Improve Wildlife AI#23671

Right now, finding animals is kind of stupid, especially since they’re a near-necessity for getting your first furnace and feeding yourself (before you have ten boxes of granola bars, beans, and corn). They spawn alone randomly and start wandering east. Sometimes, you’ll just end up never finding any animals and end up starving to death while scratching your head. With the soon™ graphical update to animals, I think they need some AI polish too.
I think wildlife should be reworked to do three things:

1. Travel in small groups. Bears are understandably solitary, and for balance purposes I don’t think I’d ever want to see an entire pack of wolves. Boars could be solo sometimes, but could also travel in groups of 2-3. Deer, to account for how little resources they give, could travel in much larger groups.
2. Tend to go to certain areas. An obvious place for animals to show up is near freshwater sources such as rivers or lakes, although this would be a bit redundant given the sheer amount of plant food that already spawns at rivers. Another place for animals to show up is heavily forested areas. Lastly, they would avoid irradiated monuments, since that stuff isn’t good when you’re naked.
3. Leave tracks up to a grid-square away. Not sure how much servers would like rendering and remembering all that, but it’d make hunting much more of an engaging activity than wandering aimlessly.

I agree with better AI, but I think having packs of anything would not be good for various reasons.

One reason is, Trausi, Posty, CoconutB and the best of the best die to these animals fairly often as it is, how much worse for the rest of us.

Also, if you had packs of animals running everywhere, itd be harder to sneak up on someone as youd cause a whole flock of deer to dart away in different directions, advertising your location.

But I will still upvote because Id like to see animals stop going East. That makes no sense. I hate seeing dozens of animals all bugging out on cliffsides on the east.

Id also like to see slightly better (not too much) intelligence on their part. They get kited too easily, and get caught up on cliffs and stuff and give up too easily.

Ive even seen a Camomo_10 video recently where he (as admin) spawned a bear in multiple times directly in front of a cheater and the bear kept wigging out and not attacking him despite being inside a tiny compound with nowhere to go.

currently being worked on

I been banned for using hack, but i didnt use it at all. I been playing rust for almost 7k hours and no reason for using cheating tools to ban my account. There must a misunderstanding for banning me, please unban me or check my situation in serious matter, and please help me for unbanning me due to unfair banning me for no reason, this is outrage. Please help me solve my current situation

I wouldn’t call animals who have no idea where you are when you shoot them running directly away from you improving AI. It just makes it a pain in the ass to snipe animals. They should go a random direction when they do not spot you instead. And not even necessarily run in a straight line either.