With runtime spawning it'll check every so often if the criteria is met and if the climate criteria is met and there are fewer members of the group than the group limit, more will spawn. All Panthera cats and their caracass count towards the limit of 1, so if any of them are within render distance/500m if you're render distance is higher than that, no more will spawn. Neofelis cats and their carcass has a separate group. A spawning can exceed the group limit, ie if there are 0 panthera members, a pride of lions can spawn, but all must be killed or beyond the range for more to spawn.

I've fine tuned the frequency they can spawn, technically it could happen the first frame you boot up the game but with the current settings I usually see a big cat after 45-90 minutes in an area, 120-240 minutes in areas where only one or two cat species spawn 

How does the runtime spawning works? if there are already other animals nearby does it block the spawn, or can the cats spawn on top of existing spawns?

Also how long does it take to start seeing spawns? I did a bit of exploring using creative mode to test other mods and didn't see any cats (I am aware they won't generate on worldgen, but I have been going back and forth in the same region for a few minutes)

Yep, all the FotSA mods are safe to intall or remove on existing worlds

Would this work with installing into existing worlrds? Just wanted to check, thanks! 

Your mods look amazing! 

Just got jumpscared by a Tiger while I was watering my crops. Great mod!

Hello,
Translation already sent to you on Discord, but I'll post it here in the meantime for impatient users.

Voici la traduction Fr du mod (v1.1.10) pour celles et ceux qui ne peuvent pas attendre la prochaine maj ;)
fr.json

And slowly getting back to old mod messages.

CatJoke-Thank you so much for saying so! It's always nice to hear!

Starsis-It should be possible on your end, removing the player from the big cats seek entity list would make them only defensive for example. 

BrownishStorm-It should be perfect safe to do so, MoonlitShade is mostly correct, only the big cats don't have world gen spawning turned on so they'll appear just as fast in old chunks as in new ones. This mod should be safe to add to old saves but the more mods you remove from a save the more bugs will accumulate even without outright save breaking ones.

BrownishStorm Entities are spawned in 2 different ways: during world generation and passively. In new chunks youll see them faster because they're spawned during world generation. In old chunks, it might take a while for enough to passively spawn over time. Of course, it's always recommended to start a new save instead of adding a mod to an existing save - that can cause bugs.

So if I added this to a current save they wouldn't spawn into any location I have already visited?

I know it's kinda antithetical to the point of the game, but is there any way to make the cats more passive? Like could I potentially just change a value in their behavior settings somewhere or would that break them entirely? I love love love all your mods and would like to use them but the default creature hostility settings don't work for modded creatures :')

Just wanted to say this is an amazing mod, so good that I'd have trouble playing without it anymore. The models are beautiful and the cats add such a 'wild and dangerous' feel to the wilderness that ninja-jumpscare-bears were not really giving.

Thank you for making and sharing this with us.

No current way to tame them, you can domesticate them but the base game domestication method doesn't remove the seek entity behavior so you'll be stalked by your pet when they get hungry, even if they don't actually attack.

is there a way to have one of the big cats as a pet?
i love those slightly bigger house kitties and would love to be able to tame one

Dageslav
It's on my planned list, but I'm waiting for the animated parts limit to be raised come 1.20 before that. They'd pair well with 4 of the 6 upcoming plant packs so I'll try to get them in when ever 1.20 drops

Please tell me that Elephantidae are somewhere in the pipeline; I have the primal desire to domesticate Mammoths 😔

The latest update should make the big cats interact with the world in very different ways, ideally they'll depopulate local wildlife less and when not protecting their babies will attack the player less often. Please let me know if any strangeness occurs in their behavior however, there might be some combinations I didn't encounter during testing

Just had my first tiger encounter, it was terrifying. Loud screeching, footsteps, and then I was dead! Awesome. The tiger drowned itself afterwards, though, lol. Seems like a behavior priority issue like you said. Great mod!

I'll run some tests, have a few other minor fixes I'd been meaning to do so I can hopefully bundle a fix in with those. Might just be a priority issue

Heya. Coming back again to report another mass-drowning event, this time of a family of American lions.

I haven't come across any other animals, modded or otherwise, that seem to be drowning to death. It seems unique to the big cats from this mod, as your other FotSA creatures seem unaffected.

While I do have the Rivers mod installed, the first instance of reported drowning was in a pond and not a mod-generated River, so I am unsure if that's related. Both events have occured on the same map/save game/server.

Strange, though the swimming behavior occasionally is buggy in the base game and animals won't correctly seek the nearest dry land.

So I came across a whole familly of dead black panthers in the middle of fairly shallow pond (maybe 5-blocks down at the deepest). With nothing around for them to have fallen from, and nothing indicating they were killed by another creature (myself included), I can only surmise that they somehow drowned, which I am not sure is intended or not. Maybe they currently aren't swimming properly? I'm not sure, but I found it strange enough to report.

I'm glad you're enjoying them! Though I don't intend to spend any more time on the taxidermies than I currently do 😅 every so often I get the urge to give up on them as is and just focus on the animals instead. For the most part I feel the same way for other feature suggestions that aren't just tweaks to the entity files as I'd like to get to all 700 or so large mammals and flightless birds and it'll already be a project a few years in the making without adding any more features.

I am loving that I can decorate with the heads and even full-body mounts of your amazing critters, but have you considered (or would you consider) adding in the functionality of being able to use a wrench to change the poses?  Closed-mouth vs open-mouth for the heads would be cool, but it would be next-level awesome to be able to change the poses of the full-body mounts.  Seated, laying down, about-to-pounce, claw-swiping, just to name a few of the dozen or so options I could think of just from a Google search of big cat pics.

Thanks for even considering, Tentharchitect

Nice catch, I'd used {genus} instead of panthera in the male and female panthera pelt drops. Publishing a fix momentarily.

Great group of mods. 🙏

It seems like pelts either drop extremely rarely or not at all. The clouded lepards where dropping but I couldn't really get anything else to drop in testing.

Tentharchitect Well, consensus in regards to how the base game handles things or simply among modders. But yeah, I feared that this is how it works... Unfortunately this makes mixing mods that add creatures, animals and NPCs a pretty big issue. Hopefully VS or a skilled modder can come up with something that helps with this.

Struuudel I'm not aware of any plans to do so, it would be lovely if they were interested and part of my motivation for overhauling the cats was to make it easier to integrate the content into the game if they were to ask me.

If by general consensus you mean how the base game is set up, you have to specify each individual entity, or the base most entity variant you want to specify. It's partially why I've set up the mods by clades, so I can have prey species flee from "panthera-adult-/*" rather than, "lion-adult-/*, "tiger-adult-/*" etc..
The exception is that you can leave some fields blank and it'll target all other entities when that behavior meets it's criteria, which is what I'd had the retalitory attack behavior set to and was causing the issues of attacking others of the same species. This is partially why I've stopped trying to add compatibility with other creature mods, since not only would I need to specify all of them per behavior, I'd need to keep up to date with all other creature mods as if they changed their entity's id it would break all the interactions.

I wrote up a suggestion over a year ago about how we might implement some sort of interaction frame work and looked into implementing it myself and realized how long it would take me just to learn the tools needed to build it. I instead just decided to make lots of content in that time and probably would have lost interest long ago if I'd tried to stick with it. I imagine as more animals are added to the base game the developers will eventually need to make a better system, but for now it requires a lot of entries per behavior.

Do you know if the devs plan to add any more of your mods to the base game? I'd love to see more FotSA content included in vanilla, since it fits the style of VS perfectly.

Tentharchitect I see.

Speaking of other mods mobs. Is there a general consensus on how to make them interact with each other? Does the game have any sort of grouping for mobs that mods can use (like "predators", "humans", "monsters" etc) to flag them for hostilities? Or do mods have to specify each mob from each mod, adding specific compatibilities for them? If it is the latter then maybe there should be some sort of API mod that adds something like that, because seeing creatures and whatnot from one mod completely ignoring those from another, even though they should be hostile towards each other, is really annoying and I don't really know who to hit up for that, if at all.

I didn't think the entity code array allowed for a black list or inverted list? Mind sharing how that is formatted AzuliBluespots? 

Tentharchitect

Can't you make an exclusion option for themselves and maybe other big felines? (and maybe bears?) That would make them fight anything BESIDES the excluded options I guess?

it loads and stuff in 1.19.3 but all the diets are not specified

That's a bug I've fixed in my updated build DarkThought, I left the retaliate attack target empty so they'd fight back any modded mob but it turns out they fight themselves as well if I do that.

And I'm plugging along, like Laerinok said it's usable but not all of 1.19's features are in yet

bringitonwimps

You can use it in 1.19.x like others mods from FotSA.

this moving to 1.19 soon? i know you have a lot of mods

Is it normal for lions to kill each other? I found like 6 female American Lions (with a couple cubs) and they immediately began killing 3 of the other ones.

Yep, I took a few days break from it to make the saber cats, but otherwise I'm focusing on updating this one.

Will be also getting the pelts, taxidermy and head mounts seen in my other FotSA mods and an art rework bringing it in line with the base game art style.

Will this mod be updated to 1.19?

I've had a couple of bug reports from ruins mods lately 35desafe, and I suspect one of them is messing with the code in unintended ways. Which one, I'm not certain but for now it seems like a few mods are just not compatible with that ruins mod.

And you can 'domesticate' the cats like you can with the big horn sheep and pigs Annastasija, but because they'll still hunt the player regardless of generation you can't really be safe from them.

Can you tame these cats?

Just downloaded and ran the mod with several added ruins mod, and the cats will spawn but wont pathfind or even attack back. Is this something an issue between mods that can be fixed by load order, or are they just not compatible?

No more deer meat for the cats, I'm done fiddling with that 😆

I am currently in 1.18.15 and I get this error on client-side: 

[Warning] Failed resolving a blocks itemdrop or smeltedstack with code faunaofthestoneage:venison-raw in mouth inventory accept stacks

They don't spawn on world gen as a way of keeping their population down and their spawn rate is low enough that I've had 3 or 4 in-game days pass before a big cat spawns nearby. Usually it is within the first day however.
I've had big cats spawn today during my plant mod testing so I'm sure the latest version has them spawning to some degree.

Hello! Our server is not able to get these cats to spawn. Thought it might be a mod conflict, so I tested in a single-player game with this as the only mod active. I wiped all the active entities ("/entity wipeall", since the cats don't spawn on worldgen), waited a few minutes, then ran "/entity count" to see what respawned in the world. No big cats. Repeated the process for good measure. Still no big cats. Am I missing something about how spawns work?

It's on the VS discord, the latest poll is on the first post of the FotSA: Caninae mods thread. Looks like Suidae is in the lead for the 3rd base game clade pack!

Damn that's cool as hell. Also there's a Discord for your mods? Or is it the within the Vintage Story Discord? I'd love to join

Pretty much all 10kg land animals from the Holocene, until I finish or my life circumstances change. I have a vote on the latest mod's discord thread, so you can see what is upcoming. Currently I'm working through the base game clades, ie.. Caninae, Caprinae, Antilopinae, Ursidae, Hyaenidae, Suidae and Procyonidae. 
The next round of options to vote for I haven't locked down, but I'm considering Bovinae, Camelinae, Elephantinae, Equinae, Felinae, Guloninae and Badgers (the small subfamilies merged into one mod)

That sounds awesome! I know you said that it would be difficult to add compatibility with the Pet Taming mod, but the image of having a homotherium as a companion is appealing... Any ideas for other fauna of the Holocene? Truly make a caveman experience perhaps

It's not silly at all, I intend to do a Machairodontinae pack at some point, though it would only include the species that made it to the beginning of the Holocene.

I know this might be silly. But are there any plans to add other prehistoric big cats? Examples being Smilodon or Homotherium, or maybe even Xenosmilus? Especially since Smilodon existed and went extinct around the same time the two lion species went extint

Fair enough. I took a look and, er, wow, I'm no modder so it was all way above my skills level. Still love this mod, but those kittens are so adorable with their little mews...

Glad you're enjoying this! No plans to patch compatibility with the Pet Taming mod at the moment, I looked into it and it seems like it will be a time consuming task. If anyone else is willing to undertake it I'd be happy to add it to the mod, but I'd prefer to spend my modding time working on my own content.

Love this but hope a patch to the Pet Taming mod comes along soon. I accidentally wiped a pride of American Lions leaving an aunt and cubs; would have loved to adopt and tame those cubs somehow...

ahh i gotcha

Yep, that is leftover from when I had melanistic and albino versions of each. When I learned about the texture atlas I removed those textures and have been slowly phasing them out with each update. 

looks like a lot of the cats are duplicated in the creative menu, some even three times

Thought I'd gotten that fixed, thanks for bringing it up!
I'll think about making a forum post, though I'm keeping my mod content here and three other places for people to post feedback.

I think that's related to your mod(s)?
12.8.2023 20:45:33 [Server Warning] Failed resolving a blocks itemdrop or smeltedstack with code game:venison-raw in mouth inventory accept stacks
12.8.2023 20:45:47 [Server Warning] Failed resolving a blocks itemdrop or smeltedstack with code game:fish-* in mouth inventory accept stacks
12.8.2023 20:45:47 [Server Warning] Failed resolving a blocks itemdrop or smeltedstack with code game:bushmeat-* in mouth inventory accept stacks
12.8.2023 20:45:47 [Server Warning] Failed resolving a blocks itemdrop or smeltedstack with code game:redmeat-* in mouth inventory accept stacks
12.8.2023 20:45:47 [Server Warning] Failed resolving a blocks itemdrop or smeltedstack with code game:poultry-* in mouth inventory accept stacks
Maybe create a page for your mods in the official forum, so that we can post bugs there?

Fair enough BoogieBrando, though once I finish the base game predator overhauls the number of enemies will be much lower, even with this mod enabled.

And to WickedSchnitzel, you can turn the spawn chance of any cat to 0 in the entity files if you'd like to disable the steppe lion, but even then no species of big cat only lives in the tropics and I'm going for animal's natural ranges.

Very nice mod, but i have removed it from my server for now, because these are spawning everywhere - not only in warm regions. I could patch it, but i am a bit lazy right now.

I would suggest to set the spawn settings to
insideBlockCodes: ["game:tallgrass-*"],
minTemp: 32,
minRain: 0.25,
maxForest: 0.4,

or something similar. This will only make them spawn in tropical regions. Although it seems like it was intended to let them spawn in the whole world.
edit: yeah, i just read it.. european steppe lion... did not even know something like that exists, lol. Maybe a config file to disable certain types.

wolves are already bad enough! hesitant on this extra challenge lol

Ah gotcha, I've been meaning to go through and add that, might as well now

prefixandcreature seems to be missing in this and probably your other mods? like when someone is getting killed.. the death message

These guys are nasty looking, makes the wolves look like puppies!

Yeah, I'm optimistic this will be fixed in the dejank 1.19 update, but if it isn't I'll go through and make all my animals not breath until the water behavior is better.

Big cats drown in water if they swim into it. may want to do w/e vanilla did with bears, to make them not drown. unless this was fixed in v1.0.6

Not currently, I intend to add pelts and other animal related items like in the Capreolinae mod but I'm waiting a bit to see if the texture atlas is reworked. If it isn't soon I might need to reduce the texture size on the cats so they use up less resources

Do these drop specific pelts like the Capreolinae mod?

Thank you for not only bringing this to my attention but finding the solution as well!

Hello!

While using your modification, I noticed one small error that is very easy to fix. In the server logs I noticed the messages:

2.7.2023 21:59:05 [Server Warning] Failed resolving a blocks itemdrop or smeltedstack with code game:fish-* in mouth inventory accept stacks
2.7.2023 21:59:05 [Server Warning] Failed resolving a blocks itemdrop or smeltedstack with code game:bushmeat-* in mouth inventory accept stacks
2.7.2023 21:59:05 [Server Warning] Failed resolving a blocks itemdrop or smeltedstack with code game:redmeat-* in mouth inventory accept stacks
2.7.2023 21:59:05 [Server Warning] Failed resolving a blocks itemdrop or smeltedstack with code game:poultry-* in mouth inventory accept stacks

Unfortunately, it appears that the "mouthinventory" attribute does not accept the universal expression '*'. All you need to do is replace "mouthinventory" code with this:

Thank you so much! I'll add this one and the deer translation next time I update them!
And yeah, the big cats can be quite elusive.

I haven't met any of the added creatures yet since I installed the mod, but I'm excited to explore where they live.

I made a Japanese file, so please use it if you like.😄

FotSA-Pantherinae-v1.0.5_ja.json

The black panther sounds don't seem to have any attenuation. They're audible and loud from very far away, but then suddenly go completely silent.

No plans to have them tameable now, but I will be making the canids tameable. I'm also happy if folks want to make a compatibility patch or version with the animal taming mod, I just don't want my mods depending on another mod staying active and up to date.

I would looooove for this to have an option to tame these big cats :D

Great to hear!!!! I just couldn't help but imagine having the bloodcurdling banshee howls of my adorable local lions in VS :3 Glad to hear it's on your mind!

Thanks Zorf!
I won't add mountain lions to this mod, but I have plans to do a Felinae mod eventually and have them and all their family members there. 

I love this! I know they're a different family, but do you think you'd ever add mountain lions?

Thank you so much for testing it and listing out the steps you took!
I still wasn't able to induce the exact same error, but I believe I've figured out the cause. I had removed the decayedBlock value so the carcass wouldn't just become an ordinary carcass after you harvested it, but it seems under certain conditions the game doesn't like that. Putting carcass-medium in the quotes seems to have fixed it. 
I'll include this in the next round of bug fixing, thank you for bringing this to my attention.

I removed all other mods, and I was still able to reproduce it.

Repro steps.
1. Go into creative mode.
2. Spawn a big cat carcass
3. Hit it until it dies (the flies drop).
4. Harvest it with a knife
5. Take out the bushmeat from the contents window.
6. Close the contents window.

On a multiplayer server, you will get disconnected. In single player, the exception is printed to the console, but you won't get disconnected.

Strange, I tested all the cats and the cat carcasses and couldn't get the error to reproduce. 
Are you using any mods that edits how bushmeat, fat or hides work? Those are the potential drops and might lead to a NullReferenceException if they were removed or edited.

When I harvest a cat carcass with FotSA-Pantherinae-v1.0.4.zip, the server kicks me off temporarily. This error is shown on the server console:

14.5.2023 21:38:13 [Server Error] System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
at Vintagestory.API.Common.Block.IsReplacableBy (Vintagestory.API.Common.Block block) [0x00055] in <ac8f793f72eb491b9577378f83f29660>:0
at Vintagestory.GameContent.EntityBehaviorDeadDecay.DecayNow () [0x00133] in <e3e95c8f905742c6b130bc8ef1849c64>:0
at Vintagestory.GameContent.EntityBehaviorHarvestable.Inv_OnInventoryClosed (Vintagestory.API.Common.IPlayer player) [0x00025] in <e3e95c8f905742c6b130bc8ef1849c64>:0
at Vintagestory.API.Common.InventoryBase.Close (Vintagestory.API.Common.IPlayer player) [0x00029] in <ac8f793f72eb491b9577378f83f29660>:0
at Vintagestory.Common.PlayerInventoryManager.CloseInventory (Vintagestory.API.Common.IInventory inventory) [0x0001a] in <7dc1ecd263244f3984ddc1d2817eedfa>:0
at Vintagestory.Server.ServerSystemInventory.HandleInvOpenClose (Packet_Client packet, Vintagestory.Server.ConnectedClient client) [0x00045] in <7dc1ecd263244f3984ddc1d2817eedfa>:0
at Vintagestory.Server.ServerMain.HandleClientPacket (Vintagestory.Server.ConnectedClient client, System.Byte[] data) [0x0005a] in <7dc1ecd263244f3984ddc1d2817eedfa>:0
at Vintagestory.Server.ServerMain.ProcessNetMessage (Vintagestory.Common.NetIncomingMessage msg, Vintagestory.Common.NetServer mainSocket) [0x00151] in <7dc1ecd263244f3984ddc1d2817eedfa>:0

I made certain to use a unique ID for my animals that others had also made, so there shouldn't be any mod conflict with using both. If you'd like to prevent one of the two from spawning you can try the mod Spawn Conditions which allows you to configure any base game or modded creature to your liking, or you can go into the entity files and adjust the spawn chance near the both of the json file. The former is better as it shouldn't disappear when the mods update.

i like this mod, but i also use the kritters and creatures mod and it  seams there may be some conflicts, like it also has  tiger.  idk if there is a way to set which big cats are available.. also seeing if i can do the same with kreatures and critters.  but really like the big catws and the models are nice.

Fair enough, if you would like to play it without sounds you can either go into the animal entity files and set the roar behavior chance to 0.0 or delete the sound folder completely.

I enjoyed the mod but deleted it because they wouldnt shut the hell up. The constant animal sounds in this game really annoy me; the drifters, the wolves, etc.

Thanks! Glad you're enjoying it!

And I know exactly what happened XD I set all of the cat's roar sounds to be audible from the realistic range, ie lions can be heard from 3 km away, but because I tested sounds in single player I could only hear them when they were loaded in near me which is capped at .5km away. I'll tweak that next time I update it, have a few bug fixes already lined up.

Awesome mod!! Love big dangerous animals, just what the game needs, some REAL threats! Thx for this man!

One thing though, their sound seems to be broadcasted server wide. So if one player is near one when it growls, another player 50 km away deep down in a mine will hear it too.
Funny nobody has mentioned this, maybe its only a problem for us, some other mod or something messing with us.

Sorry to hear that, if you could tell me which cat is the one that was giving you issues I'd be happy to look into rebalancing it.

And when you mean spawning every where do you mean there is more than one instance of cats/pride of cats spawning per square kilometer?

Bad enough that a server of 5 all came to the conclusion that this mod is very badly balanced. They keep spawning everywhere and they do way too much damage. We have to get rid of it. We're in the metal age and we can't even deal with it.

I was recently made aware of the Texture Atlases being a shared resource for all mods, and that my textures were using up most of that resource. I've since compressed them down to take up a more reasonable amount for what this mod adds. To further reduce it I've removed some features so players can have more space for other mods, but will restore them if the Texture Atlas system is reworked to be less of a limiting factor. If you'd like to keep the albino, melanistic and other color variant versions, you can use v1.0.2, but it will use slightly more texture space.

Thanks for providing feedback Yelb, it's given me some good info to work with. I'll be incorporating it in the next update within a week.
And if the experience I'm creating isn't quite what you're looking for, Craluminum's new mod Spawn Conditions should allow users to fine tune things themselves. For those wanting to remove the extinct animals or reduce the pride sizes this should make it possible without editing the mod itself.

Hi again. I’ve removed the mod for now. Cats are everywhere, another pack of steppe lions spawned 60 blocks from home, only two nights after i killed the first group. Also, they are very noisy, they growl very often. So, i still love the idea of the mod, but at the moment the balance or behavior is unfun.

That is bad luck with spawning. The lion prides appear half as often as the solitary males or female with babies do, and a pride of steppe lions are meant to be the second toughest challenge in the game. My thought with them is that you need to work with others, pick them off one at a time, lure them away, use modded weapons, traps or just avoid the area. I'll reduce the pounce rate in the next update, but challenge wise those seem on par with what I was going for, the Homo sapien mode equivalent of a end game drifter swarm. 

The last encounter, really a few blocks away from my home, was about steppe lions. A pack with 5 adults and 7 kitten !

I could take the adults one by one with precise spears. About the kids... They were cute while i was murdering them in melee.

Really it may be bad luck with spawn, but it’s way too much, too often.

Thanks for the feed back! Sadly the animal ai isn't complicated enough for them to fall back to a certain distance and attack again but I can fiddle with the pounce chance.

Which species were they? The lions all spawn in groups so it could have been a single spawning. Otherwise once one instance has occurred no more of the same genus is supposed to spawn in the same area. And their health is varied by species as well, the smaller ones are weaker than wolves while the largest is comparable to a polar bear in health and damage. 

Now i played with them, and if i like the idea of the mod, i find the cats waaay too common. In only a few days in my current game (first year, august), i’ve seen six or seven of them only around my home, one kitten. I’ve killed two of them and it was weird, they acted like crazy, jumping on me. It would feel much better if they jump once, run away, come back later, etc. So, same attack behavior, but with more delay between attacks, and fleeing further after each attempts. Also, they die after throwing only 3 flint spears i think ? Anyway, i like these cats, but they need tuning IMO.

Excellent ! Didn’t meet these cutties ingame yet, but i can’t wait to be eaten alive by a big cat, thanks !

Thanks Moby!

These new animals look amazing!

Could you add me in discord?

Craluminum#9038

Source code?