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One thing that drives me crazy about these mobile poop factories, its there tendency to scatter once discovered.

After a few weeks, they will have gone from a tight herd grazing on tufts of grass to solitary creatures spread out through the woods. The tendency is most annoying if you are playing on a map without bridges. It makes harvesting poop kinda annoying, and they just show up in random places like my camp. Farting and pooping and yawning all over the place. Awful....

It would be nice if they were attracted to some combination of; each-other, grass tufts, or grassland biomes.

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It seems to me that beefalo should indeed have an actual, unique AI. Here are my suggestions for kevin and the staff:

1) Organize beefolo as a single "herd" entity. You should never see less than three of them around at once, and a single herd should have the potential to reach larger numbers like five or eight. The herd provides a single beefalo with extra protection from hounds, and from players with spears and log suits.

2) Dead beefalo should respawn as "calves" in a random herd that is of lower than maximum size. If a whole herd is wiped out they should respawn somewhere on the map away from the player.

3) Calves should act as an instant trigger for aggression. A herd of beefalo with a calf will go into "alert" mode if you get too near to it, and warn you off, but if you stay in the area for too long, or get too close, they will attack you even if you have NOT attacked them. This makes the world more dangerous as the "nice friendly" herd of beefalo you were previously living amongst suddenly don't want you around, and either need to be avoided for a few days (maybe 7) while the calf grows up, or slaughtered.

4) Herds should wander in search of grass and grassland biomes. If possible they should stick close together as their is safety for them in numbers. I don't want to find beefalo in the woods, or lost in the swamp. :)

I'd like some other, different, types of creatures to see and experience with their own AI, but I'll leave that for a different thread. Hope this suggestion helps Kevin and the staff make beefalo more interesting.

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It seems to me that beefalo should indeed have an actual, unique AI. Here are my suggestions for kevin and the staff:

1) Organize beefolo as a single "herd" entity. You should never see less than three of them around at once, and a single herd should have the potential to reach larger numbers like five or eight. The herd provides a single beefalo with extra protection from hounds, and from players with spears and log suits.

2) Dead beefalo should respawn as "calves" in a random herd that is of lower than maximum size. If a whole herd is wiped out they should respawn somewhere on the map away from the player.

3) Calves should act as an instant trigger for aggression. A herd of beefalo with a calf will go into "alert" mode if you get too near to it, and warn you off, but if you stay in the area for too long, or get too close, they will attack you even if you have NOT attacked them. This makes the world more dangerous as the "nice friendly" herd of beefalo you were previously living amongst suddenly don't want you around, and either need to be avoided for a few days (maybe 7) while the calf grows up, or slaughtered.

4) Herds should wander in search of grass and grassland biomes. If possible they should stick close together as their is safety for them in numbers. I don't want to find beefalo in the woods, or lost in the swamp. :)

I'd like some other, different, types of creatures to see and experience with their own AI, but I'll leave that for a different thread. Hope this suggestion helps Kevin and the staff make beefalo more interesting.

i support this.

sounds like a great idea.

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I approve of this idea. It never really occurred to me before since I have a tendency to wander around different areas more, but thinking back, the beefalo were getting farther away from eachother unless a hound attacked in which case they'd temporarily get back together (before separating again.)

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It seems to me that beefalo should indeed have an actual, unique AI. Here are my suggestions for kevin and the staff

As a note, the Devs have mentioned that beefalo will have their behaviors updated once seasons are introduced. This may or may not also have to do with the addition of baby beefalo. Who knows?

1) Organize beefolo as a single "herd" entity. You should never see less than three of them around at once, and a single herd should have the potential to reach larger numbers like five or eight. The herd provides a single beefalo with extra protection from hounds, and from players with spears and log suits.

To this end another user suggested that when the map is first generated one of the beefalo should be selected as an "alpha", who leads the herd. We went on to discuss how the "alpha" would work. The effect would be that wherever the alpha wanders other beefalo must stay within a certain distance... or simply they follow him. Whether the alpha beefalo should appear different (i.e. appear more as a "bull") is open to debate. If the alpha is ever killed the herd will scatter as previously, but after a number of days a new alpha is randomly selected and the beefalo that scattered slowly migrate back towards it.

2) Dead beefalo should respawn as "calves" in a random herd that is of lower than maximum size. If a whole herd is wiped out they should respawn somewhere on the map away from the player.

Right now I'm of the opinion that once baby beefalo (i.e. calves) are added to the life cycle of beefalo then beefalo deaths should be natural. Beefalo should need to eat grass (from grass tufts) and if they cannot because either there are too many of them or the player has harvest all the grass, those that cannot eat starve and eventually die. That way you have population control outside of the player and predators. Obviously the beefalo also need a predator to cull their numbers... I suggest the hound packs. It would be nice if they went after beefalo every now and then rather than just us.

3) Calves should act as an instant trigger for aggression. A herd of beefalo with a calf will go into "alert" mode if you get too near to it, and warn you off, but if you stay in the area for too long, or get too close, they will attack you even if you have NOT attacked them. This makes the world more dangerous as the "nice friendly" herd of beefalo you were previously living amongst suddenly don't want you around, and either need to be avoided for a few days (maybe 7) while the calf grows up, or slaughtered.

Agreed, however this adds the extra danger of what happens when calves happen to randomly wander into your base camp. Whoopsie! Better flee... or do you? I suggest that we go back to an earlier comment by the Devs, that the Beefalo Hat will have a purpose... I suggest that purpose will be that when a player wears it the beefalo think they are in fact a baby beefalo. As such, a player could walk among beefalo and calves/baby beefalo without fear of aggression... unless the player attacks, revealing they are not a real beefalo.

This suggestion connects to another involving luring and taming a baby beefalo so you can turn it into a pet, and eventually into a beefalo mount (when it grows into an adult). It goes without saying that I think all calves/baby beefalo should eventually become adult beefalo after a set number of days (30 Days?).

4) Herds should wander in search of grass and grassland biomes. If possible they should stick close together as their is safety for them in numbers. I don't want to find beefalo in the woods, or lost in the swamp. :)

Agreed. As per my suggestion if beefalo need to eat grass, from grass tufts, they would never wander into a forest or swamp. Of course the AI would need to account for this logic, as currently there is no existing requirement for this behavior. In fact, maybe the AI should attract beefalo to the largest collection of grass tufts... the player's base camp...? ;)

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It seems to me that beefalo should indeed have an actual, unique AI. Here are my suggestions for kevin and the staff:

1) Organize beefolo as a single "herd" entity. You should never see less than three of them around at once, and a single herd should have the potential to reach larger numbers like five or eight. The herd provides a single beefalo with extra protection from hounds, and from players with spears and log suits.

2) Dead beefalo should respawn as "calves" in a random herd that is of lower than maximum size. If a whole herd is wiped out they should respawn somewhere on the map away from the player.

3) Calves should act as an instant trigger for aggression. A herd of beefalo with a calf will go into "alert" mode if you get too near to it, and warn you off, but if you stay in the area for too long, or get too close, they will attack you even if you have NOT attacked them. This makes the world more dangerous as the "nice friendly" herd of beefalo you were previously living amongst suddenly don't want you around, and either need to be avoided for a few days (maybe 7) while the calf grows up, or slaughtered.

4) Herds should wander in search of grass and grassland biomes. If possible they should stick close together as their is safety for them in numbers. I don't want to find beefalo in the woods, or lost in the swamp. :)

I'd like some other, different, types of creatures to see and experience with their own AI, but I'll leave that for a different thread. Hope this suggestion helps Kevin and the staff make beefalo more interesting.

You are over thinking it. All that is really required is to implement a "herd" AI which controls the overall population. Each new herd is kept within a certain range of other Beefalo in order to stop them wandering off on their own, and out of their starting area. I heard that Planetary Annihilation is working on something like Field Flows (or something named similar) which allows groups of units to cross terrain and use their pathing on randomly generated terrain. You could also implement unique AI that keeps them in a particular biome or on their respective island but if you implement herd AI then there really is no need.

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I'm going to bump this because it's not too old and I support this. Keeping beefalo resticted to plains biomes means that all your problems are solved. But instead of beefalo respawning as calves, I'd rather, if a herd is below maxium size females (game calculates 50% to be female when herd is found) have a 0.028% chance to spawn a baby every second, with the calf A.I. mentioned above.

But to keep them together, all we need is a beefalo proof invisible wall!

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One time I hit a Beefalo (Out of curiosity) and died from 15 of them, and now if I even go near one of them with a calf they will attack me! Next thing I know is I'm walking through a plain and I see a herd of Beefalo and the first thing that I will say is. ERMAGERD BEEFALO!!!!!! And then I will run over them to see a calf Beefalo and see Beefalo running at and then I will say. ERMAGERD A CALF, RUUUNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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