Problem making pens

[TheDreadHalla]

Ive been trying to make pens all over my farm and about 80% of the time even when i complete a pen it will do one of two things: it will either not register as a pen (contains 4 walls and atleast one door) or it will cause another enclosure that was previously fine to become not an enclosure. This happens weather they are sharing a wall or not. I built one across the field from another, no adjacent walls not even close to one another and it caused the other enclousre to no longer be one. Idk if this is a bug or a game mechanic but i havent found anything online about it. Its becoming increasingly frustrating as i progress in the game and want to add more enclosures.

[Ooze]

I know the feeling...

[Will | Paleo Pines Dev Team]

Hello! Apologies for only getting back to you now- Can I just confirm that this is still a problem, and that you're on the most recent game version for Steam? That's 1.2.28 right now. I've seen a few reports of this sort of thing- If you're able to send through a player.log at some stage that could be very useful!

[TK]

Yeah I've started having this problem as well all of a sudden. I made changes to one pen and another broke, then I tried fixing the problem and more broke. Had to just quit the day, I'll see what it does on reload the next time I play.

[momo]

I am having this same problem. As far as I can tell, everything is up to date. I just got the game a few days ago.

I also have one possibly glitched quest; I got 2 quests asking to find a lost item near Bongo's pen, I found one and completed that quest, I can't find a second item so I don't know if it's just really well hidden or the quest glitched.

[Let Me Die]

A lot of people seem to be having this problem. No-one at the developer is bothering with the bug reports, even if you email them directly.
*If you email them & hear back, please update your thread! Others (such as myself) would be grateful to hear anything.
There seem to be hidden rules for pen building, or the game is not well made, or both.

[Will | Paleo Pines Dev Team]

Hello folks! I wrote up some of the pen building info here:

- There's no maximum limit to how many gates a pen may have.
- For an area to be considered a pen, it has to be fenced off with at least one gate attached for entry and exit- this is the same for the wide open areas, and the smaller sort of transitional areas between the different 'wings' of the ranch.
- There must be more 'free' land on your ranch than there is 'penned' land- Free land applies to anywhere you could place something, so if you've cleared out the entire rocky area, that would be free land; but if you haven't cleared out the area, it doesn't count towards your free land. This is total pen space. (I use the pen guides I shared below to figure this out if I don't have all the debris cleared from a save)

For help with actually planning the pens, a few Discord users have put together some guides that I'll link here too in case they're of any help (the one that shows how fences take up space I find incredibly useful!)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H4cmgj3os0ubOlXxUmEtUOLweSd8geNi/view
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ncmmF3XSf-jwx0oP8Hw_3eoFBDBPdbVwZQYDSB1s0nQ/edit#gid=0
In addition to these, I tend to use https://www.paleo.gg/games/paleo-pines/pen-planner to keep track of the best biome/food/number combinations too.

I hope this is useful, and apologies that it's taken me so long to gather this information!

[Keen]

Originally posted by Will | Paleo Pines Dev Team:

Hello folks! I wrote up some of the pen building info here:

- There's no maximum limit to how many gates a pen may have.
- For an area to be considered a pen, it has to be fenced off with at least one gate attached for entry and exit- this is the same for the wide open areas, and the smaller sort of transitional areas between the different 'wings' of the ranch.
- There must be more 'free' land on your ranch than there is 'penned' land- Free land applies to anywhere you could place something, so if you've cleared out the entire rocky area, that would be free land; but if you haven't cleared out the area, it doesn't count towards your free land. This is total pen space. (I use the pen guides I shared below to figure this out if I don't have all the debris cleared from a save)

For help with actually planning the pens, a few Discord users have put together some guides that I'll link here too in case they're of any help (the one that shows how fences take up space I find incredibly useful!)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H4cmgj3os0ubOlXxUmEtUOLweSd8geNi/view
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ncmmF3XSf-jwx0oP8Hw_3eoFBDBPdbVwZQYDSB1s0nQ/edit#gid=0
In addition to these, I tend to use https://www.paleo.gg/games/paleo-pines/pen-planner to keep track of the best biome/food/number combinations too.

I hope this is useful, and apologies that it's taken me so long to gather this information!

Are you saying that we cant use all of the land in an area if there isnt MORE land that we are NOT using as pens? As in, if I have 100 squares of land, I can use 49 squares for a pen, and have to have 51 squares not being used? I am curious to know what the devs mindset was for this.

If it's going to be a permanent thing, maybe add some kind of notification when a pen placement fails, such as "You need to clear more land before placing a pen that size!" or "You don't have room for a pen that size!" or *something* in the game to let us know what is going on. It's super frustrating to have a certain area turn to a pen and it causes a pen someone else to NOT be a pen anymore, or an area just *wont* be counted as a pen and we dont know why.

Another issue I have is it will count my pathway as a pen instead of the pens I built coming off of it, which doesnt make sense to me.

[Jankies]

Originally posted by Keen:

Are you saying that we cant use all of the land in an area if there isnt MORE land that we are NOT using as pens? As in, if I have 100 squares of land, I can use 49 squares for a pen, and have to have 51 squares not being used? I am curious to know what the devs mindset was for this.

I went ahead and counted the squares in the first graphic and came up with a grand total of 3787 m² for the entire ranch, subtracting only trees and the no-build zone around the house. I also added up the areas of all my pens, which is currently 2362 m². This results in 1425 m² of free space on my ranch even before including space used by pen fencing. So I'm definitely using most of my land for dino pens!

The only times I've run into pen recognition issues is when I've made pens greater than 311 m², which is an extreme size anyway, or used gates to connect more than 3 pens together.

[Keen]

Originally posted by Jankies:

Originally posted by Keen:

Are you saying that we cant use all of the land in an area if there isnt MORE land that we are NOT using as pens? As in, if I have 100 squares of land, I can use 49 squares for a pen, and have to have 51 squares not being used? I am curious to know what the devs mindset was for this.

I went ahead and counted the squares in the first graphic and came up with a grand total of 3787 m² for the entire ranch, subtracting only trees and the no-build zone around the house. I also added up the areas of all my pens, which is currently 2362 m². This results in 1425 m² of free space on my ranch even before including space used by pen fencing. So I'm definitely using most of my land for dino pens!

The only times I've run into pen recognition issues is when I've made pens greater than 311 m², which is an extreme size anyway, or used gates to connect more than 3 pens together.

On one of my saves I have a pen that is 850 (herbie herd pen. it was the entire zone that was blocked by stone) so that isn't the issue here I don't think. When I had the issue, I had not finished clearing the wood area or the bush area, and the pen was not connected to any other pen. I wonder what the actual issue is here then.