Finding Fallow Deer in Petershshain Cornfield

[George]

I'm slowly making my way through and havent found 1 rest zone or need zone for the deers. I cant seem to find anything at all in this zone bar 1 hunting shack thing. Would the antlers for luring make them come?

[DopaTrain]

Fallow should be all over the east side of the map.

[VictoriaHuntress]

The first time I played this game on PS4, back in Dec 2021, indeed as DopaTrain said, Fallow Deer were all over the place in Petershain. About a year ago, I purchased COTW for PC through my Steam account - when I went to Hirschfelden in that game, Fallow Deer were few and far between in Petershain, especially in the northeast on the lake. When I started yet another new game on my PS4 after Emerald Coast was released, the Fallow Deer zones were again very different from the first game and the current on-going game on my PC.

Need zones are allocated randomly whenever you start a new game from scratch (or if you delete a reserve's animal population file and then select that reserve again).
Thus, no two game instances will have exactly the same need zone distributions. It turns out that potential need zone locations are pre-allocated for each map (and hard-coded into the EXE file), so when the animal population file is created (or recreated as above) the allocation algorithm just picks randomly from the potential zones per species.

The callers won't work if you are not within 200m (or whatever the stated range of a caller type is - you can see this in the store UI), so if you go that route, you'll have to scout around in a region in hopes of getting within calling range.
There are things you can do to increase your chances of finding animals:
1 - spot and stalk hunting: walk through a region, listen for vocalizations (incl fleeing): track the sound, note the distance estimate and walk in that direction. Chances are you will: come across tracks that you can follow to need zones, walk into actual need zones, or be able to spot animals from a distance.
2 - spend time on high ground ( hills, mountains, lookout towers) just glassing for animals in the area
3 - set up hunting structures (portable or the permanent ones) and glass from those - that can get expensive, though ( $16000 for a tent, tripod or stands, less for ground blinds) or ($2100 for permanent hunting towers, $1700 for permanent ground blinds) so you have to make up the cost by hunting and harvesting a lot of game to break even.

That's why it's called hunting LOL - it's hard work.

The other thing you can try, on PC at least, is to delete the animal population file for the reserve, in hopes of generating a more favorable animal population distribution - just make sure you make a copy of the game's save directory first :)

[George]

I have set up a ground blind, i'm wandering round also looking for tracks. thanks for the advice.