Animal Tracking

[Droj]

An Animal tracking skill or separate skills such as bear, beaver & deer tracking unlocked after say big game game hunting. Would work something similar to prospecting but instead tracking those animals Instead. A specific item could then be crafted using a piece of loot from that animal. For example a dried bear hide and a hunting trophy gives you an item like 'The Bear Tracker' which is required to be equipped when tracking for bears much like Dowsing rods for example.

Would like to hear your thoughts on this especially loftar's. Is a idea that has already been considered?

[Sevenless]

Currently bears spawn like forageables, and they despawn like them as well. It'd be more likely to have an item that increases spawn chance of the animals, as opposed to specifically tracking one. That would just take less infrastructure to program.

[painhertz]

At this point, there are so many of any particular animal that if you know where to look, you trip over them. Figure out where to look.....

[Droj]

Currently bears spawn like forageables, and they despawn like them as well. It'd be more likely to have an item that increases spawn chance of the animals, as opposed to specifically tracking one. That would just take less infrastructure to program.

this, should they not be persistent too?

[Scilly_guy]

I'm going to bump this because I think about it from time to time. I am not interested in tracking bears for hunting but for running away from them.

The way I see it knowing what animals are around is an important RL wilderness skill, and even if it just adds a little flavour it'd still be nice.

I imagine it working like this: Animal randomly drops either a scent (foot print) or a foragable (dung). If you find bear dung you know a bear was in the area in the last hour, and you can add the dung to your compost heap. If you find a scent then you can actively track the animal, it would be neat if the scent lead you to the next scent rather than straight to the animal.

Of course this would work better if animals were persistent, or even if they lasted for longer and wandered further.

[iamah]

unique footprints for each animal(humans too), they would become weaker over time until fade away, only the trained eye would recognize the faded prints... probably too complicated to implement, though...