ISSUE DESCRIPTION
Disclaimer: Please forgive me that this ticket includes several bear-related issues but they are interwoven, so I think it’s better to sort things out in one go.
Description of the issue: There are several bugs/issues most of which seem to result from a severe mixup of bear species.
Missions
There are two WP missions in the “Animals of the world” collection related to bears other than polar bears (whose issues are not part of this report):
Issue #1: The objective for the Black Bear states to photograph a grizzly bear. This one is likely just a typo, no more, but it can be very irritating because if you choose, for example, the marked regions in the Appalachean mountains in the world map, you will not find any grizzly bears there, only Black bears (screenshot below). And no, these are distinct species, even in the game (see below).
P.S. Please also fix this in the translations (e.g. German is equally wrong)
Animal species in game and their ranges
Using the Dev Tools I found that FS2024 contains models for at least 4 different bear species besides the polar bear:
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Grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis) - found in the Northern Rocky Mountains, e.g. Yellowstone. The grizzly is the largest subspecies of brown bears.
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Black bear (Ursus americanus) - found in US mountain areas
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Sun bear (Helarctos malayanus) - This SE asian species is found in FS2024 in Europe mountain areas as well as in Russia. It is the smallest bear species accing to Wikipedia and can be identified by their cream-coloured chest patch, the “inward-turned front feet” and the characteristic snout, all of which is different from brown and black bears.
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Ussuri brown bear ( Ursus arctos lasiotus). A subspecies of brown bear found in NE Asia (Sibiria, N. Korea and Hokkaidō in reality. In FS2024 can be found in Thailand.
(Female, males are far darker in FS2024)
Now to the facts and the issues:
Issue #2a: Sun bears only live in SE Asia (Myanmar, Thailand, Kambodscha). They don’t occur anywhere in Europe or northern Asia. So either their distribution is wrong or the wrong model is used for the brown bears, which indeed occur in Europe, Russia and northern Asia in general.
Issue #2b: The population world map in FS2024 for the “Brown bear” consists of (a) the grizzly subspecies in N. America (which is fine) and the locations in Europe which (see above) only contain the much smaller sun bear. If there were indeed brown bears in Europe (in FS2024) it would be OK to mix them together, but sun bears are not a sub-species of brown bears. (Meaning: If the model is replaced by a real brown bear (#2a) this will solve this issue #2b too.)
Issue #2c: Ussuri brown bears cannot be found in Thailand (or SE asia in general), that’s the territory of the sun bear, which in turn is missing there (see above). As stated above they prefer colder habitats.
I would suggest that you just exchange the spawn regions of the sun bear and the Ussuri brown bears in FS2024. Afterwards it will not be 100% scientifically accurate either but definitly much closer to reality with the SE asian species being found in SE Asia and the N. Asian species found in N. Asia and Europe. (And only experts can tell apart European brown bears from the Ussuri subspecies anyway.)
Issue #3: The Ussuri brown bears count as “black bears” for the WP animal missions. This is wrong because there is a separate “brown bear” mission and they are a subspecies of brown bears, so this is where they must count.
Animal models
The adult models of both the black bear and the sun bear (filling in as brown bear, see above) are bugged:
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Issue #4a: They are consistently half-buried in the ground and thus hardly findable (with the exception of black bears on snow where the black moving hump is sufficient to spot them).
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Issue #4b: They only play one ~2s walking animation in endless loop, switching back to original position after the animation.
The juvenile black bears are not affected, they only have one eating animation and thus don’t move forward and backward, and they stand on the ground, not in the ground.
FREQUENCY OF ISSUE
How often does this occur for you? Always.
REPRODUCTION STEPS
Please list clear steps you took in order to help our test team reproduce the same issue:
- From main menu, select World Photographer → Animals of the world → Black bear, on world map see wrong objective.
- From main menu, select World Photographer → Animals of the world → Brown bear. Select the Alps (or Pyrenees) as starting point
- Find a bear. Notice that (#2) it’s not a brown bear but a sun bear and (#3) that the model is sunken and only moves forward, only to be reset every 2 seconds
YOUR SETTINGS
What peripherals are you using, if relevant: Not relevant
[PC Only] Did you remove all your community mods/add-ons? None isntalled
[PC Only] Are you using Developer Mode or have you made any changes to it? Used Dev Mode to identify the different bear species in-game, but issues are independent of Dev Mode.
[PC Only] What GPU (Graphics Card) do you use? NVIDIA 3070 mobile
[PC Only] What other relevant PC specs can you share? Has Wikipedia installed. 
MEDIA
For issue #1: There are only Black bears (U. americanus) in the Appalachian mountains, no grizzlys. So the “grizzly” in the objective is most likely a typo.
For issue #3: Ursus arctos lasiotus is a brown bear subsp., not a black bear.
For issue #4: Model in earth and endless loop animation, very same for sun bear (probably even the identical animation).
For anyone who wants to contribute on this issue, Click on the button below to use this template:
Do you have the same issue if you follow the OP’s steps to reproduce it?
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SimUpdate 2 Beta (1.4.7.0) fixed issue 
