated for some time after killing a target, including the player, making them stop seeking entities for a short amount of time (though they will still attack when the player comes too close, and they will chase when attacked). In many cases, though, whether the animal is aggressive or not matters less once the player has already died, especially if it happens to be just one of multiple wolves. And this still changes little about their typical behavior in the wild - finding a saturated animal is certainly not common enough to make me risk walking up to one to find out unless I'm specifically looking to kill it.

 

21 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Injuries in particular are a rather interesting solution since injuries mean the animal no longer needs to kill the player in order to be dangerous. The player could easily be left alive with plenty of health after encountering a bear or other dangerous animal, but they might have an injury that requires time and attention to heal properly and avoid more serious consequences. A more serious injury such as a broken leg or arm could reduce movement speed or affect the player's ability to fight in melee or used ranged weapons, making certain activities more difficult. A bite or scratch might count as a minor injury, but if the player doesn't take the time to treat it then it could get infected and cause more serious problems.

I would personally be rather cautious about the benefits that status effects can bring to the game, because it can be pretty difficult to integrate them into an existing ecosystem - I wouldn't personally expect status effects to be anything more than a way of reimplementing and standardizing existing effects like hunger, freezing, alcohol or poisoning for at least one or two major updates.

But that said, I couldn't agree more with the general idea.

[LadyWYT]

3 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

One thing that really frustrates me about the lore side of it is that, sure, there is technically a vague suggestion that there might be something that makes animals agitated which the Seraph isn't aware of, but at the same time their behavior is completely unaffected by temporal stability, storms and any of the related mechanics (not even by realistic weather, for that matter). This can make it seem like the lore explanation actually has nothing to do with the most important established lore and instead references something else, which could be basically anything that we know nothing about. I could see the vague one-sentence suggestion as remotely acceptable if it had any mechanical reinforcement. And that's not even mentioning how unlikely the average player is to find that lore in the first place, so as it stands the player has practically no reason to believe that the animals aren't just aggressive like that in the wild for no reason.

A reasonable solution/explanation to this, in my opinion, is perhaps just make animals avoid monsters and other unnatural entities. Monsters might not attack them, but they're still animate creatures, and ones that don't exactly move, smell, or sound right. Animals might not care about temporal stability since they aren't sensitive to those kinds of forces, but they aren't going to be fans of unnatural things moving around either. As for the player, most animals regard humans as a threat, and seraphs look mostly human. However, they are funny-colored humans and slightly larger, and perhaps smell a little "off" as well, which is probably enough to put most animals more on edge than they would otherwise be around humans.

This could also be something the player can ask/comment on to the traders, with the traders offering a shrug and expressing mild surprise that the wildlife is so aggressive to the player. It might not answer all the player's questions, but it at least expresses up front that there's something different about the player versus the NPCs. From there the player can potentially uncover more lore on it, or just make up their own reasoning.

11 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

In many cases, though, whether the animal is aggressive or not matters less once the player has already died, especially if it happens to be just one of multiple wolves.

One thing I want to note here, that I forgot earlier--if an animal kills the player, it's probably a good idea to have the animal run off. While dying to wildlife is certainly frustrating, I think that's not so much a problem for the player, as it is trying to get their stuff back. It's really frustrating to die, respawn, and try to retrieve your stuff only to find that the bear/wolves/whatever is sitting on it. Yes, there is "keep inventory", but that's not a very satisfying way to play the game for many players. Having the animal move on after a kill is a fair way to handle it without making the game too easy, and feels fairly realistic since animals tend not to enjoy hanging around areas they've recently encountered threats.

 

15 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

And this still changes little about their typical behavior in the wild - finding a saturated animal is certainly not common enough to make me risk walking up to one to find out unless I'm specifically looking to kill it.

This is also true, and in fairness I think this should be the standard expected behavior when it comes to player-wildlife interaction. Encountering a wild animal, especially a large one, shouldn't necessarily be an immediate death sentence, but the player should ideally pay attention to their surroundings, be careful with their movements, and avoid close encounters as a general rule if they don't want a fight. If the behavior is too predictable or too lenient, then you end up with players just ignoring the wildlife and doing whatever they please.

 

19 minutes ago, MKMoose said:

I would personally be rather cautious about the benefits that status effects can bring to the game, because it can be pretty difficult to integrate them into an existing ecosystem - I wouldn't personally expect status effects to be anything more than a way of reimplementing and standardizing existing effects like hunger, freezing, alcohol or poisoning for at least one or two major updates.

I expect that when the status effect system is finally implemented, there's going to be a LOT of complaints about it. Exactly what it looks like, I'm not sure, but I do expect that it will make the game as a whole harder, and shake up several systems/mechanics(like sleep, cold, and hunger) that players previously took for granted.

That being said, I do expect such a system to make things like animal attacks and fights in general more interesting than the pure numbers game we have currently.

[qualicabyss]

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

From a gameplay standpoint though, it's not ideal to just let players ignore ranged weapons and simply run down the animals. I wouldn't say it's particularly realistic either to allow the player to just sprint around with impunity.

The thing is, thats already what players do.
Pit traps are a common practice in part due to how bad ranged options are.
Even a hunter with a recurve bow and steel arrows only does 7.8 damage per hit, which is pretty low, additionally ranged accuracy is pathetically low, and you lose the ability to hit something 5 blocks away if you're moving at all.
The only reason I use a bow is because goats are idiots and run towards you after getting shot.

[LadyWYT]

24 minutes ago, qualicabyss said:

The thing is, thats already what players do.

Right, and that's partly because the player is already faster than many animals, and suffers no real penalty for sprinting. Boars, at least the normal ones, are a rather notorious example of this, since they're a larger animal but easily outrun by the player. 

28 minutes ago, qualicabyss said:

Pit traps are a common practice in part due to how bad ranged options are.

Maybe, but I would say it's also due to how easy it is to exploit creature AI. The animals aren't very good at avoiding pits, so it's very easy to just herd them into a pit or otherwise set out some bait(like farms or a full food trough) to lure them in. If injuring an animal made it run slower/run shorter distances, or there was otherwise a blood trail to follow, then pit traps might be less prevalent, but I daresay a lot of players would still use them simply because...it's easy.

To push players away from pit traps, animals need to be smarter at staying out of pits. Unless they're in a blind panic, they shouldn't just trot themselves into a hole simply because a potential threat showed up. Likewise, if there's food they obviously can't reach, or that's in an obvious trap, they shouldn't just happily enter their doom; the player should need to disguise the hole with branches or perhaps use a snare instead.

36 minutes ago, qualicabyss said:

The only reason I use a bow is because goats are idiots and run towards you after getting shot.

Which is a good argument for overhauling the AI for goats, sheep, and deer. Males should be more aggressive, yes, but unless the threat is close enough to warrant a charge, the first instinct for a goat/sheep/deer really ought to be run. They might not really understand how ranged weapons work, but they do understand what a threat is, and that putting distance between themselves and that threat is a good thing.

And of course, if the animals are better at avoiding traps and threats, then there's a stronger argument to make them take comparatively fewer shots to kill. 

[Bumber]

On 7/9/2026 at 9:45 AM, MKMoose said:

One thing that really frustrates me about the lore side of it is that, sure, there is technically a vague suggestion that there might be something that makes animals agitated which the Seraph isn't aware of, but at the same time their behavior is completely unaffected by temporal stability, storms and any of the related mechanics (not even by realistic weather, for that matter).

It would be neat if animals panicked before a temporal storm. Villages using chickens as an early warning system because they don't have seraphs around.

Edited July 11 by Bumber

[VaelophisNyx]

Thing is though, real animals are quite bad at avoiding properly made traps. They were literally a go-to hunting method for thousands of years for a reason. Why chase a deer for 6 days until it exhausts itself, when you can make it fall into a carefully disguised pit?

 

oh also

  

On 7/9/2026 at 9:05 AM, LadyWYT said:

 

I will note that neither of these is necessary to deal with predators. Wolves can be kited rather easily, bears too, provided it's not a brown bear or polar bear since those are faster with more reach. And if the predator isn't near your base then you don't really need to worry about it. Paying close attention to your surroundings will let you spot threats in advance so you can either prepare to deal with them or avoid them.

I would like to see you kite bears/wolves at ~200-300ms ping with 1% or greater packet loss. Instant death due to the magical teleporting bear kinda makes armor mandatory...or a giant ugly pit. It also makes evading them hard while out exploring, the main issue. Not everywhere is a flat plain with nothing to block LoS on the problem animal!

Edited July 13 by VaelophisNyx

[LadyWYT]

5 hours ago, VaelophisNyx said:

I would like to see you kite bears/wolves at ~200-300ms ping with 1% or greater packet loss. Instant death due to the magical teleporting bear kinda makes armor mandatory...or a giant ugly pit. It also makes evading them hard while out exploring, the main issue. Not everywhere is a flat plain with nothing to block LoS on the problem animal!

That's a connection issue, not a game issue. Unfortunate, and understandably frustrating, but not a good reason for making the game as a whole easier.

 

5 hours ago, VaelophisNyx said:

Thing is though, real animals are quite bad at avoiding properly made traps.

So make the player work a little harder at building a trap? Currently, all the player is required to do is dig a hole, maybe put a little bait down. While I'm sure that such a trap could potentially catch an animal in real life, there's a reason that pit traps usually need to be disguised. 

In any case, there's the Stamina Mod, which technically does exactly what's listed in the initial suggestion, and then some. But I don't think that's what you're looking for either.

[VaelophisNyx]

On 7/13/2026 at 9:06 AM, LadyWYT said:

In any case, there's the Stamina Mod, which technically does exactly what's listed in the initial suggestion, and then some. But I don't think that's what you're looking for either.

While it would've been, it's unfortunately slop riddled, so yeah not a real solution.