Pre-generate remains of dead animals

[Senthe]

I recently found a pile of bear bones in a place I thought I never visited before, and I was initially astounded, before realizing it must've been a bear that I personally killed weaks ago. It would be impossible to find something like that in a completely new terrain.

It's currently possible to sometimes witness predators killing and eating prey, but they both must be spawned first before they can meet.

Why not pre-generate dead animal remains too? Logically they must be everywhere in the world, so it should be possible to stumble upon them once in a while (even if very rarely).

1. Eaten/rotten remains of an animal: If predators and prey animals get generated in a new area, then why not just pre-spawn a useless but interesting carcass alongside them?

2. Pile of bones/feathers: Shouldn't this be a normal occurence that some animals either get eaten, or just die naturally, and so their remains sometimes just lie scattered in random places?

[McKwack]

I take it this 'random animal remains' is different from the random Elk carcass that I found drowned while trying to walk on thin ice?

In a sense that the Elk would have to be spawned first and actually trying to cross the thin ice before the ice broke, sending the Elk into its watery grave.

There's also the occasional pile of bird feathers that I found (forgot the exact species), although I suspect this also falls to the predator-eats-prey sequence that you mentioned before.

[PALU]

Drowned animals "existed" in the world and drowned when failing to get out of the cold water.
The feathers result from birds being taken by predators, and sometimes you can find remains of animals taken by predators, which can give you a small meal if you're not too squeamish to act as a scavenger.

[Senthe]

I take it this 'random animal remains' is different from the random Elk carcass that I found drowned while trying to walk on thin ice?

In a sense that the Elk would have to be spawned first and actually trying to cross the thin ice before the ice broke, sending the Elk into its watery grave.

There's also the occasional pile of bird feathers that I found (forgot the exact species), although I suspect this also falls to the predator-eats-prey sequence that you mentioned before.

Yeah, in all of these examples those animals have to previously be spawned, exist and move around before this can happen. So you need to hang in the area for some time for something interesting to potentially happen to animals. I'd like to just occassionally see an aftermath of them dying before I got there, without ever spawning alive

[Sami]

Actually there can be animals, and all sorts of life, also at the terrain you visit for the first time. So it's not so that you have to hang around for some time before things start to 'spawn'.
The completely new areas are also given a period of life cycle, the present animals living their life etc. so there's always a history of incidents at the moment the character enters terrain for the first time. So, in theory it's possible that you'll find animal remains also on a fresh, firstly visited terrain. As you can find all the other marks of animal and NPC activity as well.

In the past, years and years ago, the spawning was more of a thing and it originated from how traps were handled within the code. That was re-worked back in 2015 in version 3.20 and after the animal appearance hasn't been dominated by the gamey spawning mechanism.