Your Feature Request / Idea
Okay, so we got a fix for the murder-machine killing that was there at launch, that is fantastic and im sure we all really appreciate it.
However the more I play and the more i make mixed exhibits, the more it becomes evident that the new system is not exactly completely fixing the problem. As evidenced by these threads, this is bad enough that it is perceived as a bug by some, myself included:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/448513-Carnivores-forget-to-eat-the-herbivores-that-they-kill-to-eat?p=7214378#post7214378
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/455125-Hunting-mechanic-still-flawed
As Stuart pointed out however, that is not actually a bug. The system is working "as intended" and apparently the intention of the system is that smaller kills will always be fed from (something that is not true btw, my carno does not always eat his gallimimus cell-mates) while larger kills will be ignored, due to some seemingly arbitrary reason, which Stuart suggests is the dinosaur's hunger isnt... low enough to match the size of the kill? Therefore the carnivore will abandon the kill and maybe sorta kinda if we're lucky eat from it later.
This doesnt work. It's an improvement over the old system in that it makes mixed exhibits possible, but as it stands it just makes them very annoying to manage. If the carnivore abandons the kill, I'm quite sure i have seen them hunt again even if the corpse is still available, which, even if that isnt the case, the game incentivises us to remove the corpse because it treats corpses as a problem, through making diseases more likely to occur and through the annoying red popup, which well.. we have no other messaging system so i guess thats there to stay as it is the only way to notify us of a dead dino.
The bigger problem however is that regardless of how the system is "intended to work", I still see carnivores kill both large and small pray when their hunger isnt even close to have to consider hunting and then just leaving the corpse there. I see this practically every other kill. And the hunting is still very much incessant. I put two goat feeders in my mixed exhibits, to have more goat targets for the AI to lock onto, and this works sometimes. If i didn't do this, I've observed how often a dino will kill and it's just... kindof a slaughterhouse. It makes it very tedious to manage such exhibits, especially with the limited space available on the islands, which usually forces me to create a dedicated hatching area, with two hatcheries on maximum hatching chance, so only 4 incubation slots in my entire park. I have to tranq and move every new arrival because if i want the space to make exhibits, i have to sacrifice it from convenience.
In short, the current hunting mechanics are still a problem. This is the simplest way i can suggest to fix them:
1) Lower the threshold at which a carnivore will hunt to eat. Slow it down as well.
2) Make sure carnivores eat from every kill they make, as soon as they make it.
3) Remove the chance for them to kill just for the sake of killing because that is still happening. And if it isnt then that is exactly what it looks like, so it's still a problem and whatever is actually causing it needs tweaking.
Bonus) You could remove the chance for corpses to cause diseases and give different sized animals different Food value, meaning the corpse can slowly decay this value and disappear when it is down, and the carnivore will reduce this value while it is feeding. This will allow us to actually leave corpses of mid-large dinos as a way for carnivores to eat multiple times from the same kill. There could be a welfare penalty to this, i dont think anyone would care. If this is done however, you have to make sure that a carnivore will prefer to eat from a corpse rather than hunt again if one is available. This is also very evident in the wild with predators, they would rather get a free meal then expend energy and risk failure. This one is sightly more complex but i think it can be done fairly easily.
With this, you will round out the hunting mechanics into something not only natural but also functional and non-frustrating. Please finish this!
Okay, so we got a fix for the murder-machine killing that was there at launch, that is fantastic and im sure we all really appreciate it.
However the more I play and the more i make mixed exhibits, the more it becomes evident that the new system is not exactly completely fixing the problem. As evidenced by these threads, this is bad enough that it is perceived as a bug by some, myself included:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/448513-Carnivores-forget-to-eat-the-herbivores-that-they-kill-to-eat?p=7214378#post7214378
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/455125-Hunting-mechanic-still-flawed
As Stuart pointed out however, that is not actually a bug. The system is working "as intended" and apparently the intention of the system is that smaller kills will always be fed from (something that is not true btw, my carno does not always eat his gallimimus cell-mates) while larger kills will be ignored, due to some seemingly arbitrary reason, which Stuart suggests is the dinosaur's hunger isnt... low enough to match the size of the kill? Therefore the carnivore will abandon the kill and maybe sorta kinda if we're lucky eat from it later.
This doesnt work. It's an improvement over the old system in that it makes mixed exhibits possible, but as it stands it just makes them very annoying to manage. If the carnivore abandons the kill, I'm quite sure i have seen them hunt again even if the corpse is still available, which, even if that isnt the case, the game incentivises us to remove the corpse because it treats corpses as a problem, through making diseases more likely to occur and through the annoying red popup, which well.. we have no other messaging system so i guess thats there to stay as it is the only way to notify us of a dead dino.
The bigger problem however is that regardless of how the system is "intended to work", I still see carnivores kill both large and small pray when their hunger isnt even close to have to consider hunting and then just leaving the corpse there. I see this practically every other kill. And the hunting is still very much incessant. I put two goat feeders in my mixed exhibits, to have more goat targets for the AI to lock onto, and this works sometimes. If i didn't do this, I've observed how often a dino will kill and it's just... kindof a slaughterhouse. It makes it very tedious to manage such exhibits, especially with the limited space available on the islands, which usually forces me to create a dedicated hatching area, with two hatcheries on maximum hatching chance, so only 4 incubation slots in my entire park. I have to tranq and move every new arrival because if i want the space to make exhibits, i have to sacrifice it from convenience.
In short, the current hunting mechanics are still a problem. This is the simplest way i can suggest to fix them:
1) Lower the threshold at which a carnivore will hunt to eat. Slow it down as well.
2) Make sure carnivores eat from every kill they make, as soon as they make it.
3) Remove the chance for them to kill just for the sake of killing because that is still happening. And if it isnt then that is exactly what it looks like, so it's still a problem and whatever is actually causing it needs tweaking.
Bonus) You could remove the chance for corpses to cause diseases and give different sized animals different Food value, meaning the corpse can slowly decay this value and disappear when it is down, and the carnivore will reduce this value while it is feeding. This will allow us to actually leave corpses of mid-large dinos as a way for carnivores to eat multiple times from the same kill. There could be a welfare penalty to this, i dont think anyone would care. If this is done however, you have to make sure that a carnivore will prefer to eat from a corpse rather than hunt again if one is available. This is also very evident in the wild with predators, they would rather get a free meal then expend energy and risk failure. This one is sightly more complex but i think it can be done fairly easily.
With this, you will round out the hunting mechanics into something not only natural but also functional and non-frustrating. Please finish this!