Head's up! Just wanted to let y'all know about something new and exciting for the mod: lost bonedog and boneyard wolf pups! They're rare, but if you encounter an injured one you can tend it's wounds which will proc a dialogue option with the chance to adopt the critter! Let me know if you encounter anything wonky with the new feature so I can patch it up!

@[TLP] lucazz'tuoi Should be fixed now. Had to reduce the max size of behemoth elders a bit, but MA should work consistently now when fighting them.

@[TLP] lucazz'tuoi I'll keep investigating it. I'm not gonna leave this unfixed.

ok even after the change is impossible to attack it whit martial art

Ye i was unable to hit it,i was using and entyre squad of martial artist

@[TLP] lucazz'tuoi Behemoth hull size has been increased (vanilla values were too small turns out) so fighting with melee weapons should be possible again. Tested it out with a Flesh Cleaver (which has the shortest weapon reach) on an elder and it worked fine.

HOWEVER: Martial arts appears to be bugged when fighting, at least from the front. It's not the weapon reach as MA is longer than the shortest swords, but something causes MA to lock up when head to head with an elder Behemoth, and I'm thinking it may be related to the animal's animation jank.

Elder behemot Is to big to be hit in melee range "but him can hit you"

@The man they call Jayne. Thanks man

@Anrhaa I somehow managed to screw up the simplest sub mod imaginable and had to recreate it lol. Here's the new version. https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3534015046

Boss can I ask to revert the changes to death items to raptors? So they don't have regular raw meat. I saw them as pest with basically rotten skin and parasites, not a good food source.

Additional to remove the death items added to Pet Dog and Settler's Dog. They not having meat make them harder to kill and easier to take care, since starving bandits could not butcher them.

@汐羽 No problem at all! More can enjoy it this way!

I really love your mod and have translated it into Chinese! Thank you for creating such an amazing mod.
If you have any questions or concerns about the translation, please feel free to contact me.
https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3531285689

@Cozhmisus, I've been meaning to do that for a while, and I've just updated it accordingly. There are now a few extra subtle differences between the dog breeds in the game, not the biggest but they're there. Also each dog species has a new coat color that can randomly spawn: a Blue Heeler inspired one for regular Bonedogs, a Golden Retriever inspired for Horse Dogs, a lighter grey alternative for Mountain Dogs and an even redder coat option for Boneyard Wolves.

In the future I'd like to do a separate mod dedicated to adding several new breeds of domestic dogs to Kenshi. Kind of like More Dogs, but I'm talking more specialized working breeds for the different factions (guard dogs, war dogs, hunting dogs, herding dogs, etc.). Though that'll have to wait till I'm fully comfortable with GIMP and quite frankly I'm not there yet and won't be for a while. But it's something I want to do!

@Lasershadow
If you load the mod "Swish Mods : Bandara Standalone" before Symbiosis you should be able to buy the backpack for Cafe Beasts from Nomads.

Question: Is there a pack or saddle for the Cage Beasts? Or a mod to give them one?

Excellent mod that makes travelling across the land or hunting much more pleasing!

At the beginning of my playthrough, I bought a Horse Dog and, as I didn't read the details of the mod yet, I thought they were a race that was faster than average, only to discover later that no, all dogs were like that. So I thought that it would be cool to change their stats a bit to have each race have their specialty, like Mountain Dogs being tougher but slower, Horse Dogs being faster but a bit more fragile, and Bone Dogs being a middle ground. I don't know if that would make sense from a biological standpoint, but gameplay-wise, it would be cool to make specialized pack units, for example, and would give sense to searching the land for the dog we want!

Another detail I would suggest is reducing the amount of leather goats drop by one, as they're about the same size as Bone Dogs, and those drop one while being more dangerous.

Again, thank you for this wonderful mod! Cheers!

@lizardmang, I'm very pleased to hear others are enjoying it! The creature design in Kenshi reminds me heavily of reading 'The Wildlife of Star Wars' as a kid and me boggling my mind at an artbook about fictional alien animals yet feeling the same sort of wonder my dinosaur books would impart on me. They've got that exact same vibe, and trying to increase and explore the depths of Kenshi's ecosystems in this mod has become my new pet project. (Got similar mod exploring climate, weather and fertility in the works on the side too!)

Thanks for pointing out Howler's Maze balance for me (the one region I haven't gone to in my current play through spanning the entire east of the map LOL). I've implemented the suggested changes alongside a couple of other spawn tweaks.

Absolutely in love with this mod, it makes the world feel so much more alive and unpredictable. The herds of behemoths and garrus sleeping together in the desert is one of the coolest things I've ever seen in this game

The only thing that felt off to me so far is that Howler Maze seemed a bit crabless when I settled there. I patched it on my end by halving the garru and goat spawns and that's been good enough for me. Thought I'd mention it since you've been tweaking spawn rates. Anyway thanks for all the work you've put into this already!

@taitomagatsu Thanks, I really appreciate constructive criticism and feedback, as I'm one to constantly tinker with stuff out of perfectionism.

The Fog Island gorillos were born out of a pun admittedly, but I'm really happy with them. One of the things I really wanted to emulate was a population of animals otherwise identical to the rest of their species that specializes in a unique niche and food source, like the wolves in coastal Alaska and Canada that specialize in hunting salmon. It'll be tricky to keep balance in the area with future patches for fog fiends and fog spiders.

I noticed the relative rarity of BTs in Vain as well and have adjusted nest spawns accordingly. Details in the latest change note!

@Skolokiroptera After your great adjustments to Wend, I tested the spawns in a few other biomes.
Love the addition of gorillos to the Fog Islands. Sometimes it's utter mayhem with gorillos, fogmen, and outlaws all fighting each other.
Because of the new spawns of raptors, bonedogs, and garrus in Vain, there are very few beakthings compared to before. Vain is suddenly a much easier and more diverse biome. To preserve the difficulty of the biome, the spawn rate of beakthings could be increased. If the difficulty is of no concern, then Vain is a much more beginner-friendly biome as it is.
Just my two cents to help with making the mod even better.

@Borbo, not at this time. I'm learning Blender so I can implement it eventually. Until then a mod that does which I highly recommend is 'Swish Mods : Bandara Standalone' by Swishos, you can place it before Symbiosis in the load order and get the benefits of both it (backpacks, Nomads with them) and my own (faction, stat and behavior edits). I used it for a long while and it was one of the inspirations for me.

Is there backpacks for cage beasts?

@taitomagatsu, appreciated mate!

@Skolokiroptera Wow, that was quick. Thank you for your hard work and your dedication to your mod!

@taitomagatsu, I've gone back and forth on Wend's spawns for a while now, adding and removing both Mountain dogs and river raptors a couple times. I released a quick update that removes the dog nests and implements small single and paired dogs instead of packs at a much lower spawn rate, while increasing their water avoidance. I'll run through the area with a testing character to check out the vibes now, see if it's enough.

Awesome mod, it adds greatly to immersion.

I have found just one immersion-breaking change. In Wend, Bone Dogs spawn in the river and cross its full length in huge numbers. It would be better to have no bonedogs in Wend at all, rather than having them swim through the river as whole packs.

I will try to save you some time, and tell you what i did, or what i remember. I deleted the iridiscent Beakthings because some people were saying they were invinsible, completely idle and/or spawming too much. Then i changed the "oni gorilo loner" character that instead of spaming oni gorilos were spawming black gorilos. His Beakthings requires attention to see what is bugging them. These are the major problems of that mod before doing a patch.

I did my own changes too like reducing the spawn rates of tainted garrus, i still don't decide whether i want them in my game or not. And deleting spectral backpack, but those are my preferences.

@robertoa7667 Radiant animals is on the list! Either it or Animal Diversity by Mr. Shears will be the next big animal mod I plan to make a patch for next. I'm pretty far along on More Dogs right now, after that, I want to tackle something smaller like Waste Fiends because I'll simultaneously need to work on the 'Master Patch' which will be necessary to tie all the individual patches for different creature mods together.

That said I've gotten a lot of the planning parts already done for Radiant and several others (like how I'd like to expand animal ranges or unique relation statuses). For example, all the different spiders from vanilla and multiple mods I'm looking at have very different ranges per species but combined make one big continuous range, just like how geographic distribution displays speciation amongst unique kinds in our world!

So the new races he adds fits more with the modifications you made.

Consider doing a patch while you are active to Radiant animals. The guy is offline of kenshi modding since years now.

@Kraut Kontrol, The only change wild bulls have from vanilla that would boost their damage is a 10% bonus to armor. Other then that the only other stat changes are them being slightly tougher (from 20 to 25) and a custom stat card to give them a higher average speed without also boosting their combat stats. Now bulls do hit like a truck already in vanilla and that's a combination of their charge animation allowing them to hit multiple people and their strength rating of 70 (which I did not touch), the only the only noticeable difference in gameplay should be them lasting longer before going down, thereby dishing out more damage in the long run.

All I know is I've got a Wild Bull in my squad that does about 5x the damage of my strongest humanoid squad member and I suspect this mod might have something to do with that.

@Kraut Kontrol, stat buffs to them are species-wide, and were done because I found them too weak in vanilla, wild herds being pushovers once reaching a certain threshold with a competent squad. I wanted them to be threat later in the game and to not get wiped by packs of dogs and other predators so easily. So compared to that one could consider the purchasable bulls and goats overpowered, though personally I see them as just worth their cost now.

Do the stat buffs to bulls, goats etc. affect the ones you can buy from Nomads traders, too, making these likely overpowered party members?

Thanks for the fast answer, I was busy and missed it. It is wonderful to hear you are looking to create a patch for it. This is really gorgeous work and I appreciate your approach to posting the detail and credits as well. I will definitely follow up.

@Eyeless Deceiver, there are some conflicts with spawn rates and other aspects at the moment. A More Dogs patch is my first priority for expansion as I view it as a near essential creature mod. It's a lot more in depth than it appears on the surface, so it'll take some time to get it right to ensure the integrity of Hoser and Opal's work is respected in everything I do. I'm grateful for your continued enjoyment!

Hello Skolokiroptera. I take it it is best for me to disable More Dogs by Hoser & Opal, which I am running right now? (If I do so, taking care that I do not have animals from that mod currently loaded.) I imagine those dog variations and spawns will conflict with your animal rework?

The harsh world of wonderful mods! I love the other one, but I also really want to apply your rework!

More Dogs: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2377416273

@Yakubian Ape I added coexistence values so rebels and herbivorous critters are less likely to fight. Large herds will attempt to steal crops so that probably sent them spiraling into 'on sight' violence before.

That makes my day! I'm always trying to improve on my work and enrich my and others gameplay as much as I can! Thank you!

@Shidan You know I distinctly remember having a similar train of logic when I was creating the crop eating behavior for the herbis; I didn't want pets to cause trouble. Not sure how I missed that with carnivores and smell, but I've gone through and changed to apply to squads only. There's a couple of other random AI race changes that I'll probably need to go back and swap over too squad as well now that I think about it.

Really feel like the smell hunter AI should be removed from animal races. It is incredibly disruptive to gameplay with player owned animals that have it, constantly making them run off to find bodies nearby. It's fine behavior for wild animals, but it should be assigned to their squads imo, not the race.

You should virtually never add AI to a race, because you don't know if it will be fitting for every possible scenario that race might be present in. You can control where squads will be, so they are the best place for AI to be assigned

Are the rebel farmers/empire peasants supposed to attack the wildlife in Sinkuun? I know it's not super relevant to your mod, but since you added and changed some faction relations and added some factions I figured I'd ask. It makes sense lore wise, being starving rebels and peasants under the boot of the empire, but again I figured I'd ask since I did an empire villager start and the town guards (rebel farmers faction) are at war with the local goat population. Trying to figure out if this is intended or if its a mod interaction with this mod or something else entirely. Thanks for your time!

By the way, I love your mod, its become a new permanent staple of my load order. Kenshis wildlife is one of my favorite parts of the game and this just makes it better!

@The_Black_Toaster, oh you'll find certain beasts are well worth the reward especially the most dangerous of prey...
Once I get more comfortable using GIMP, I'd like to go back and make death items more unique per species, at least visually speaking with custom icons.

ooh this is great, i'm running a trophy hunter right now so hopefully this adds the spice

@Jango, I do want to add a more immersive form of taming to the mod. I've got some ideas I'm working on.

@Thunderous, no problem mate. It was a lot quicker to do than I thought it would be!

THANK YOU! I literally captured mist gorillo's and was like, huh I can't tame them! Thank you so much for a speedy patch and quick response!

Thanks for the answer!

I was referring to the new cat race of UWE.

Mogwai mods are really well done and is possible to create a separate patch for them.

If you haver thinked about to insert taming, this mechanics are really nice:

https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1593914893

@clayoverby96 I totally understand. I adore all the animal variety mods out there and it's one of them. It's the equivalent of doing Symbiosis 3 times over though, which isn't hard, it'll just take a long time for me to do so it's kind of a background project for now. I highly recommend getting into modding Kenshi, the FCS looks intimidating but is pretty easy to learn especially with the tutorials others have made and it's super satisfying to shape the game and interact with others in the playerbase. I've got several other big projects unrelated to Symbiosis I'm working on RN, including my own unique recruit mod and it's great fun!

@Skolokiroptera Thanks for the reply! Your mod seems great. I would love to use it in the future but ngl idk how to play Kenshi without GenMod anymore lol Trying to learn more about modding and stuff bc in the future I would like to assist with these kinds of issues.

The TameBeasties patch has been released y'all!

@Thunderous I'll try and get one whipped out soon. I know it's been requested for a while. IIRC I'll need to implement it for just Mist Gorillos and Horse Dogs as the others including Cage Beasts/Bandaras are already covered.

Patch for tamebeasties?