I am one of those who really like the new modes in 2024. One of these modes is world photographer. I really like the way it is implemented. (I’m not going to talk about mistakes right now.)
Everything was fine until I opened the animal album. It took me more than 20 hours to explore the animal world in this mode. At the moment, I haven’t found any cats. Not a single ostrich. 90% generation consists of wildebeest, buffalo, Zebras and giraffes. Of course, some animals are less common. But they are completely absent here. I said earlier that it took me 9 hours for the elephants to appear.
From all this, I concluded that the generation of animals is not calibrated. All this makes it extremely difficult and even impossible to fill in an album with animals.
I know that there are more serious problems in the game at the moment, but I hope that my proposal will still find support, since the photography mode is one of the very interesting and exciting game modes and also requires increased attention and study.
I also saw posts on the forum that many people play with children to show animals. But children are the future generation of users. Problems with animals also reduce their interest.
The pictures below show examples of animal generation. I tried different habitats, but most often I searched in the most popular region - the Serengeti. I have also tried so many ways to explore the world, but nothing has brought results.
You need to upvote your post. It doesn’t automatically do it even though you made the post.
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I have the same problem with the asian elephants. Found them once but it was in the free cam without the photo camera equipped. It would be nice to have some sort of clue if you fly at least near them, like a POI marker appearing or some smoke grenade at their location. I expected them to be in the indian national parks but these are all trees. So neither possibility to land nor to spot them there.
It likely is like this on purpose, that is, some animals like the big cats and hyenas are far more rare than others. It’s easy to find African buffalos and fairly easy to find zebra, giraffe, even mooses and bears in other regions.
But I agree that it should not be like this. Looking in the forums I can see lots of people complaining they aren’t getting their albums filled in what I would call a resonable time span. (And no, spending/wasting 100+ flight hours until, by chance, you see a single lion or hyena, is not adequate.)
Achievements like this should be something that requires skill and maybe a bit of luck too but it should not be a lottery where finding, lets say, a hyena with a baby is as rare as hitting the jackpot.
Currently these albums are off-putting if your goal ist to get all the stars.
BTW. This topic is essentially a duplicate of that one:
World Photographer > Fauna, extremely rare animals spawn, can’t be completed.
You might want to vote for the other one which has more votes.
Are you aware that you can enter photo mode in a Free Flight as well? You can get the stars too if you remember what the mission objectives for the animal are. No need to search for each animal species separately in the corresponding WP mission.
Voted. This IS really an issue. The spawning rate of rare animals have to be increased. Its really Impossible to find the animals to complete the animals album. For example in the area of the Addo Elephant Park south africa i have seen not one Elephant…in reality they are everywhere running around.
Lol. It would be great …after searching for the specific rare animal which is the Objektive..for maybe 25 hours (Realtime!!)! ..it should spawn automatically. Lol
Maybe I should give some information I have gathered from analyzing animal generation using the built-in Dev mode in vanilla FS2024. These information might give you a hint what kind of “fix” you can or cannot expect:
- As expected, the animal density option in the graphics influences the number of animals, more specifically the maximum number of animals which can be spawned at a given time. For example, “Ultra” means max. 250 animal positions are kept by the sim at any time.
- There can be less animals. If you start a flight, no animals are initially visible, they spawn over the next seconds to minutes if conditions are right. There can also be far less or even zero animals if the landscape only allows for few (rare) animal species, e.g. only for polar bears, or for no animals at all. Yes, on big areas of the planet no animals do show up.
- Animal generation is indeed random and certain species like buffalo have a far higher probability of spawning than others (i.e. big cats) with some others in between.
- I have currently no proof or indication that certain species have additional requirements (apart from their range map). There might be some rules concerning the animal range or probability shifting over the time of year, but I have not seen any influence of time of day, the length of your flight or how many hours you have played the game.
- Even the rarest species like hyena or cheetahs do spawn often enough to find some within like 5-10 minutes if you knew where they are. Therefore the above mentioned wish “[…] after searching for the specific rare animal […] for maybe 25 hours […] it should spawn automatically.” won’t help imho.
- What I am saying is that if you don’t find the animal in an area where it does spawn, the reason is not that it didn’t spawn.
- One reason it’s so hard to find animals is that they can be hidden by tall grass. (Specifically turning off grass increases the chance to see them.) Or it’s hidden by trees, see below.
- All animals I know in FS2024 go to sleep at 6:00 to 6:05 pm in the evening, no matter what. When they lie down they are even harder to spot but easier to photograph since they don’t run away any more. (I tested it, a hyena pack lying in savanna grass is basically invisible if you don’t look at them from top down, which is unrealistic.)
- Another reason is that the animal did spawn but simply isn’t visible because you are not close enough. As I have proven in another forum thread, specifically the cheetah only becomes visible if you are closer than ~300m from it, otherwise you won’t see it, not even with the camera zoom. Hitting a cheetah with such a narrow flight path takes a lot of luck. The specific distance seems to vary greatly between species, even within different giraffe species and it imho needs corrections!
- Animals also spawn in forests, even in dense forests, but the chance to see them is zero, unless you walk, which - given the distance between spawn points of rare animals - is not an option either. That’s why it appears as if animals only show up on bare areas or clearings … you hardly see the ones below the forest canopy.
Long story short: The animal spawning isn’t the problem, chances are the rare animals were there and you just didn’t see them either because they are hidden by vegetation or because they didn’t render on screen. Increasing their relative spawn probability could likely reduce the difficulty finding them, a fixed rate alone (instead of a random spawning) will likely not solve the issue.
To me the root issue seems to be that searching for certain animal species like tigers, monkeys and cheetahs from a plane just doesn’t make any sense in real life¹ for the very same reasons that you won’t see them from a plane. Trying to make it work in a sim implies deliberately mis-tweaking some settings (higher-than-life wildlife density, lower vegetation settings etc.) to make it work at all. Maybe these missions shouldn’t be there in the first place.
¹ I know of some African wildlife projects which do regular flights to check for big cats from the air, but to my knowledge they only try to find specimen with radio collars which they can roughly locate by the collar. Then they know what area/direction they need to peer at to hopefully see them from up there.
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In the latest Developer Stream they mentioned that they have to “tweak” the spawn system and we should keep an eye on seasons… so what IS the best season for a specific animal in africa? Google gives you so many answers …lol …best answer… “…animal X can be spotted all around the year”
Thanks for that summary..so basically they should increase the spawn rate of rare animals..
