I just noticed something while exploring a dessert planet. I was merrily on my way to a deposit on which the visor glitched out and wouldn’t tell me what it is, so I thought I’d check it out in case it’s a feature, not a bug. It wasn’t, but something else I think definitely was, and if I’m right, I’m loving it.
Basically, the planet had peaceful creatures, many of which I scanned already. But then I… kind of entered a new area? It had more dense vegetation, so I guess you could call it a forrest (in as far as that’s possible on a dessert planet). There’s similarly dense patches around which didn’t have this feature, but they might be smaller… I didn’t get to the bottom of the mystery yet, because… all of a sudden, I was getting swarmed by predators. They came out of all the corners.
Since I don’t have a shield upgrade yet, and there was a really annoying sentinel looking at me funnily, I took my legs and ran… into the wrong direction. Deeper into what I can currently only assume are their hunting grounds. They started to come at me from all sides, when I decided it was time to strategically head for the ship.
So I ran, and jetted, and on leaving that particular area of denser vegetation, realised they didn’t pursue anymore. I stopped and turned around, and saw a couple of them lingering around between the outer cacti, looking in my direction, but not following me. I could even finally scan them safely now.
This is the first time I ever encountered any behaviour like this in NMS. I’ll head back out there tomorrow to see if I can come to some more definite conclusions about the territory of these scary beasties.
Yes. I have encountered two planets where a very similar thing happened. In my case, it was crabs. I was surprised because I had just been wandering around scanning when I suddenly began to see 1, 2, 3 ,4 ,5 6, and maybe even more. All scurrying towards me and not happy at all.
I believe there may have been a cave nearby in one case. In the other case, I too found a very dense area of foliage.
Because I was so busy looking for something else, I failed to investigate it further.
I’ve been swarmed by a pack of nasties before but I never considered the idea of territorial…
I just thought they were ganging up on me for an easy snack.
…and in other news, an abandoned explorer craft was found on Gongflibidy 3 today, believed to belong to Jedidia Spacesmurf of the Etarcian CSD. It was reported he had returned to a specific area for scientific studies but then failed to report in. Local critters declined to comment but sentinels were seen scanning their full bellies…
Ok, I went out with my trusty Nomad to do some science! Well, some visual observation, at least…
Some things I noticed:
The areas that were crawling with the predators were also crawling with other creatures. So it would seem like it’s not so much “there be dragons here”, and more “there be a lot of critters here”.
I have observed this on other planets as well, on this one it’s just very pronounced and was therefore more noteicable.
The desert planet I was on at the time basically has completely barren areas with lots of craters. There are no critters there. Then there’s stretches of sand, where there are some creatures, but not a lot of them and mostly certain kinds. I encountered individual members of one of the two predator species that were giving me trouble in these areas.
And then there’s patches of denser vegetation that are crawling with critters, both in sheer numbers and diversity. Two of the species on the planet are predators with impulsive behavior, so they are very prone to attack the player. They both occur in these patches, and while not nowhere as numerous as some of the other species, the fact that they tend to gang up on you lets you quickly forget anything else around.
They did in fact not pursue too far beyond a certain point, so they seem to have at least a primitive kind of awareness of locality in their behaviour, not just in their spawn points.
Based on these observations, it seems unlikely that the game has some awareness of “predator territory” or somesuch, though it’s not impossible.
What I observed seemed to be more like better attuned and smarter spawn point generation for creatures in general, which just made itself a lot more noticeable due to the fact that there were two predator species with a penchant for attacking players.
And like teeth, too. Yeah, some of what I observed definitely seemed to look a lot like teeth.
In any case, this is an interesting improvement that can have some unpredictable consequences (and NMS totally needs more unpredictability), and also helps to add some meaning to the different sub-biomes of a planet. I like it.
I remember pre-next you used to get a lot of creatures spawning around bodies of water, like it was their local watering hole and they’d respawn as fast as you could kill them (good for culling missions. Bad for the soul) Anyone remember that?
Since reading folks observations I can say I’ve noticed the same thing in my own playthroughs.
There are definitely new and different behaviours and spawning methods. I’ve also noticed different behaviours during storms, particularly with large birds. (I noticed this while on a quest to find the small birds landing during storms like sheralmyst mentioned)
They loooove to swoop during rain storms on my planet and actually fly off into the distance after it ends.
If I happen upon them when there’s no storm they tend to just circle about with the odd swoop down. If a storm starts they swoop like crazy then, again, fly off into the distance after it ends <3
captured a lot of it in stream. I’ve every intention to edit those things down to highlights but editing means not playing and I don’t know how to stop. How do I stop??
