Topic: Wild Animals in Villages  (Read 18197 times)


spamgoose

« on: September 06, 2017, 07:45:53 AM »
With a previous character (RIP), I had a really crazy experience with one village. It was a village I had lots of dealings with, and I had noticed wolves on the zoomed out map in their area before. One day, I went to the village and heard fighting sounds... a pack of wolves had jumped their fences and killed every one of their reindeer. When I showed up at the battle lines I managed to kill one wolf before the rest fled, leaving dead reindeer and villagers in their wake. I, ahem, helped clean up the carcasses. I went back a couple days later and found them in the midst of battle again... my arrival caused the wolves to flee but their shaman, and possibly many others, were missing.

I hired an NPC from the village (their only able-bodied man left), as well as another NPC from a nearby village, and started a kind of Iron-Age CSI episode ("who's afraid of the big bad wolf", taking off my sunglasses to a Who song). We set up traps, followed tracks, and generally hung out guarding the village. Almost every night the wolves would attack again, generally luring me one direction, then assaulting another. One night I sent one of my henchmen against a wolf, when two others attacked from the opposite side. The henchman disappeared.

Bit by bit we managed to kill the wolves off, though hilariously two children and a maiden had been horribly crippled in attacks and laid around the south side of the village for the rest of the game. They never got better, but I periodically brought them food ("How's it going?", "Mustn't Grumble. That's what the adults tell me", said the horribly brutalized orphan).

After it was over, I explored a little in the woods a few squares beyond the village, finding stacks of dead villager clothing (and presumably my henchman's), but no bodies.

Has anyone else had an experience like this? How do NPC's react to animals generally? I've chased reindeer into villages, but I don't think the villagers ever reacted. They definitely seemed to take on aggressive animals quite readily, though this is the only time I've seen it.

Edit: Another weird part of the story. Before the attacks I did a message quest for one of their villagers where I took a message to a vagabond village. Shortly after the attacks began. The guy who gave me the message wasn't around any more, so I assumed he had died. Later on, I found him living in the vagabond village... I highly suspect his involvement.
« Last Edit: September 06, 2017, 07:51:17 AM by spamgoose »

koteko

« Reply #1 on: September 06, 2017, 09:39:13 AM »
Quote
Bit by bit we managed to kill the wolves off, though hilariously two children and a maiden had been horribly crippled in attacks and laid around the south side of the village for the rest of the game. They never got better, but I periodically brought them food ("How's it going?", "Mustn't Grumble. That's what the adults tell me", said the horribly brutalized orphan).

That is so horribly hilarious :D

LoLotov

« Reply #2 on: September 06, 2017, 11:35:13 AM »
I want to be able to like this more times. Can't trust those vagabonds.
Iiiiii juuuuust want to set the woooooooorld onnnn fiiiiiiiiireeeeeee.... Iiiiiiii don't want to start a flame in your heeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrt.
And with your admissiiiiion you feeeeel the same, I'llllll have reached the goaaaal I'm dreamiiiing offfff, believe meeeeee

Kerlysis

« Reply #3 on: September 06, 2017, 09:49:43 PM »
i'm pretty sure there are werewolves lurking about. twice i've gone to intercept a vagabond on the morld map, and zoomed in to wolf tracks and no sign of humans... and a strange adventurer was hanging around when wolves attacked my homestead. it's the only explanation!

JEB Davis

« Reply #4 on: September 07, 2017, 02:12:12 AM »
Excellent wolf story. I'm hoping something similar will happen for me  :)

spamgoose

« Reply #5 on: September 07, 2017, 03:04:05 AM »
i'm pretty sure there are werewolves lurking about. twice i've gone to intercept a vagabond on the morld map, and zoomed in to wolf tracks and no sign of humans... and a strange adventurer was hanging around when wolves attacked my homestead. it's the only explanation!

Werewolves makes a lot of sense! That hadn't occurred to me. The message quests always feel very nefarious but I never know what, if any, outcome happens. It makes me wonder if you could strategically direct bears towards villages... maybe there's some arcane secret ritual I haven't discovered yet where you could summon one. That'd be pleasant.

codyo

« Reply #6 on: September 09, 2017, 11:15:14 PM »
Wolves are pretty tough. I'm surprised they managed to kill so many villagers though.
I've never seen animals go through a village, but there was a time a njerpez warrior did and he did not last very long.

« Reply #7 on: September 10, 2017, 04:14:35 PM »
I wintered in a fortified village, where a bear suddenly entered and managed to kill a poor maiden, before the rest of the folk killed the bear. I believe they will be hostile towards the animal, if it is an aggressive animal.

spamgoose

« Reply #8 on: September 11, 2017, 05:50:04 AM »
That's interesting, I would expect a bear to do more damage. My village was seal tribe and mostly women, old men, and children, so that made a big difference. Also, the wolves were just sneaky... I don't know if it was amazing AI or just circumstance of where the wolves wanted to go, but they were awesome at running away when outgunned, and then hitting from another side.

« Reply #9 on: September 11, 2017, 10:05:35 AM »
That's interesting, I would expect a bear to do more damage.

I managed to hurt it quite a bit before it ran away to the other side of the village and killed the maiden. However, a bear isn't that much of a challenge, if it gets surrounded by all sides of angry villagers :)

spamgoose

« Reply #10 on: September 13, 2017, 11:52:44 PM »
It's funny how things happen after you talk about it. I spotted a bear wandering around a village. In what I can only describe as *heroic fashion*, I threw a rock at it and ran into the village. It crippled an old man pretty good but the villagers beat it down. It's actually kind of a cursed village... after that 3 separate Njerpez have also wandered in and got wiped out. It's a strange two tile vagabond village/kota that was created by a quest (I think) so I wonder if that's effecting the pathfinding of mobs.

Edit: This village is nuts. A group of foreign traders moved in for a week, then today 2 more Njerpez entered the village simultaneous and managed to kill a couple people before being taken out.
« Last Edit: September 17, 2017, 06:37:27 AM by spamgoose »

Atwood

« Reply #11 on: September 20, 2017, 12:12:43 AM »
I've had a few encounters with wild animals in villages, including bears, wolves, elk and reindeer that were just chilling in town when I arrived, as well as a Njerp that came into town and was promptly beaten to death by the villagers. I've also seen a couple of times when a wolf pack has invaded a town, and it wasn't pretty.

My character had travelled down to visit the Reemi for trading, along with his pack of dogs, and I noticed as we entered one particular town to spend the night that there were wolves all around this village. The village had a large pen of pigs on one edge, and the wolves seemed very interested but kept running away whenever I got near. I spent a couple hours trying to hunt a few down at range, but they were very wary and moved out to the trees (the village was surrounded by fields on all sides). Finally I went to sleep, only to be awakened by the sounds of battle and squealing pigs - looking out of the cabin, I saw there were now wolves *everywhere*, all throughout the village. The pigs were mostly dead and the villagers were chasing wolves left and right through town. I of course jumped into the fray with my dogs and managed to save the last surviving pig, though a wolf tore out the throat of one of my dogs in the process, and then helped the villagers fight the rest of the pack. It was a total bloodbath - the ground was littered with dead wolves and torn villagers, and with a couple of villagers shooting randomly into the fight at the unconscious wolves in the midst of their kin, I moved to the edge of the village and picked off the last fleeing wolves there.

In the end, I don't know how many villagers were killed - I counted at least nine dead (several with arrows stuck in them) and eight dead wolves, plus six or seven dead pigs in the pen (and my poor dog). A good number of villagers were left, but only two children had survived the attack, both terribly wounded with one collapsed and unable to walk near the edge of the village and the other barely able to move. In the spirit of good neighbourliness, I skinned and butchered all the pigs and wolves and cooked up the meat for the villagers (the hides I kept for myself), and then went back to bed. In the morning, I went to work on my stack of hides that were tanning beside the village well and found the grisly sight of one of the wounded boys floating dead in the well. It seems he had fallen through the thin ice over it and drowned. The other boy was still lying alive but grievously wounded at the edge of the village, where he remains to this day, three years later in-world. I still bring him food and presents now and then. He tells me things are going pretty good.

Another wolf-in-village encounter I came upon shortly after the fact was when I was raiding Njerp villages - I'd seen wolves in the general area while I was scoping the village out the night before the raid but mostly ignored them. When I attacked the next day, there was a surprising number of pre-wounded Njerps and the fight was over pretty quickly. When I went into the emptied village to gather my spoils, I found a single dead Njerp maiden surrounded by a pile of five dead wolves. There was one seriously wounded wolf still alive, which I killed as well, and then I skinned and butchered the lot. Now that I think of it, most of my wolf pelts came from wolves attacking villages.

I've also had a couple of bear encounters in villages. The most notable was with a newer character - an escaped slave who had finally, after much hard work and deprivation, saved up enough to buy her first cow. I set out to the next village with my cow loaded up with what trade goods I had left, as well as with my faithful dog Kalerva, and on the way happened across a reindeer herd and killed one. Such good luck! We reached the village, noting some bear tracks in the area, and set to roasting reindeer meat, leaving the cow and dog tied up by the well with the tanning reindeer hide. Part way through, Kalerva started barking up a storm and on going outside I saw a bear charging at my newly purchased cow - I quickly intercepted, setting the dog loose, and the bear ran off with Kalerva hot in pursuit.

When Kalerva didn't come back, I tried to call for him and... had no option to call my dog. Following the bear tracks away from the village, I soon found the shredded partially eaten remains of Kalerva, with the bear sleeping peacefully a few metres away. Furious, I went back to the village, used my reindeer meat to hire a woodsman to hunt bear with me, and the two of us went out (leaving the cow tethered in the village, obviously) and slew that dog-eating bear. Skinned and butchered the carcass and returned to the village loaded up with bear meat. Went to roast the bear meat. Heard pained bellowing outside and came out to find *another* bear standing over my freshly torn apart cow. So, off we went again, this time to kill the cow-eating bear, which we did. Skinned and butchered the second bear, skinned and butchered the cow, and then used the masses of bear and cow meat (*cough*and a little dog meat*cough*) to buy a new dog and cow, which I have vowed will *never* be left tethered to a tree on her own!

Finally, in a more peaceful incident, recently my character walked into town and found an entire herd of reindeer hanging out there. I chased them for a little bit but then left them in peace in the village fields. The villagers didn't seem to mind them munching their way through the crops.

spamgoose

« Reply #12 on: September 20, 2017, 05:53:45 AM »
Awesome stories. I don't know if it was the dynamics with fields, but I found the villagers in my wolf village tended to get drawn quite far out of the village. As I had said, I found their clothing in piles quite a ways out of town. Though some died on the spot as in your adventure. The wolves' retreat and return tactics seemed particularly devastating.

Have you found that non-hostile animals are afraid of NPCs (that aren't your companions)?

I pushed some reindeer into a village once hoping that they'd react to the villagers and get cornered but they seemed to move through quite happily. Not much of a test case, and it seems you've had a lot more situations to see.

Atwood

« Reply #13 on: September 20, 2017, 09:03:57 AM »
From what I've seen, NPCs and non-hostile animals are completely disinterested in each other. In the first wolf village, the wolves had been wandering freely around and even into the village with the villagers completely oblivious to them, and the wolves didn't seem to be avoiding villagers at all. It wasn't until the wolves went aggressive and started attacking the pigs (or possibly even the villagers themselves) that some villagers got involved. Part way through the fight, there were a couple of wolves that had fled and then returned to the village while non-hostile, and the villagers ignored those wolves until they went hostile again.

Same with the first bear that charged my cow - when I first went to investigate the barking, the bear hadn't gone aggressive yet and there was a peasant and an old man just a few spaces away from the bear, completely ignoring it. I can't remember if they went aggressive when the bear did or if they kept ignoring it, but either way they weren't much help.

Njerps may be an exception, as in one village I encountered a Njerp wandering around in the middle of the night. I very heroically went inside and poked everyone awake so they would go outside and see him (hey, I was utterly exhausted and really needed my sleep!). I didn't see the crucial moment, but I know I suddenly heard a bunch of swearing and the sounds of fighting, and when I looked out the Njerp's head had been bashed in by one of the housewives with a stone. I don't know who attacked first but the Njerp had definitely seen me previously and not attacked, the chorus of swearing set off very shortly after the villagers would have come in eyesight of the Njerp and his corpse was right on the border of the village, so the villagers must have swarmed him down there, suggesting they went after him rather than the other way around. I've tried on several occasions to chase Njerps into villages just to see what would happen but never succeeded on getting them into a villager's sight. I also chased one into a group of foreign traders, who completely ignored him (he was non-hostile at that time). Also, in one particularly unlucky zoom-in, I ended up squarely between a Njerp and a group of bandits, about ten spaces away from each and right in the middle. The Njerp made a quick exit away from me and the bandits, so I don't know if he was running away from my arrival or if he was actually avoiding the bandits as well.

I don't know if it makes any difference, but this particular zoom-in was to a shelter I had built, and the bandits and Njerp were right by the shelter. After I killed the bandits, the Njerp came back to the shelter while I was picking over the bandits' gear. Do shelters attract wanderers or was it just coincidence? I've noticed a few times that there were humans in the immediate area of shelters, ranging from Njerps to bandits to woodsmen, but then it might just be that there are lots of humans around the map and some just happen to land near shelters. There was one kind of funny one where I had a shelter right by a bunch of wolf traps - when I went in to check the traps, there was a wolf in the trap closest to the shelter, but there also were very fresh Njerp tracks all around the shelter. The tracks then went right up to the trap the wolf was in, only to immediately turn around and go straight off into the next tile over. It seems even Njerps sometimes nope out at the thought of going one-on-one with a wolf.

spamgoose

« Reply #14 on: October 03, 2017, 05:47:40 AM »
To add to the insanity of this current cursed village. I was chasing a Njerpez around the island for a bit... not really attacking, just watching him run for kicks. He got a bunch of distance so I went somewhere else. I wandered back to the village, and when I zoomed in, low and behold! The njerpez was asleep in their main cabin. He woke up when I arrived and tried to run away... the villagers never cared. I unleashed my hounds and killed him in the village. No one lifted a hand to help me.

So, Atwood... I think you are right. Unless something is actively hostile, villagers just don't care. It makes me wonder what set off all the other Njerps who had wandered in... maybe they saw old men and thought it would be an easy kill or something.