Trapping testing - do traps spawn animals?

[Fakiroen]

Hello, survivors!

I have read every post linked to trapping and some of them mention that having specific traps in an area spawns specific animals that can be caught with them.

I believe this is true, because I hardly ever meet wolves on the map, but as soon as I build a fence around my cabin with trap pits, it is just a matter of time before a random wolf gets caught in the pit. This happened with every single character I had. I´ve done like 7 playthroughs usually 2-3 winters long.

I wanted to test the randomness. Please see attached photo, its a piece of art!
https://imgur.com/a/Ohk4BE1

1) 10 % Trapping skill
- I took resources and went to a Ford tile near a river in the Driik territory.
- I hex-edited the TRAPPING skill to 10 %.
- Built 10 traps of each: Trap Pit, Loop Snare, Paw-Board, Light Lever Trap; with 10 % trapping skill
- Baited them with raw meat, raw fish, berries, leaves, turnips, lentils and with one random spoiled raw fat cut.
- Travelled 15 map-tiles back to my home
- Visited the Test Site every 2 in-game days (=on the morning of every 3rd day).

After 10 days, in this absolute minefield of a trapsite - not a single animal was trapped, not a single bait was eaten.
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2) 100 % Trapping skill
- I returned the old save file, empty Ford tile without traps. Delivered resources.
- Hex-edited the trapping skill to 100 %, then I did exactly the same, built traps with 100% skill, baited traps, travelled 15 map tiles back home, and visited the test site every 2 days;

After 10 days, in this absolute minefield of a trapsite - not a single animal was trapped, not a single bait was eaten.

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I have no clue if the trapping skill even matters. The trapping is so random that I rarely ever do it with any of my characters.
I would love to learn the secrets and actually use it as a survival skill, but I just dont understand how to trap animals.

Does it literally only work in a way, that you need to ___see___ an animal on the world map, then go in the tile, build and bait a trap, and then wait for 2 days? Is that the only way that trapping actually works as an ACTIVE skill and not a random prey lottery?

[Plotinus]

10% is really low, I don't usually get trapping success before 20% -- at best the animal will wander into the trap and then wander out again because the trap failed that badly. Once you get the skill up a little higher, you'll be drowning in meatcuts. As for why 100% wasn't good enough -- it can take a lot longer than 10 days for it to start to happen. I think the probability of the animal wandering by is smallish but it adds up over time.

It used to be that trapping caused animals to spawn and you'd get like 10 pine marten spawning in your region just by having a small trap out, but it was pretty ridiculous and unbalanced, so now traps don't affect animal spawning. Instead, animals are spawned in habitats that suit them, all around you, whenever you're walking around or living your life, there are hundreds of animals (most of them birds) whose motions are being tracked. If you hit & to turn on debug logs then every map load there'll be so much data printed into a file in your urw directory about all the animals that are moving around.

So you don't need to see the animal on the world map, it's there even if you don't see it. But it can take time to start to work. I usually start out by making a trap fence. Everyday, I reset the traps, which grinds the skill a little, and then I go back to my homestead and build my house. I always wind up catching an elk before I starve to death -- even if I start with 0% skill because you can train it up pretty quickly, but also I do sometimes wind up doing a little fishing to tide me over, or getting food from quests.


I think another thing affecting your success is that Driik has a lot fewer animals than other regions, because it's so populated with humans.

[Matti-patti]

There seem to be two modes to trapping. The long distance mode that you are descibing (trap is fairly distant to PC) seems more RNG centric. You leave a trap and once you arrive back to it the game may or may not decide that something got trapped there. Having a known animal in the area that you build a suitable trap for does not seem to make the chances much higher. Whereas if you stay nearby and the game actively keeps track of the animals near you, then they are much more likely to enter the traps. It's also possible that the long distance mode benefits more from widely spaced trap sites in different biomes (due to reliance on random animal generation rolls) and that kind of hugely concentrated trap site isn't at all beneficial (since they don't actually spawn animals anymore). Whereas the near-distance mode is more likely to benefit from large concentration of traps, especially if the spirits in that region like you. Traps might not spawn animals but relations to spirits and maybe the bear teeth ritual seem to, and more traps will spawn more actual events of the animal entering the trap since it's all tracked.