First Contact With The Cannibals

[Frosty]

Newbie here! The wiki says "...once a cannibal has seen the player and has successfully run away, the tribe will start to send more and more cannibals each day after the player"

How accurate is this? Do they hound you for the rest of the game from then on? Wherever you go on the island?

[Yetizuli]

If you go to remote parts of the island they won't chance after you (the mountains) they don't come after you every day but for the most part, yes this is true

[Ruckpie]

Originally posted by JamusTheMallard™:

If you go to remote parts of the island they won't chance after you (the mountains) they don't come after you every day but for the most part, yes this is true

What are you talking about? There is a tribe near the edge of the mountains. They happily chase you around there.

On another note, that's 100% accurate. Also know when you kill a female the males get very aggressive. They can climb and the more you kill them the more they send.

[BIT Bear]

In generally i've found cannibals to become more and more agressive the more days go by.
Their patrol numbers also seem to increase and like RuckPie said; they will become very angry with you if you attack and kill the females. Even if those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ started the fight.

I wonder if there's a way to kill cannibal tribes. Can you do that? Because there are a few small villages near my base and sometimes they wait for me near the ledge of my base (they can't reach it) and it's starting to get annoying to start a new day and then be ambushed having to waste time using a different route or worst case a raft.

What im more curious about is what the different effigies mean. I've noticed they're building new effigies near camps and campfires I built. Maybe they are random but i don't think so.

[kaylo7]

It's more accurate to say they will hound where they last saw you, and to a lesser extent the structures you've built and land you've deforested. So moving around to other bases when cannibal numbers get too large is good strategy, as they have to find you at your new location before resuming trying to murder-kill you.

The effigies they raise may or may not directly affect how many come after you, but supposedly players have linked certain effigy types and certain numbers of them to increased spawns of certain mutant types, such as cowmen.

[Syncourt]

They don't memorize locations. It's just another myth.

I heard they did when I first started playing (among many other AI related myths) and so I built an escape path and a hidden rest spot in a shipping container with the opening facing the ocean, a good distance away from my base. When I snuck off in the night to avoid killing the cannibals that were grouped out the front of my base and avoid aggroing them, I slept in the shipping container only to wake up finding the cannibals walking down the hill towards my hidey hole, searching for me.

I hid back inside before being spotted, they walked right up alongside the container and just hung around outside it. They knew I was around there but they hadn't seen me or any structures. All I had was an unlit campfire and a bed hidden inside, completely out of view.

I attempted this another time by making a second base to retreat to when the attacks got too strong, on the first night my second base was attacked by the same number that I was getting at my original base.

As far as the wiki goes, don't trust everything on there. It is not so much about being spotted by the cannibals as much as it is about killing your first cannibal. Even without killing them you will find that as soon as you have chopped down a few trees they will be aggrivated regardless. Once you have aggrivated them, they will hunt you for the rest of the game.

[kaylo7]

Well as far as the shipping containers, I've built there before and it seems the "can't build" radius that was recently implemented might also be the range that structures extend out and can be seen by cannibals. Anything inside the shipping containers will thus likely be visible to them, causing them to investigate. If you stand near the walls, they can and will spot & attack you through them. The containers are also along one of their patrol routes.

I've built a base outside their patrol path along the isolated beach with the boat in the south-east corner of the map. I built along the base of the cliff so nothing is visible from above, and they never ever found that particular base in 100+ days. I always moved there when spawns got too crazy (this was back before nerfs to cannibal spawns on the surface) with multiple virginias and armsy's each night, careful to not lead any to it.

I'm fairly certain that they cannot harrass you without first finding your current base location, but they do seem to spawn faster around old bases I've returned to, versus new ones I'm currently building.

If you doubt me, try building far north-east at the edge of the snow region where they don't patrol. None will come to harrass you, but if you lead a patrol back to your base and hide inside, once they put up some effigies you'll start seeing them outside your base, despite it being outside their normal range.