[3.83] NPCs wandering farther from village

[Plotinus]

"He's around here somewhere, but I'm not sure where exactly"

When I visit a village lately, most of the villagers are not home at first -- they're 2-3 tiles away, but they start coming home as I spend more time in the village, and if I wander around the perimeter of the village, I'll usually see them coming back and can run into somebody who can tell me where the quest giver is.

I don't know if this is a bug, it could be that they're out tending their fields or pursuing their own interests, and they do come back eventually -- and it probably makes attacking peaceful villages harder., though I don't play that way.


I'm mostly noticing this with migrated characters, and these characters are all over a year old. I just tried it with a new character from 3.83 who is 17 days old and just tried taking him back to a village he'd previously visited, and update at first i thought it wasn't happening but actually the blacksmith is almost a full tile away and there's a lot of footprints much farther afield than i'd expect. So probably it's not about migration after all.

I recently sent you a character for a different bug; if you take him to a previously visited village (there are map markers, and a small trap near each village to track how long it's been since last visit), you might be able to reproduce it with him. otherwise i could save the game the next time i notice it happening.

It isn't happening all the time, but most of the time. i could provide a save of this newer character if needed

[Plotinus]

update: actually the new character is experiencing it, so it's not about migration-- the village he's in is near some thin ice, so that constrained where the villagers wandered, but there are more of them in the woods, farther north than i'd expect

[Sami]

Hmm. This is likely related to adjusted NPC time intervals as result of fixing this bug:
http://www.unrealworld.fi/forums/index.php?topic=7074.0

Villagers can for example decide to go for a little random walk, say for 10 undefined time units.
Now the recent adjustments made these time units, for peaceful walk tasks also, to last longer than before so the NPCs will also venture farther.
They return eventually though, but this makes village interaction more troublesome than before so we'll check, adjust and fix it.