Anyone using hunters near crops?

[Don Cool]

I didn´t build fences in my newest test map because I couldn´t see any deer, somehow a deer showed up anyway to eat my beans, I opted to make a hunter instead of a fence. I am still seeing no deer nodes and my hunter has caught 4 deer in a season, not much but that´s 240 meat + 2 bonus boars I manually hunted when bored.

.... and no beans were stolen. Anyone know if deer can happen to magically appear out of nowhere? I know bears sometimes do when they spawn.

[IFIYGD]

I have had the "Deer Spotted" icon on the screen with 3 arrows up, clicking on it shows 7, 8 or 9 deer, but hovering over it brings up no deer highlighted on screen. My hunter still hunts and the Carcass icon shows up, but the deer he or she is hunting are invisible. My cows go invisible too at times, even though the barn shows a full herd.
They're in the aether with the stuff from the trading post?

Cows will ignore fences around crop fields, too, if your grazing grid overlaps one, and it will show "crops lost to wildlife" when it happens. And they can be hard to see wandering among the pole beans. An unfenced field does draw deer in, so if you're having the same invisi-deer thing happening...

[MajesticIX]

The deer will travel great distances to get to it apparently. I had a deer attempt to walk from the south of my village up to the fields in the north. My tower shot them at the town square. Odd place for a deer to be grazing. There is a deer spot south of town.

[Yehoodi]

early on i will use hunters to cover farms if they are attacked by deer. I too have noticed that deer can appear on fields even though there is no deer icon in the area.

[Nefelia]

I built a few farms in the south of my town. No deer nodes anywhere near the farms. A decade or two later, two deer nodes.

I no longer use fences for my farms. I prefer to just build hunting lodges nearby and lure the gullible deer to their grisly deaths.

[wabbithunta]

I had something like this happen to me yesterday. A walled town with gates and the little buggers got in to the city. They had walked around a wall by a lake, as you can't build on water, a weak spot for an attack by raiders, so I put two towers nearby to combat them, but they ignore game.
I put a hunters lodge near my crop fields and killed 3 deer, but there was one bugger that kept "hiding", I watched the fields, and the hunter too, to see if I could find the phantom deer. but no luck on that score, despite waiting, and watching out for it, sad or what...? 🤷🏼‍♂️,
I kept getting the message about losing crops to wild-life, and these were the only farm fields I had, I even fenced them off, added gates to allow farmers access and still lost my crops to game.
I say had.., as I thought "right you little f******. let's see how you deal with this one" then!
I deleted my fields, all five of them, and then rebuilt with field stone walls + gates added first and then added the fields after.
Made my town plebs "go hungry" for a little while, until the crops grew back, but the little bugger was there no more.
So all I can think of was that it was a bug, as I never ever saw deer/game after killing 3 of them,
Crop fields are now working fine (for now...)

[briancourt2]

I use the fields to feed the deer. The magnet is useful to bring the deer to you. As my town expands I move the hunters out to the deer and close off the area. There is a spawn point where the deer come from. So you can accidentally not clear the bush/tree that was that spawn point and they can come back. F3 shows the herd quantity if you don't want to hover over the icon. A field of minimum size right outside your fence is the best of both worlds. Sure that one farmer must be frustrated, but worth the meat.