Animal population issues

[PioneerX]

HI,

I run a vanilla PvE server with a small group of active players (<10). I have noticed that we have trouble maintaining animal populations. I have increased the spawn.max_rate (3,10,50,1000) several times and this seems to have no effect. When the server starts up the animal count will rise. According to spawn.report we should have 960 on the map, however after an hour and half the spawning stops and the number declines steadily so it only ever reaches ~180/960 before falling to around 1-10.

(13:55:42) | animals (autospawn/animals)
Population: 7/960

Graph of the anilmal count as reported by spawn.report command : http://www.pioneerx.co.uk/files/rust/rust-animal-count.png

The spawn.refill_populations command seems to have no effect and all this is running on a dedicated server with plenty of RAM and CPU to spare. Have I missed something I need to do?

Thanks any help.

[TheHeavyGunner]

join my server i will give you 10,000 wood and 2000 stone and therea so many animals its pvp but i will offer my protection server name is widowmaker