Wolves, wildlife and fences

[Nettlesprout]

Has anyone had an unprovoked attack by wolves, or do they only attack when hungry and cannot find other sources of food?

Do they ever leave the map or will they just continue to multiply into larger and larger packs, killing wildlife and when they run out of wildlife, turn on people?

Is it a useful strategy to try to exterminate wolves as soon as they are spotted before they can multiply, hunt all the wildlife, and start forming packs too large for the settlers to handle?

I wonder if deer and hares are left unchecked, if they would start raiding gardens for food?
When it says stick fences are "easily penetrated by enemies and wildlife," do they bash them down or just run through them (no collision)?

[Horatio]

From personal experience: I have only discovered wolves to attack during events, or when I attack them. There doesn't seem to be a middle-ground for animal interaction with settlers, yet... I don't believe that leaving the wildlife to roam will mean they increase in size. These are features which are sure to be included in future updates that pertain to wildlife.

At the moment, they are just viable sources of food. Everything you can hunt, you can eat.

[Nettlesprout]

Originally posted by Horatio:

I don't believe that leaving the wildlife to roam will mean they increase in size.

I have had other people say otherwise and my personal experience seems to back this up:

https://i.imgur.com/81y5H01.png

https://i.imgur.com/uV6DtrE.png

This is experimental branch largest map, Hilltop Standard difficulties. I usually plant early and leave the wildlife mostly alone.

I have started recently killing off wolves (full colony military raid even for lone wolves because they scare me) but I am not sure how much is observational error / internal bias. If "events" mean 10 wolves are insta spawned then it may not help much. Do event wolves leave the map after their little raid?

I have this compulsion to constantly restart over and over and over everytime I think of some way to do something better :p So I have a lot of hours and a lot of early settlements but have not gotten that "deep" ...

[Wantoomany]

Wolves will eat wildlife. You can see evidence of this by looking for random, forbidden, bone piles on the map.

Devs have also confirmed that if wildlife is left alone it will repopulate. This leads me to belive wolves will too. Although it might time a lot of time as, other then events, wolves seem to appear on the map individually rather then in packs. So I would expect their growth rate to be slow.

My personal policy however, if I see a wolf, it gets hunted quickly.

[Nettlesprout]

Well I get LOTS of random, forbidden bone piles on a freshly generated map, so it is hard for me to take this as evidence unless maybe I am ankle deep in bone piles by late game... I take that more to be rpg color ("oh no theres wolves look at all the bones they've left"). I have never actually seen wolves ingame stalking a deer.

I usually see wolves early on just as singles but later in twos and threes, and the idea of waiting until I have packs of 5-10 worries me and makes me want to hunt them early game.

But maybe they do not (yet) actually have hunger/aggression/pack attacks outside of events? Maybe that will be in the updates that give us animal husbandry and taming?

[Orclover]

KILL THE WOLVES. My games I don't usually need the meat of them or the deer but its a nice buffer to have. Solo wolves will periodically hunt the deer/rabbits in the area and keep their numbers down. Keep all the wolves in the area eleminated when they show up and the number of deer/rabbits will just keep increasing. I had 10+ deer and a dozen rabbits a few days ago, and then a 12 pack of wolves showed up for an event. This time I did not go out and clear them early enough (it was winter and my peeps were busy building a another new warehouse). The wolves went on a killingspree and wiped out every deer and rabbit in the land before I could stop them. I had to build 3 new smokehouses to keep up with the new meat supply.

Some days with json editing I really do hope I can make a whole village of cannibal witches.

[Nettlesprout]

Originally posted by Orclover:

Some days with json editing I really do hope I can make a whole village of cannibal witches.

I think if you do a custom start and set the villager perks, those apply to all future joiners. I did one custom start and as long as I had only 2-3 perks set at 100% probability to get, then all my future joiners had those perks also. So I think you can do the female cannibals already ... just set to 100% female, 100% cannibals

[Orclover]

Originally posted by Nettlesprout:

Originally posted by Orclover:

Some days with json editing I really do hope I can make a whole village of cannibal witches.

I think if you do a custom start and set the villager perks, those apply to all future joiners. I did one custom start and as long as I had only 2-3 perks set at 100% probability to get, then all my future joiners had those perks also. So I think you can do the female cannibals already ... just set to 100% female, 100% cannibals

Yea I have my current run with 95% female and I need to remember to set that starting variable for cannibal, bandits get no love from me.

But now I wish I had edited the json to nerf the trebuchetes. Had 16 bandits show up and almost immediately send a volly fire to wipe out the entire center of my castle area and warehouse before I could run an assault team out the front door to lure them in.

Well....at least it is not winter cold snap. Yea trebuchets are in need of a tweak. That was from across the entire map. They didnt even roll them up. Just spawned and leveled me.

[Nettlesprout]

Does it work to put out a couple decoy "workstations -- say a pyre and a campfire -- to encourage them to attack those (only 15 wood each) and maybe discourage the use of trebuchets?

I keep restarting maps when I get a new "idea" and I never get past the first year :/ sigh.

I was like that with Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress as well. But I still enjoyed them all very much lol. Many hundreds of hours.

[theaaronone]

Originally posted by Nettlesprout:

Does it work to put out a couple decoy "workstations -- say a pyre and a campfire -- to encourage them to attack those (only 15 wood each) and maybe discourage the use of trebuchets?

I keep restarting maps when I get a new "idea" and I never get past the first year :/ sigh.

I was like that with Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress as well. But I still enjoyed them all very much lol. Many hundreds of hours.

The raiders in my game always head straight for my pyres first, which are well outside my settlement - it's like they know their fate! After those are gone they go for my campfire which is roughly at the center. but by then they've wandered over dozens of traps and my archers have been filling them with (horribly aimed) arrows.

The AI at this point seems to prioritize attacking whatever they can path to the easiest.

I'm on a normal sized valley map and am slowly building a two-wide trench just inside the "red" zone all the way around, with one bridge, and a walled in path filled with traps my archers can fire down into that leads to just outside my settlement. I'm not placing any doors, so the AI should think it can path straight to the settlement, and (I hope) prevent the trebuchets from spawning.

[Nettlesprout]

No doors means no rooms? or is it possible to make doorless rooms somehow using stairs or something?

[theaaronone]

Originally posted by Nettlesprout:

No doors means no rooms? or is it possible to make doorless rooms somehow using stairs or something?

I think a door is required, I had two workshops in one building, one upstairs, and one down, but they registered together until I built a wall with a door around the staircase opening. I hope this gets reworked later to where we can just designate the zones and place the required items / workbenches / etc... kinda like how Prison Architect does it.

[Bahamas]

On topic. there are 2 types of wolves. The normal one dose not seem to attack villagers. The event one attack everything and leave the map after a time if not killed in time.

[Philtre]

The "normal" wolves appear to be entirely peaceful unless attacked. I've had woodcutters and berry gatherers in close proximity to the wolves and nothing happened; I don't hunt them because then they will attack, and I generally assign hunting to my less skilled archers so they will skill up, so it takes them a while to get the kill and they take a lot of damage. They don't seem to build up to pack sizes of more than 4-ish.

The "event" wolves will kill anything they come into range of, including the "normal" wolves. Get rid of them quickly or there will be no wildlife left. (On the plus side you can scavenge the carcasses of anything they kill - they don't eat them.) The tooltip says they will eventually leave if left alone, but I haven't been taking any chances....

[TealDragonGaming]

Other than the hostile event they've seemed 99% peaceful to me. They only attack if I'm shooting them or stabbing them closeby. They try to run like deer if possible.

[cpc8472]

I hope that if/when the devs add a tame animal ability there's a slight chance to tame wolves. There is one that hangs around my settlement not bothering anyone (yes, I know that could change), but it reminds of how ancient man domesticated wolves and wild dogs.