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1

General Discussion / Re: Wild Animals in Villages

« on: September 20, 2017, 09:03:57 AM »

From what I've seen, NPCs and non-hostile animals are completely disinterested in each other. In the first wolf village, the wolves had been wandering freely around and even into the village with the villagers completely oblivious to them, and the wolves didn't seem to be avoiding villagers at all. It wasn't until the wolves went aggressive and started attacking the pigs (or possibly even the villagers themselves) that some villagers got involved. Part way through the fight, there were a couple of wolves that had fled and then returned to the village while non-hostile, and the villagers ignored those wolves until they went hostile again.

Same with the first bear that charged my cow - when I first went to investigate the barking, the bear hadn't gone aggressive yet and there was a peasant and an old man just a few spaces away from the bear, completely ignoring it. I can't remember if they went aggressive when the bear did or if they kept ignoring it, but either way they weren't much help.

Njerps may be an exception, as in one village I encountered a Njerp wandering around in the middle of the night. I very heroically went inside and poked everyone awake so they would go outside and see him (hey, I was utterly exhausted and really needed my sleep!). I didn't see the crucial moment, but I know I suddenly heard a bunch of swearing and the sounds of fighting, and when I looked out the Njerp's head had been bashed in by one of the housewives with a stone. I don't know who attacked first but the Njerp had definitely seen me previously and not attacked, the chorus of swearing set off very shortly after the villagers would have come in eyesight of the Njerp and his corpse was right on the border of the village, so the villagers must have swarmed him down there, suggesting they went after him rather than the other way around. I've tried on several occasions to chase Njerps into villages just to see what would happen but never succeeded on getting them into a villager's sight. I also chased one into a group of foreign traders, who completely ignored him (he was non-hostile at that time). Also, in one particularly unlucky zoom-in, I ended up squarely between a Njerp and a group of bandits, about ten spaces away from each and right in the middle. The Njerp made a quick exit away from me and the bandits, so I don't know if he was running away from my arrival or if he was actually avoiding the bandits as well.

I don't know if it makes any difference, but this particular zoom-in was to a shelter I had built, and the bandits and Njerp were right by the shelter. After I killed the bandits, the Njerp came back to the shelter while I was picking over the bandits' gear. Do shelters attract wanderers or was it just coincidence? I've noticed a few times that there were humans in the immediate area of shelters, ranging from Njerps to bandits to woodsmen, but then it might just be that there are lots of humans around the map and some just happen to land near shelters. There was one kind of funny one where I had a shelter right by a bunch of wolf traps - when I went in to check the traps, there was a wolf in the trap closest to the shelter, but there also were very fresh Njerp tracks all around the shelter. The tracks then went right up to the trap the wolf was in, only to immediately turn around and go straight off into the next tile over. It seems even Njerps sometimes nope out at the thought of going one-on-one with a wolf.

2

General Discussion / Re: Wild Animals in Villages

« on: September 20, 2017, 12:12:43 AM »

I've had a few encounters with wild animals in villages, including bears, wolves, elk and reindeer that were just chilling in town when I arrived, as well as a Njerp that came into town and was promptly beaten to death by the villagers. I've also seen a couple of times when a wolf pack has invaded a town, and it wasn't pretty.

My character had travelled down to visit the Reemi for trading, along with his pack of dogs, and I noticed as we entered one particular town to spend the night that there were wolves all around this village. The village had a large pen of pigs on one edge, and the wolves seemed very interested but kept running away whenever I got near. I spent a couple hours trying to hunt a few down at range, but they were very wary and moved out to the trees (the village was surrounded by fields on all sides). Finally I went to sleep, only to be awakened by the sounds of battle and squealing pigs - looking out of the cabin, I saw there were now wolves *everywhere*, all throughout the village. The pigs were mostly dead and the villagers were chasing wolves left and right through town. I of course jumped into the fray with my dogs and managed to save the last surviving pig, though a wolf tore out the throat of one of my dogs in the process, and then helped the villagers fight the rest of the pack. It was a total bloodbath - the ground was littered with dead wolves and torn villagers, and with a couple of villagers shooting randomly into the fight at the unconscious wolves in the midst of their kin, I moved to the edge of the village and picked off the last fleeing wolves there.

In the end, I don't know how many villagers were killed - I counted at least nine dead (several with arrows stuck in them) and eight dead wolves, plus six or seven dead pigs in the pen (and my poor dog). A good number of villagers were left, but only two children had survived the attack, both terribly wounded with one collapsed and unable to walk near the edge of the village and the other barely able to move. In the spirit of good neighbourliness, I skinned and butchered all the pigs and wolves and cooked up the meat for the villagers (the hides I kept for myself), and then went back to bed. In the morning, I went to work on my stack of hides that were tanning beside the village well and found the grisly sight of one of the wounded boys floating dead in the well. It seems he had fallen through the thin ice over it and drowned. The other boy was still lying alive but grievously wounded at the edge of the village, where he remains to this day, three years later in-world. I still bring him food and presents now and then. He tells me things are going pretty good.

Another wolf-in-village encounter I came upon shortly after the fact was when I was raiding Njerp villages - I'd seen wolves in the general area while I was scoping the village out the night before the raid but mostly ignored them. When I attacked the next day, there was a surprising number of pre-wounded Njerps and the fight was over pretty quickly. When I went into the emptied village to gather my spoils, I found a single dead Njerp maiden surrounded by a pile of five dead wolves. There was one seriously wounded wolf still alive, which I killed as well, and then I skinned and butchered the lot. Now that I think of it, most of my wolf pelts came from wolves attacking villages.

I've also had a couple of bear encounters in villages. The most notable was with a newer character - an escaped slave who had finally, after much hard work and deprivation, saved up enough to buy her first cow. I set out to the next village with my cow loaded up with what trade goods I had left, as well as with my faithful dog Kalerva, and on the way happened across a reindeer herd and killed one. Such good luck! We reached the village, noting some bear tracks in the area, and set to roasting reindeer meat, leaving the cow and dog tied up by the well with the tanning reindeer hide. Part way through, Kalerva started barking up a storm and on going outside I saw a bear charging at my newly purchased cow - I quickly intercepted, setting the dog loose, and the bear ran off with Kalerva hot in pursuit.

When Kalerva didn't come back, I tried to call for him and... had no option to call my dog. Following the bear tracks away from the village, I soon found the shredded partially eaten remains of Kalerva, with the bear sleeping peacefully a few metres away. Furious, I went back to the village, used my reindeer meat to hire a woodsman to hunt bear with me, and the two of us went out (leaving the cow tethered in the village, obviously) and slew that dog-eating bear. Skinned and butchered the carcass and returned to the village loaded up with bear meat. Went to roast the bear meat. Heard pained bellowing outside and came out to find *another* bear standing over my freshly torn apart cow. So, off we went again, this time to kill the cow-eating bear, which we did. Skinned and butchered the second bear, skinned and butchered the cow, and then used the masses of bear and cow meat (*cough*and a little dog meat*cough*) to buy a new dog and cow, which I have vowed will *never* be left tethered to a tree on her own!

Finally, in a more peaceful incident, recently my character walked into town and found an entire herd of reindeer hanging out there. I chased them for a little bit but then left them in peace in the village fields. The villagers didn't seem to mind them munching their way through the crops.

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Gameplay questions / Re: Baiting Wild Pigs

« on: September 14, 2017, 06:39:32 AM »

I had excellent luck with trapping a herd of wild sows once (as described here: http://z3.invisionfree.com/UrW_forum/index.php?showtopic=8130), and in my case, interestingly enough, it appears the successful bait was a captured wild sow from their herd.

I had a trap fence already set up with all pit traps and the sows happened to show up a few tiles away from it, so I chased them toward the fence and ended up trapping one in a pit. The others all took off, leaving their pal behind, and I corralled her on the inside of my trap fence (opposite side from the sow herd) and left. A few hours later, the sows returned and every single one of them ended up stuck in my trap pits, apparently in their efforts to reach the corralled sow. None of the pits were baited as I recall. That was the only time pigs showed up anywhere near one of my traps, so I haven't got any information on trapping them beyond that - I've never bothered making traps specifically for pigs because they're easy enough to hunt down, seeming to tire quickly and have pretty weak senses, as you mention.

If you do happen to trap another wild sow, it might be worth your while to keep her alive in a little fence and place deadfalls or pit traps around the outside in case the others try to come back to her. I suspect this might work with reindeer herds as well if you caught one of the bigger ones that they tend to follow, but I've never had the situation arise myself to test it out. I've tried it with wolf packs (leaving the wolf in the trap, obviously, since fences don't hold them), but that didn't turn out very well for my character. It seems wolves are clever enough not to all blunder into the traps and instead hang around their injured fellow waiting for *you* to come back...

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Modding / Re: Use of dried/smoked meat/fish in cooking

« on: September 11, 2017, 11:59:39 PM »

The recipes are built from the specific words of the ingredients, which is why just 'dried meat' won't work but 'dried stag cut' will, but you can use an asterix as a wildcard to make more general ingredient lists. For example, to allow any smoked meat or fish in the recipe you can use {Smoked*}, any dried meat/fish is {Dried*} and so on.

You can also put the wildcard at the front (e.g. {*berries} to allow any berry type, including dried), at both ends (e.g. {*ried *} if you want to include anything at all that is dried, including meat, fish, berries, mushrooms, etc.) or even throughout the ingredient name if the ingredient might have many modifiers on it (e.g. {*Rotten *weasel carcass*} if for some reason you wanted such a thing - this would allow for modifiers like 'grisly', 'small' or 'skinned' to be present without blocking the rotten weasel carcass from being used).

For dried berries, you might be able to use {*ried *berries}, but I haven't tested that out. One thing to note as well is that spaces matter when you're using wildcards, so {*stag cut} is different from {* stag cut} - the latter will only allow cooked/preserved stag cuts while the other would allow either raw or prepared cuts.

Here's the Njerpez cooking mod PALU mentioned, which is a great resource for creative cooking ideas and coding tricks: http://z3.invisionfree.com/UrW_forum/index.php?showtopic=7253

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Modding / Re: Creating Uniquely Named Items

« on: July 12, 2017, 01:53:19 AM »

Awesome! ^^ Thanks for the help, everyone - that should make things easier with a couple other projects I had in mind as well.

6

Modding / Creating Uniquely Named Items

« on: July 11, 2017, 09:23:41 AM »

I wanted to make some items for my game that would each have a unique name attached to them to memorialize my fallen dogs and had a couple questions about how that would work. I've already got a 'Carved dog figure' item I modded in, but I'd like to 'inscribe' them to make things like 'Carved dog figure - Erkki', 'Carved dog figure - Salme', and so on, changing the associated name for each deceased doggo. My questions are:

1. If the name of a modded item is changed on its diy recipe (e.g. changing the resulting item's name from 'Carved dog - Erkki' to 'Carved dog - Salme'), do items previously made with the old name still show up as normal or will they cease to exist/become unusable/lose their image because their recipe is gone? Do they retain the values set at the time of their creation even after that specific recipe ceases to exist?

2. If they do need to keep the specific recipe for each uniquely named item to work, does commenting each unique recipe out when done (so it won't continue to show up on the menu) allow them to still function or would this also break them the same as removing the recipe entirely?

3. If the recipe does need to be kept and can't be commented out, can it be moved to a hidden menu by means of creating a submenu with no corresponding menudef key? For example, if I put in a Names submenu in the diy but didn't add anything to the menudef to make that submenu actually viewable outside of the diy file, and then moved each uniquely named item's recipe there when I was done with it, would that let the item keep working normally?

I'm hoping I can just change the item name in the recipe freely without worrying about breaking stuff but I wanted to check before I actually edited anything in case I ended up ruining the carved dogs my character has already made. I'm using 3.30 if that makes a difference at all.

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Suggestions / Re: Regarding dog's behaviour in front of danger

« on: May 27, 2017, 02:42:17 AM »

I've certainly noticed different personalities in some of my dogs - I wrote a post on it some time ago (possibly the one PALU is referring to) on the old forum: http://z3.invisionfree.com/UrW_forum/index.php?showtopic=8145

While it's hard to be sure if the traits are actually there or just the result of confirmation bias, the main traits I've observed that appear to be on a range are:

Courageous versus cowardly (how long the dog continues to fight before fleeing due to wounds)
Gluttonous versus light eater (how long the dog goes before barking for food, stealing food or eating unusual foods)
Aggressive versus calm (how much damage the dog does to prey, quickness to attack, time to calm down, likelihood of attacking its master)
Clingy versus roamer (how far the dog prefers to be from its master, whether glued to your side or entire world tiles away)

Specifically on the courage of dogs in fights, three of the dogs I mentioned in the other post make a good example of the difference with a fight we had with a Njerp. The three dogs all attacked on command without a problem. The Njerp had a blunt weapon and started swinging at the dogs, and almost as soon as the fight started Olli was running away. Rikori stayed fighting until he was unable to stand, at which point he dragged himself away. Likewise, Sammi continued attacking until he also collapsed, at which point he tried to flee. I then stepped in and killed the Njerp (I was almost dead from a previous fight when we stumbled across the Njerp, so I was keeping well back from him). Sammi and Rikori were a mess, both with fractured shoulders, elbows, legs and chests and a bleeding fractured skull for Rik, who spent the next several hours slipping in and out of consciousness before thankfully stabilizing. Olli, when he finally showed up, had a bruised shoulder. Olli did not get fed that night.