How do animal spawns work?

[Trafalgar]

What determines where animals will be? It seems like groups of animals hang around a particular location until a server crash, and then they're gone, and other groups of animals will be in different places. Is it more complex than that, and are there any plans to improve the system?

[Gauteamus]

I really hope there will be some sort of Lotka-Volterra fox-eat-rabbit mechanic to animal breeding, would not have to be anything super advanced, but the all too common "spawn point" method seen in far too many games is abit boring.

[loftar]

It's not all too advanced. There are no fixed spawnpoints, but the game keeps track of when small regions of the map were last seen by a player. If they haven't been seen for a while, some random animals are spawned according to some rules of probability based on the terrain of the site. Currently, they spawn as follows:

* Grasslands: Foxes, sheep, chickens or rabbits.
* Swamps: Only toads.
* Forest: Foxes, boars, deer, rabbits, toads or (in the lesser civilized areas) bears.
* Also, at night, rats will spawn here and there.

Watch out for the bears. Unless you're really far away, they won't attack you, but if you attack them, they are, well, dangerous.

[RaptorJedi]

Am I right in my guess that (if you count the center as ring 1), bears spawn around ring four or five?

[kaka]

Am I right in my guess that (if you count the center as ring 1), bears spawn around ring four or five?

Fourth.

[Laremere]

What about Cows and Bandits?

[kaka]

They spawn on grass and in woods, but do not scale with wilderness/civilization.

[Malicus]

Am I right in my guess that (if you count the center as ring 1), bears spawn around ring four or five?

Fourth.

Hrm, thread necromancy, but this has been bugging us (the B12 people). Do the devs count the circle around Brodgar as ring 0 or ring 1?

[loftar]

The colored circles are levels 1 and 2. The first non-colored ring is ring 3, where animals start being aggressive. The outermost ring right before Mordor is level 9, and Mordor itself constitutes level 10.

More exactly, it is actually so that creature levels are determined by the "civilization rating" of an area, which is currently ranging from 1000 at the RoB and 0 in Mordor. The intention is to implement a census system, which will count such things as hearth fires in an area and determine the civilization rating from that. The current "further away from Brodgar" stuff is just a temporary placeholder until that is implemented. When it is, places like Bottleneck the Laketown will probably be considered rather civilized.

[Malicus]

Oh, I see. We'd been counting from zero, whereas you start from one. I guess we'll have to correct this off-by-one error, then. =P