Smelling - Tracking \ From January 2021 Development Update

[AdrianWR]

Smelling - Tracking \ From January 2021 Development Update

When I first read this it was interesting, however, upon closer inspection… I realized that this opens the possibility for many new survival mechanics against the environment. ( Zombies - Wild Animals - Bandits )

Nelson said that you will leave a trail that will not be visible to the viewer, but can be followed by other entities such as bandits, wild animals or zombies. In turn, this trail could also be activated or deactivated under different conditions or with different objects.
Here some examples of what can be posible now.

Different scenarios or possibilities

• The player could activate his scent by carrying meat in his inventory, this could cause him to leave this scent wherever he goes in a small or wide radius depending on the object. This would make it possible to lure zombies to your direction slowly because of this scent. In turn, when passing through a forest, an animal could intercept this scent and follow it to its source, which would be you. Unless you leave the meat in a suitable container.

• The player’s own scent could attract hungry animals. This would make walking through a forest not so easy, since you would have to be alert in case you are not being followed by a bear, wolf or various wild animals that could be implemented. To deactivate this scent, you could get muddy. However this mechanic would be more of a suggestion as I believe it has not been planned.

• When passing through environments with grass, mud, snow or sand, you may leave footprints on the ground. This could be detected by players, but also by Bandits.
  They will follow the trail until they locate the player, however if you have the right shoes, you can avoid leaving footprints, or even avoid the sound of footsteps.
  However I am not sure if this would fall under “scent”.

Additions

• Different animations could be added to the entities to indicate that they are detecting a trace. When an animal intercepts a player’s trail (or scent), it would perform an animation in which it sniffs the ground, observes its surroundings and then follows the trail stealthily. Wolves would do it in packs while bears would be solitary (unless you are unlucky and you are followed by 4 bears).

• When a bandit follows your footsteps, he could also make an animation in which he crouches down, touches the ground a little as if inspecting it and after getting up he looks around and follows the trail, if this bandit is in a group, he could also turn around and make a gesture of following his allies.

---

Let me know what other scenarios you imagine with this new mechanics, or what other possibilities you think could happen!

[THEMAX94120]

Bandits alone shouldn’t be able to track the player (except some rare case of bandits), but now perhaps it would be interesting to have some bandits / players with dogs that are able to smell a target ? It would also be a nice additions for player that prefer to rely on hunting, making it easier for a player to find food.

[TigerSurvivor]

Just like the previous comment, I believe that this function makes domesticated dogs, as long as they are in the game, of course, much more useful, because they can smell a track of an animal or entity, and then it will alert its owner.
With this I believe that gestures could be more useful, in addition, of course, to Player-to–Player communication.
An example, supposing that Unturned II has the same gestures as unturned 3.0.
A dog found an entity’s trail, and it alerts the player, whether with a bark or a howl, something like that. Then, the player has two command options for the dog, the first is to follow the trail of that entity, which can be triggered by the pointing gesture; or else, he can use the second option, ignore that track, triggered by the wave gesture.