"The forest around looks extremely hostile."

[caius]

I love the changes in mood for the new update.  I just received this message when I woke up...

The forest around looks extremely hostile.

  I'm kind of freaking out now.  Let me give some context...

I'm in my homestead at the beginning of winter and reducing bandages to cords (harsh furs => bandages => cords) for drying and smoking meat as well as starting out on a trapping expedition.  While I was sitting in my cabin, I heard a grouse whistling outside and stepped out to find a hazel grouse in a loop snare.  I killed, skinned, and butchered the bird then sacrificed the 1 grouse cut in a general sacrifice. 

You gently set the hazel grouse cut on the ground as a sacrifice.
You feel comfortable.

I then cleaned and tanned the grouse skin, prepared cords, rinsed the skin, and went to bed.  I woke up with this ominous feeling.  I'm tempted to take all my stuff and abandon my homestead for a while. 

What happened?  What do I do?  Have any of you experienced this?

[PALU]

It's common.
I haven't experienced anything that ought to be caused by it. The feeling comes from the forest spirits being angry with you for your actions and not getting enough sacrifices to make up for it.
Forest spirits get angry for anything of theirs you kill, and I think felling trees also angers them. Sacrifices reduce their anger and can turn the feeling into being pleased with you (although I haven't encountered anything that I'd attribute to that either).
As far as I can tell the system is currently a bit unbalanced with any kill having the same weight, so a squirrel and an elk are basically worth about one sacrifice. However, you can only make a single sacrifice per day (try a second one: I do that by mistake occasionally), which means that there is no chance to satisfy the spirits if you live only off small game.
The spirits of the water seem to fall into the same pool as the spirits of the forest, so you can essentially select which one to sacrifice to, but not both. I don't know how water spirit demerit points work, though.
It also seems that the size/quality of sacrifices doesn't matter, so I usually sacrifice spoiled raw meat (1 cut to the spirits and two to the dog).

[Dungeon Smash]

i'm not sure what effects this has either, although surely there are some.  it's kept mysterious on purpose   i'm pretty sure it makes animals less likely to appear or fall into your traps, and there may be a chance for skills to succeed less often as well.

that being said, it's not the end of the world.  if you just offer a sacrifice every morning, it should be back to normal in 1-3 days.

[mead]

The exact same thing happened to me today. I was skinning the fox that I just caught. Then decided to sacrifice 1 cut of it's meat to thank the forest spirit. When I performed the ritual, I felt comfortable. Everything seemed alright. Then after a good night sleep with a full belly, I woke up feeling scared. Maybe my sacrife wasn't enough or maybe I did some other thing that angered forest spirit. I still don't know. But my advice would be to give more sacrifices to spirits for a couple of days or atleast that's what I think so.

[trento007]

It's not every day that I kill animals, and I generally avoid killing small game due to difficulty in chasing and higher chance of mangling the hide beyond usability, but I rarely have a problem with the spirits being angry with me. It is also not every kill that I perform a general sacrifice or (the removed) hunters sacrifice, but maybe about half the time as I can often forget or decide against it.

My understanding is that bothering the spirits excessively is bad, just as not acknowledging them can be bad. I would usually never use the same ritual twice in a row, even on separate days. Also be sure the meat you sacrifice hasn't been cooked yet as I think that can be unwanted by the spirits.

[Privateer]

:following:

 I've never experienced this, though I can remember posts from a few years back to current occasionally bringing this up.
As said above, maybe somethings are just better left unexplained.
 Though I've not had a chance to investigate this "mystery"
I've always wanted to be able to experiment with it.

[caius]

:An Update:

I spent the day disassembling all my traps and then packed up trade goods and supplies for a winter trip to the Kaumo region.  My current homestead is in the west, near a river and lakes just to the north of the Driik region. 

On my way to the Kaumo region, I encountered a winter bear in the southern edge of the Kiesse region.  I killed the bear, made a sacrifice, completed the bear skull rite, and set about to process the fur and meat.  I saved some of the meat to offer as a general sacrifice over the next few days.  Everything was fine and I went from "comfortable" to "at ease" after a short time.

Then while moving through the Kiesse villages, I encountered a winter elk and brought it down.  I tried the same strategy (general sacrifice and save cuts to continue to offer) set cuts to dry outside a building.  I moved to a nearby lake, set the fur to tan, and slept in a shelter.  The next day, I woke up to the message, "The forest around looks frightening."

I don't know what is happening.  I had assumed the ability to please the spirits was a factor/property of my character.  However, is pleasing the spirits based on geography?  Do the various named zones have different spirits that must be appeased?  Am I offering sacrifice to some spirits only to wander into a different region who didn't benefit from previous sacrifices?

[Roheline]

I've found that sometimes overdoing the sacrifices seems to be worse than doing them less. It's almost as if the mechanism the game uses to recognize a killed animal isn't the animal itself but the sacrifice.

I had a character doing a lot of fishing that kept getting the scary forest messages. So instead of sacrificing for every single "catch" of fish, I tried waiting until I was done fishing for the day and then just doing a single sacrifice for all of it.

So far it seems to have worked; both "supernatural" encounters I've had so far with that character have led me to believe my actions are at peace with the forest.

I'll have to test out my theory with small game instead of fish, to see if, say, after catching multiple squirrels in a day, one sacrifice suffices or if that angers the spirits.

[PALU]

As far as I've seen, you can sacrifice once per day, where the day ticks over somewhere in the middle of "morning". If you do a second sacrifice (e.g. because you woke up early, so you're technically in the previous "day") you "feel a bit unsteady" (if I remember the wording correctly). I haven't noticed any effect from accidental double sacrifices (apart from the message and wasted resources).
There may well be a geography connection as well, but as far as I can tell the sacrificial limit is one sacrifice per day shared between water and forest (and all regions). Thus, you can kill multiple times in a day, but only sacrifice once.

My starting characters rapidly get a horrible relation with the spirit of the forest since the only thing that can be caught are birds, and you need multiple birds per day to fill your belly (while still having to go hungry frequently). If you use passive hunting, you frequently get the situation that you get nothing for days on end, only to get frenzy periods where you get multiple birds per day, spending all your time processing the birds.

A trick I've used early on is to sacrifice the bird fat and use bark for tanning instead. That way the belly can be kept at least half full, instead of wasting half the meat of the catch on a sacrifice.

[MrMotorhead]

My first character was always on the spirits' bad side.  He was a kaumo that got most of his food via pole fishing with a few small (bird) traps thrown in.  I feel like I was sacrificing a fish every day or so but I'd get lots of messages about the waters around looking scary.  I wasn't catching more fish than I would eat.  I don't know if that lead to his downfall but I can say that the lake where he lived was infested with njerpez, but it was robbers that finally did him in.

My current guy is an owl tribe sniper, definite olympic athlete.  He gets no food from fishing and nearly all from hunting big game with the bow.  The spirits seem to love this guy and I frequently see messages about feeling at one with the forest, even while chopping down many trees to build a smokehouse in a spruce mire.  Beside the food source this character started with the ritual of greeting the earth spirits before sleep, and uses it most every night.