Current Workaround for Merging Volt Goat Herds

[lakhnish]

So there's a thing in the game where if two volt goat herds are at a low enough population and are close enough together, they merge into one herd. This can occur when you yourself have penned the volt goats too close together or upon world generation. This means you can permanently lose a goat herd not because they died, but because they merged. This does also seem to apply to the console versions. The reason why I think its the case is in the spoilers.

Spoiler

Bug Report #1 sometime during Celestial Update. Bug Report #2 the day before Halloween. In essence, it's this:

This may be in relation to Game Update 280490, specifically this: "Fixed bug preventing herds from merging properly." What this did is that all herd would now properly merge, including those that don't make new herds, such as volt goats.

What I wrote in the bug report #2:

The three luas to compare were lightninggoatherd.lua, beefaloherd.lua, and herd.lua 

The issue is in herd.lua in terms of the the merging of herds, specifically the function Herd:OnUpdate(). In that function is self:MergeNearbyHerds(), which can merge herds together if they fulfill the merge criteria. What differentiates beefalos from lightning goats is that beefaloherd.lua can make new herds while lightninggoatherd.lua cannot (and they shouldn't be able to either). Since the lightning goats now merge from two herds into one herd, we permanently lose that herd when in theory we shouldn't since they can't make new herds.

The current workaround that I could figure out is this. and it relies on two RNG components. The first RNG component is that you need to hope that you had two volt goat herds to begin with on world generation. It's not possible to tell with 100% certainty unless you do c_countprefab("lightninggoatherd") upon world creating.

If you did get two goat herds, from experience, the lowest amount of goats each herd has is two goats. Goats can take up to 1.5 days to repopulate, and they need to be offscreen. That means you need to wait until Day 4 for each herd to populate to a total of 4 goats per herd. They shouldn't merge at that point, but I'm not completely sure. It's probably best to wait to day 5.5/6 for a full herd of 6 goats per herd. And that's where the second RNG component is. You have to hope that the goat herds don't merge during that time frame. 

So hopefully you have two fully populated goat herds. From there, you need to make sure that they are 5 turf tiles (equivalent to 25 walls) away from each other to prevent mergers in the event you decide to move them. If you don't, you risk this. The herd update range is technically less than 20 walls, but why risk the herd updating itself into that range. That's it really.

Please provide construction feedback. Thanks.