On The Idea of Joining a Server as an Animal

In dev log 4, I found this quote that sparked a few ideas in my head:

“One pretty crazy idea I’ve been tossing around in my head lately and would love for your feedback on (note we’re nowhere near implementing this yet) is: What if you could choose to play as an animal when joining a server? My thought process here is that while 4.x’s animal AI will be a lot better than 3.x’s, nothing beats fighting against real, smart, opponents, and not only would it be fun to play as an animal but a lot more challenging to hunt. Assuming they’d have similar health/life stats this would also encourage more in-depth natural survival features since animals can’t eat canned beans.”

I have a few thoughts as to how this could work, and I would like some opinions on them:

  1. It could be a certain type of game-mode, where people can either choose to be a certain animal or a Player.

  2. It could be a server setting, where normally you’re either allowed or not allowed to join as an animal and can be changed by the owner.

  3. It could be deemed as a ridiculous idea and never be implemented.

I’m more or less in favor of #2, but that’s just me.

I feel like on the system of being an animal, it should be somewhere along these lines:

You can choose your animal category (Passive/Predator) and then type (Pig,Deer,Moose,Wolf,Bear…). Depending on what you picked, you have a few options. As an animal of the Passive category, you could go around finding player-planted crops, berry bushes, etc, and perhaps there’s an added bonus for surviving for a time. As one of the Predator category, you would hunt Players, primarily. If you kill them, they drop raw meat which you can eat. However, I’m not sure if the Predatory animals should be able to kill the Passive animals, since that would be easy prey for them. The animals should have basic stats like food, health, and sprint. Immunity can be lost, and I feel like water can either be removed or you can create certain areas with clean water. That way players can strategically hunt in the spots where the animals have to go to drink in order to stay alive.

If anyone has thoughts, feel free!

Thoughts & Revisions from the Comments

  1. On a side note, Harvest brought up that playing passive is basically pointless. I think the idea could be either scrapped or something could be done to make it more worthwhile.

There’s a good point there. As a predator I guess the only satisfaction would be sneaking up on a geared player and making them lose everything… Odds are the passive category might be a bad idea, looking back. If anyone has feedback on this that would be appreciated.

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I was thinking along the lines of a far more sensible option imo - allowing the community to help this gamemode to emerge on it’s own.

Much like roleplay, milsim, and more creative things like Tales of Terror, this could literally be left without any official intervention and our imagination would push us to turn this idea into reality. Despite Unturned not being designed for such a thing, I’m sure it will take off on it’s own with enough brainpower.

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All the animals you mentioned are just ones from 3.X.

I don’t see any point in playing as a grazer.

I didn’t really either, I was just putting it as a suggestion. I only put ones from 3.X because they’re the ones I’m familiar with, and I know that there may very well be more in 4.X… I was possibly hoping that I could find a purpose aside from sabotaging people’s carelessly planted crops. Any suggestions would be awesome, since this is just an idea.

I don’t really see a purpose of being these animals besides eating (as both passive and aggressive animals) and killing (aggressive)
It feels dull because all you can really do is depend on other people to keep you alive. Other than that, there’s really nothing else you can do. So i don’t think this would work out unless you add a completely ground-breaking addition

The point would be to have more in-depth and natural survival game-play, like the game Shelter 2.

I think that we already have animals on the servers. (Yes , joke about toxic people)

I want to be a fish :'c

Unless you like being hooked, put on a fire, then eaten… be my guest

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