Why the hell are there so many of them!?

[marrowbuster]

I didn't even visit this area for a while and in the time I've been away about a dozen teenbirds have spawned, all ganging up to kill the tallbirds that try to get rid of them.

Tallbird mechanics are bizarre.

[-Variant]

Ah... love works in mysterious ways.

[Baark0]

Smallbirds seem to spawn around tallbird nests during spring. If you leave them unloaded, instead of starving they seem to grow into teenbirds. If you want, you can take them to your base with a teleporter staff and raise them until they become adults.

Tallbirds as a whole are confusing, and really they need an update, because spending 28 days (1 1/2 seasons!) is an absurd amount of time just to be able to get 2 meat and a tallbird egg every few days. For comparison, beefalo on average take 23-25 days to fully domesticate without a brush. It'd also be nice if tallbirds stopped killing their children. Despite characters saying they are territorial, they don't have issue with other tallbirds, but do with their own children, and while it's amusing seeing a tallbird oneshot a smallbird, it's kinda immersion breaking seeing the parent kill it's child.

[_zwb]

22 minutes ago, Baark0 said:

Smallbirds seem to spawn around tallbird nests during spring. If you leave them unloaded, instead of starving they seem to grow into teenbirds. If you want, you can take them to your base with a teleporter staff and raise them until they become adults.

Tallbirds as a whole are confusing, and really they need an update, because spending 28 days (1 1/2 seasons!) is an absurd amount of time just to be able to get 2 meat and a tallbird egg every few days. For comparison, beefalo on average take 23-25 days to fully domesticate without a brush. It'd also be nice if tallbirds stopped killing their children. Despite characters saying they are territorial, they don't have issue with other tallbirds, but do with their own children, and while it's amusing seeing a tallbird oneshot a smallbird, it's kinda immersion breaking seeing the parent kill it's child.

I think the reason why tallbirds act so weird is because: "Those were a failed experiment" --- Maxwell

[D_Good_Fellow]

Okay, I saw this too and I thought I was going crazy!

I hadn't heard anything about smallbirds/teenbirds spawning without player intervention (in fact I had read that wild tallbirds respawn fully grown at their nests), so when I walked by a tallbird seemingly trying to murder her teenage son I was very confused. (When I came back later there were three teenbirds and no adults, so I guess the son won).

How do wild teenbirds even work? I always thought their behavior mechanics were dependent on having a player they were loyal to. Do wild teenbirds still defend players from monsters and attack players if unfed?

[Baark0]

4 hours ago, D_Good_Fellow said:

Okay, I saw this too and I thought I was going crazy!

I hadn't heard anything about smallbirds/teenbirds spawning without player intervention (in fact I had read that wild tallbirds respawn fully grown at their nests), so when I walked by a tallbird seemingly trying to murder her teenage son I was very confused. (When I came back later there were three teenbirds and no adults, so I guess the son won).

How do wild teenbirds even work? I always thought their behavior mechanics were dependent on having a player they were loyal to. Do wild teenbirds still defend players from monsters and attack players if unfed?

If you hatch a tallbird egg  then they become a follower to you (if you get to far away without them being able to walk to you, they will stop following you though). In the wild they are in this state by default, and will simply wander around eating whatever food they come across. Afaik there is no way to befriend wild small/teenbirds.

[marrowbuster]

On 6/21/2023 at 12:59 AM, Baark0 said:

It'd also be nice if tallbirds stopped killing their children. Despite characters saying they are territorial, they don't have issue with other tallbirds, but do with their own children, and while it's amusing seeing a tallbird oneshot a smallbird, it's kinda immersion breaking seeing the parent kill it's child.

Lord knows how many of these kinds of threads have been posted in the Bug Tracker forum, of which I have contributed to.

[CameoAppearance]

Smallbirds spawn from tallbird nests in early spring, yes. Usually their parents murder them (unless they're left unloaded for the right amount of time to grow into teenbirds offscreen like these ones), and I don't know if that's a RoG-era oversight that hasn't been important enough to be corrected or if it's being left in on purpose. I'm not actually sure if they do this in singleplayer but the latest this behaviour could have been introduced is when RoG content was integrated into DST in spring 2015, a solid eight years ago, so Klei probably knows tallbirds do this by now.

Personally, since there's that Maxwell line about them being a failed experiment, I don't find it immersion-breaking so much as a reminder that the Constant isn't a natural place even in the context of the story. When the same tallbird that chased you halfway across the map for stealing an egg out of its nest and killed half the last hound wave because they were close to the nest fails to recognise its freshly hatched baby as having anything to do with the egg it was protecting and immediately attacks it, I can see why the species' creator considers them a failure.

Honestly after this long with infanticidal tallbirds in the game I'd be at least somewhat disappointed if tallbirds stopped attacking smallbirds and suddenly learned to live in peace with their children after eight or nine years of senseless yet darkly hilarious murder. I'd rather see character quotes added to the game that specifically comment on tallbirds being bad parents/more protective of their eggs than their young. (If they attacked other mobs in defense of their own smallbirds and treated other tallbirds' smallbirds as valid targets that would at least be consistent with the rest of their territorial behaviour and preserve some of the entertainment value.)

[D_Good_Fellow]

29 minutes ago, CameoAppearance said:

Smallbirds spawn from tallbird nests in early spring, yes. Usually their parents murder them (unless they're left unloaded for the right amount of time to grow into teenbirds offscreen like these ones), and I don't know if that's a RoG-era oversight that hasn't been important enough to be corrected or if it's being left in on purpose. I'm not actually sure if they do this in singleplayer but the latest this behaviour could have been introduced is when RoG content was integrated into DST in spring 2015, a solid eight years ago, so Klei probably knows tallbirds do this by now.

Personally, since there's that Maxwell line about them being a failed experiment, I don't find it immersion-breaking so much as a reminder that the Constant isn't a natural place even in the context of the story. When the same tallbird that chased you halfway across the map for stealing an egg out of its nest and killed half the last hound wave because they were close to the nest fails to recognise its freshly hatched baby as having anything to do with the egg it was protecting and immediately attacks it, I can see why the species' creator considers them a failure.

Honestly after this long with infanticidal tallbirds in the game I'd be at least somewhat disappointed if tallbirds stopped attacking smallbirds and suddenly learned to live in peace with their children after eight or nine years of senseless yet darkly hilarious murder. I'd rather see character quotes added to the game that specifically comment on tallbirds being bad parents/more protective of their eggs than their young. (If they attacked other mobs in defense of their own smallbirds and treated other tallbirds' smallbirds as valid targets that would at least be consistent with the rest of their territorial behaviour and preserve some of the entertainment value.)

Tbh you don't even need the "failed experiment" explanation to defend the immersion. There are plenty examples of real world animals immediately killing their newborn children. It's true that there is no species whose instinct is kill all their offspring every time they have babies (at least to my knowledge), but seeing a wild animal attacking its own young is not that atypical of a thing to see in nature.

It is still odd from a gameplay perspective though. The fact that the smallbirds die unless they are offscreen long enough to grow up just feels like wasted potential. Although I'd hardly consider "tallbird family dynamics" a high priority on things I'd like Klei to add/change lol.

[CameoAppearance]

3 minutes ago, D_Good_Fellow said:

Tbh you don't even need the "failed experiment" explanation to defend the immersion. There are plenty examples of real world animals immediately killing their newborn children. It's true that there is no species whose instinct is kill all their offspring every time they have babies (at least to my knowledge), but seeing a wild animal attacking its own young is not that atypical of a thing to see in nature.

It is still odd from a gameplay perspective though. The fact that the smallbirds die unless they are offscreen long enough to grow up just feels like wasted potential. Although I'd hardly consider "tallbird family dynamics" a high priority on things I'd like Klei to add/change lol.

If they ate the dead smallbirds it'd be a bit less weird, since a lot of animals that kill their young in real life either eat the bodies or feed them to their surviving siblings after thinning out the litter. (I suppose teenbirds would eat them, since they're carnivorous, but you don't generally get a mix of dead smallbirds and smallbirds that survive long enough to become teenbirds.)