So I was experimenting in one of my sandbox islands trying to see if i could balance the stats out of herbivores and carnivores so that they could "coexist" with each other by trying to get their defense and resilience (for higher hp regen) as high as i can get them while still having the dinos be fairly evenly matched so that they survive fights and hopefully heal back to full hp by the time they want to fight again. After several attempts, I started to lose hope that it was possible (particularly with a larger group of dinos) to get them to not eventually kill each other. It wasn't long after that that I had an idea though : Goats.
Since dinos attacking goats apparently counts as combat, and as far as I can tell it seems dinos are on some sort of timer behind the scenes that determines when they go looking to fight another dino/hunt a goat, I wondered if I could prevent carnivores from fighting other dinos by making sure there are plenty of goats around for them to hunt. My first test was with a Baryonyx and a Metriacanthosaurus - i had a wall splitting their enclosure upon their release so they could drink water and feed before truly testing out the experiment. And so far.... It has been a success! I've had these 2 dinos in an enclosure together for well over an hour with 2 goat feeders set to dispense every 3min, and not a single fight has broken out between them.
So I decided to test it again with a larger group of dinos - namely with Stegoceratops and Spinoraptor, as I wanted to create an enclosure with all 3 Hybrids of the Dr. Wu DLC together. I bred 3 of each dino, and set up an enclosure with 3 goat feeders this time (since more dinos), and overall it has been successful as well. There has been 2 or 3 fights over the course of an hour or 2, with both dinos walking away and fully healing well before another fight started.
I decided to test this even further with my enclosure of S. American dinos containing Herrarasaurus x5, Dreadnoughtus x6, and Giganotosaurus x2... and I wanted to try and add 2 Carnotaurus to the mix to see if I could distract the Large Carnivores with goats to get them to coexist... and this is where things started to fall apart a little bit - mostly because I discovered that the game seems to have a limit as to how many goats it will spawn at a time and I was finding that the feeders were dispensing but no goats were coming out, and so the large carnivores were targeting each other more frequently, which eventually resulted in death for one of the Gigas.
I haven't heard of anyone else trying this before (tho I remember hearing about people getting large carnivores to co-habitate by placing many small fence pieces so dinos wouldn't have room to fight), but maybe this information may prove useful to someone. It could also be interesting if the non-live carnivore feeders would also reset that "fight timer" for carnivores to make them less likely to engage each other unless there is distinctly a lack of food.
Since dinos attacking goats apparently counts as combat, and as far as I can tell it seems dinos are on some sort of timer behind the scenes that determines when they go looking to fight another dino/hunt a goat, I wondered if I could prevent carnivores from fighting other dinos by making sure there are plenty of goats around for them to hunt. My first test was with a Baryonyx and a Metriacanthosaurus - i had a wall splitting their enclosure upon their release so they could drink water and feed before truly testing out the experiment. And so far.... It has been a success! I've had these 2 dinos in an enclosure together for well over an hour with 2 goat feeders set to dispense every 3min, and not a single fight has broken out between them.
So I decided to test it again with a larger group of dinos - namely with Stegoceratops and Spinoraptor, as I wanted to create an enclosure with all 3 Hybrids of the Dr. Wu DLC together. I bred 3 of each dino, and set up an enclosure with 3 goat feeders this time (since more dinos), and overall it has been successful as well. There has been 2 or 3 fights over the course of an hour or 2, with both dinos walking away and fully healing well before another fight started.
I decided to test this even further with my enclosure of S. American dinos containing Herrarasaurus x5, Dreadnoughtus x6, and Giganotosaurus x2... and I wanted to try and add 2 Carnotaurus to the mix to see if I could distract the Large Carnivores with goats to get them to coexist... and this is where things started to fall apart a little bit - mostly because I discovered that the game seems to have a limit as to how many goats it will spawn at a time and I was finding that the feeders were dispensing but no goats were coming out, and so the large carnivores were targeting each other more frequently, which eventually resulted in death for one of the Gigas.
I haven't heard of anyone else trying this before (tho I remember hearing about people getting large carnivores to co-habitate by placing many small fence pieces so dinos wouldn't have room to fight), but maybe this information may prove useful to someone. It could also be interesting if the non-live carnivore feeders would also reset that "fight timer" for carnivores to make them less likely to engage each other unless there is distinctly a lack of food.