How to kill off all animals and respawn them?

[rolypoly]

I want to change the percentage of the aggressive animals on my server, and read somewhere that even if you change the settings, the animals that are live already will not change anything, so I need to kill them all off and then respawn them. Is there a GM command to do that?

[cjreamoore]

As far as i'm aware there is no such command. You may have to completely restart your server and adjust the creature ratio before starting it up.

[silvertoken99]

You can probably just go into the wurmcreatures.db using sqlite studio and remove all records... I think there might be other tables with references though like offspring and creature skills

[Annie]

I just ran into this issue while setting up my server. I went into the wurmcreatures.dg with my sqlite editer. There is a location that lists all the animals there. I went in and deleted the animals I did not want on my server. I then saved it, updated my aggro animal to 50% (was 60%) and turned "Newbie friendly" setting on. The server saved and is now relaunched with no issue.

[bob_2059]

You really should do this in multiple steps via the DB in order to do it safely. Some basic SQL knowledge will come in handy to prevent totally screwing the DB.
Do not have the server running while modifying the DB (not just this time, but any time)
As mentioned by silvertoken99, there are interdependencies across multiple tables. Wurm may or may not handle missing records properly, but don't assume it will. Fix it yourself before restarting the server.

At the very least, you need to clean up the wurmcreatures.position table with a query such as:
delete from position where wurmid not in (select wurmid from creatures);

If you delete creatures that have inventory (such as trolls and their clubs) you'll end up with orphaned items- the club still exists in the items DB, but the owner (troll) no longer exists in the creatures DB.

There is not a quick and simple way to do what you want, but it can be done.

[cadh20000]

Originally posted by bob_2059:

If you delete creatures that have inventory (such as trolls and their clubs) you'll end up with orphaned items- the club still exists in the items DB, but the owner (troll) no longer exists in the creatures DB.

There is not a quick and simple way to do what you want, but it can be done.

At least the Huge Clubs rot quickly when not carried in an inventory or equipped so they won't stick around too long even if you just leave them.

[bob_2059]

At least the Huge Clubs rot quickly when not carried in an inventory or equipped so they won't stick around too long even if you just leave them.

You're making assumptions there.
You're assuming that the item will appear in the world when the creature holding it is removed from the DB.
select * from items where name like '%club%';
Note that their x,y,z coords are null.
Will they miraculously appear somewhere once the holder (troll) is deleted?
If they do not appear, how will they take environmental damage and decay?
Is the server programmed to handle this unexpected condition, or will those items remain indefinitely?
If they remain indefinitely, will this unexpected data in the DB cause future problems?

Computers don't generally handle unexpected data well, unless they are explicitly told how to do so.

[Myst Leissa]

Originally posted by bob_2059:

At least the Huge Clubs rot quickly when not carried in an inventory or equipped so they won't stick around too long even if you just leave them.

You're making assumptions there.
You're assuming that the item will appear in the world when the creature holding it is removed from the DB.
select * from items where name like '%club%';
Note that their x,y,z coords are null.
Will they miraculously appear somewhere once the holder (troll) is deleted?
If they do not appear, how will they take environmental damage and decay?
Is the server programmed to handle this unexpected condition, or will those items remain indefinitely?
If they remain indefinitely, will this unexpected data in the DB cause future problems?

Computers don't generally handle unexpected data well, unless they are explicitly told how to do so.

Honestly thought Decay was a legitimate effect for /all/ items (most noticeably food but all items take "decay damage" over time; except special items like deeds and ebony wand (which tbh even the ebony wand has a breaking chance when digging :/)

[bob_2059]

Honestly thought Decay was a legitimate effect for /all/ items

Not all. Many items in a creature's inventory never take decay. The list of items that do take decay in inventory is a lot shorter than the ones that don't.
And that's the situation with troll clubs. They are created in a creature's inventory (the troll) and do not start to take decay until they are in an item (the troll's corpse). Killing a troll converts it from being a creature to being an item. During this conversion, the huge shod club gains x/y/z coords in the database. If you simply delete the creature from the database, it never goes thru this conversion.

Database errors tend to snowball in general, not just in Wurm. What starts off looking like a minor issue, over time, becomes a huge one. It may work fine for weeks or even months until you hit a critical point where the database becomes hopelessly corrupted and unsalvageable.