Chris Johnson wrote:N-Aldwitch wrote:As in it doesn't exist.
Oh, the reason why this hasn't been implemented, by the way, is because animals haven't been deindividualised apparently.
I'm unsure where you heard that - There are no plans to deindividualise animals - animals have already been individualised and will stay that way.
There are other good reasons why this is has not been implemented , nothing to do with how the program handles animals.
Here I was referring to why animals which die of natural causes don't drop resources .
The main reason is system resources - There are about 4000 to 6000 animals deaths due to old age every day . The overhead in identifying what resources they drop, and how much, then seeing if there is a pile of that resource to add to or whether we make a new pile is collosal, relative to the simple command to kill the animal (i.e. remove it from the d/b) .
The second reason is that , whilst animal sourced resources eventually rot away outside we'd soon face cases of massive piles of animal resources in most locations , most of which (c.95%) have no character in them to clear up/use the mess . This would also require more system resources to display them everytime someone looked at the ground , not as bigger load as the main reason but significant.
Spillages, Your own idea about trapping animals is (IMHO) a good one, but not totally original , something akin to trapping would probably be the first step in domestication and has been discussed before (though those discussions may have been in the RD/ProgD private threads)