User:Yoshida Keiji/User guides/Predator attacks
How to protect yourself against predator attacks[edit]
Lost tribe early days[edit]
At the very beginning, your primary concern will be to keep safe your smaller pets like cats, Yorkshire terriers and dogs which usually die very fast with just a few hits after getting stunned.
- Make use of "zones" like Home and "Animal zone 1", don't leave them with "Unrestricted". Once you build a room, make sure to assign them inside for complete safety. You will need to place them some food or if you let them go outside in Home zone, keep the food closeby.
- Predators usually hunt smaller than them creatures, so its unlikely that they will go for your pets at first. Rats, squirrels, hares and turtles are the weakest, so you should be able to hear their death cry when a predator is around. Sometimes, predators don't entirely consume their courpses, so seeing some around are also a signal of their presence.
- Once you find some lurking around, keep track of their "Food bar". Their hunger need will trigger somewhere between 30% ~ 35%.
- Craft Recurve bows if conditions allow for better hunting/defense.
City walls[edit]
You should always build an outer wall that completely surrounds your base. Once you get this done, you can "free" your pets from being only inside a room, to the outside but still within the Home Zone. Now, the only danger will be against your colonists.
- Anybody who goes outside your walls should be combat capable, which means you should exclude outdoor tasks to those who cannot fight (Incapable of violence) and those with slow moving speed, be it Bad Back, Frail and/or leg injured pawns. This is because if you already get the "alert" due to not paying attention, anyone who can fight back at least a couple of sword swings, can survive longer while you send others to the rescue.
- Play by sectors. Instead of assigning tasks scattered all around and across the map, whatever job you choose, make them all be somehow "together" by mining the same area as your foraging pawns, wood cutters, hunters and haulers.
Settlement[edit]
Once you have already established your colony and have free time to spare on secondary duties, you can:
- Tame low handling skill requirement animals such as birds, wild boars, muffalos to guard your characters after training them with Obedience so that they follow their masters wherever they go. Just make sure to select which animals follows who. But do NOT do this with "Bonded" animals as you may lose mood buffs if any of those die.
Playing it smart[edit]
While predators are fearsome animals, they can also help you a lot too. Instead of killing them all, you can also choose to keep them close in case of raids. If you happen to have a predator in the same direction from where raiders approach your colony, you can use them as guardians by just triggering their manhunter revenge with one hit and then running back to safety. They will eventually switch target and attack your enemies. Most likely those animals will die after inflicting some minimal damage against the hostiles, but better your enemies doing the deed than risking yourself. Free meat.
Don't get scared of predators. Eventually as you venture into extreme biomes like ice sheet maps, scanning your map will on the contrary, become a basic survival need. This practice of watching your entire map will come very handy and improve your gameplay a lot if you get used to look around at night while animals sleep and their "ZZZ" animations float all over the map, giving you an idea of their population count and proximity.