Question About Carcasses On Interloper

[Nyarlathotep]

In my current interloper game, I landed an arrow into a deer in a terrible spot and it took off. The weather turned foul and I decided to head back for my nearby shelter as my condition was already pretty low.

After a brief rest I checked my stats and it showed that the deer has in fact died. But... this shitty weather will not let up.

So I am stuck here drooling, and torturing myself with images of being surrounded by large chunks of cooked deer, stuffing my mouth with anything left over, whilst also entertaining the thought of being able to recover my precious arrow (provided it did not fall out somewhere along the deer's erratic route).

My question is: How long will a deer corpse lay outside, and do nearby wolves have an effect on the amount of meat I can potentially harvest from it?

[Dan_]

Well, from my experience the carcasses of any prey you kill are not affected in any way by the surrounding wildlife. If you shot a fatty deer you'll  get all the meat from it when you eventually harvest. Even if you steal a deer from a wolf within a few seconds of the wolf downing that deer, you get all the meat and the wolf won't come back to it, ever.  

As for as how long do they last, I believe there is a more elaborate mechanic to it but basically, the carcass will decay pretty fast and after a couple days it will vanish. I'd say I recall harvesting four day old carcasses but I really haven't observed or measured the decay appropriately, neither find any solid information on this issue. What I can do is extrapolate the decay rates for quarters ( 10%/day * 200% for interloper, since the decay is doubled from baseline stalker ), so at 20% per day a carcass should theoretically last 5 days from the killing blow or bleed out moment, if and only if we can use the decay rates for quarters to extrapolate the results.

I'll do some science with rabbits since they are plentiful and I can control the kill times precisely, I'll report back if the above makes sense. 

Hope it helps! 

 

 

[jerry486]

Wolves will not affect the killed deer or the amount of meat on it, they won't even notice it's there. I did notice strange behaviour once though - found a corpse, heard the wolf bark so stated to fall back, observing the wolf. It went the the corpse and then turned towards me. First I thought this had something to do with the inspect_smell thingy, and it did, but not in the way I assumed (I thought corpse was the smell, but it was simply a spot by the corpse where I stood, hence creating a smell point for the wolf to inspect).