Auroras healing shot animals.

[Nathan Unruh]

So I'm hunting a bear and I shoot it in the torso, so I follow it as it's bleeding out for about 4 hours (game time). With night approaching, I round the corner and the bear vanishes completely, no trace. I head back to my house and a green wolf follows me home, telling me that there is an aurora.

Next morning, I go outside and the same bear is roaming around. I checked his trails and he is not bleeding. I also checked my kill count and it shows that the bear didn't die.

Is this a bug? That the aurora will heal wounded animals? Or did he just heal because I slept inside?

[Leeanda]

Injured animals can heal if you go into an interior location.   It's not guaranteed to happen but I'm not sure if it's an actual bug or not.

[hozz1235]

Yeah, as @Leeanda said, animals can "reset" sometimes when you transition to an interior location.  This has been around for quite some time (always?  can't remember a time when this didn't happen).

Best bet, if you cause an animal to bleed, pass time/sleep outdoors for a couple hours then go look/listen for crows.  A non-transition cave works really well for this waiting.

[conanjaguar]

I can confirm that animals are seemingly much tougher during an aurora. Yesterday, I emptied a whole revolver clip and three rifle rounds into a glowing wolf at point blank range, and it just scampered off!

[xanna]

I also have the impression that if you're hunting when night falls and an aurora starts, the bear you're tracking doesn't become aurorified, so much as it despawns and is replaced by an aurora bear so there's no history of any damage.

I remember this is what happened to 22atreyu22 on his final Neo-native run recently, even though he never went indoors or through a transition screen. Shot a bear, it ran, night fell with aurora, bear disappears (with arrow), eventually find bear (now green), no sign of arrow, bye-bye atreyu 😔
video here:

 

Edited November 18, 2022 by xanna
clarify he was outdoors the whole time

[UTC-10]

To heal a bleeding animal, go inside a building (pass through a transition), then wait longer than a game hour then come out.  If the animal has not bled out by the time one exits the building, it spawns as uninjured.  If it had bled out during that time period, then it spawns and dies.  

I suspect that originally, as programmed, the game did not make that second check for when the character comes out so bleeding animals, such as a bear which can take a long time to bleed out, would regularly turn up healed.  

To make sense of the OP's experience, I speculate that the bear, which had bled for 4 hours, was likely going to keep bleeding for another 2 to 4 hours (I think 8 hours is the max) but the aurora caused the bear to despawn which then froze or suspended its bleed timer.  The OP went to shelter and, as can happen, the aurora lasted all night until dawn, so when the OP came out the next day, even though maybe eight hours or more had passed from the time the bleeding bear had despawned, as far as the game was concerned, the bear had not yet bled out, because of the frozen or suspended bleed timer due to the aurora despawning the bear, so spawned it uninjured.  

If that is true then it probably is a bug much like the previous go inside, sleep, and heal the bear problem that was mostly fixed. 

[Nathan Unruh]

Thanks for the comments. So I believe animals can despawn and respawn as an "aurora" animal, so it likely explained the bear disappearing. Then I would have slept inside long enough for the bear to spawn uninjured. I guess the moral is don't go hunting at dusk or you might get an Aurora 😂

[hozz1235]

On 11/18/2022 at 4:45 PM, Nathan Unruh said:

Thanks for the comments. So I believe animals can despawn and respawn as an "aurora" animal, so it likely explained the bear disappearing. Then I would have slept inside long enough for the bear to spawn uninjured. I guess the moral is don't go hunting at dusk or you might get an Aurora 😂

AND don't go inside after injuring an animal.