Animal Senses, Animal Alertness and Hunting Pressure
Since I ramble a good bit, here is a link on a lot of this topic from Bumblewoot.
There seems to be at least two systems that influence animal behavior. This topic is a bit debated, so this is how I see it in the game, it tracks with some people’s opinions and not with others. I agree with the take that Alertness and Hunting Pressure are related but different. All the animals seem to share the alertness and hunting pressure with all of the other animals in the herd, so that one closer in the bushes that you don’t see is the one that always seems to ruin a stalk.
Alertness level is visible on animal info with hunter sense. There are three states: calm, alerted, and spooked. When calm, animals do what is expected for the zone that they are in. When alerted, they mostly look around and in your general direction and may call out but does not seem to be a guaranteed response. I believe that I have seen alert animals either come to calls, or quickly calm down and respond to calls. When spooked, they run. Alertness level fills relatively fast but also dissipates relatively fast. Even spooked animals will run a bit, then calm down, and eventually go about their business, returning to the zone area (not likely the same spot) or may travel to the next one in their life cycle. When in the alert state, animals seem more sensitive, and are much easier to get spooked.
Animal alertness is mostly driven by sight and sounds of the hunter. The hunter’s stance (standing, crouched and prone) and perks impact how detectable you are. Think of alertness like a bucket with holes. When you move, you start filling the bucket. When you stop it drains. If it gets to a certain full level, the animal and its herd go alert. You fill it more, they spook. Alertness fills and empties pretty fast. Sight seems to be relatively low and impacts this at like 50 meters or so. It may vary by animals and difficulty setting some, but is it so short it is hard to tell. Sound while crouched seems to be detectable at around 180 to 200 meters. It seems like lower difficulty settings make sound detectable at shorter ranges, like 20 meters per lower level, but who knows what it actually is, but several others think this is how it works as well, but nothing official has been put out. The closer to the animal that you are seems to increase how much each sound made raises the alertness level. The terrain does impact your movement sound generation. Grassland is probably one of the lowest impacts but it’s hard to tell. The forests on Transylvania is one of the loudest making sneaking around quite a bit more challenging.
This amounts to, if you want to sneak up on an animal, you can pause a bit as you move in to manage how alert they are. You can watch how they behave as well as be aware of sounds they make. Lower your stance as you move in and take longer pauses as you get closer. If you can call the animal, you can often call them in without moving, and they will come in close enough to walk on you depending on how visible you are.
Hunting pressure seems to be a slightly different mechanic to some. There is no way to directly measure it or see it. If you think of it like a different bucket, it fills much slower and drains much slower. Impacts of hunting pressure seems to include animals moving away from where they should be. They often seem to not actually spook and run or call out. I am thinking that calls start not working as well as normal. They just move away and often sort of mill about looking like they are confused. This can last a long time like 20 or 30 real life min, so a couple of in game hours. There seems to be different levels where they do not wander for as long or as far. Hunting pressure at high levels, can also make that need zone flip, an often drinking zone becoming a rarely drinking zone.
Hunting pressure seems to be a slightly different mechanic to some. There is no way to directly measure it or see it. If you think of it like a different bucket, it fills much slower and drains much slower. Impacts of hunting pressure seems to include animals moving away from where they should be. They often seem to not actually spook and run or call out. I am thinking that calls start not working as well as normal. They just move away and often sort of mill about looking like they are confused. This can last a long time like 20 or 30 real life min, so a couple of in game hours. There seems to be different levels where they do not wander for as long or as far. Hunting pressure at high levels, can also make that need zone flip, an often drinking zone becoming a rarely drinking zone.
It seems like alertness does fill the hunting pressure bucket. Your scent crossing the animals seems to fill it to a level to the low level pretty quickly, causing them to move away. I do not think that animals catching your scent will be locked in wander mode for a half hour, but they will move away and re-path but often without making a single call like when they trip the ‘alert’ alertness level.
To me, shooting an animal seems to fill alertness to spook and but I do not think it hits any of the hunting pressure’s immediate effects. They seem to calm down rather quickly. However, since hunting pressure empties slowly, frequently hunting the same animals in the zones will cause it to build up vice dissipating. This can then impact animal behavior, coming into calls, not feeding, etc and at some point change that zone’s use frequency.
Since Tikamoon Plains, there seems to be some adjustments to animal senses. A mechanic seems to have been added that seems to use sight and sound for a third animal senses meter that causes animals to investigate and can lead to a charge for many species. I call this defensive/charging, but we have not seen anything official on this from NRG. It seems to me that animal sight has been buffed from previous but I hope to see something more conclusive on it in further work on it. Bumblewoot did a great piece that shows off many of these features in game as well as the old ones, including the differences from animals being alerted/spooked and pressure/moving away.
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