frosty sail
Firstly, my aim with this post is to raise awareness in the hopes that someone with more time can pick this testing up and do some proper analysis, and secondly to hopefully save someone from a very long grind.
I have two grinds set up:
- Black Bear on SPR - 3000+ harvests, 0 GOs
- Fallow Deer on TA - 500+ harvests, 0 GOs
I wanted to test if HM really works before I invest many hours into it for no reason. So I made a backup of by game files (I am playing on steam). I then downloaded two mods from Nexus:
- Animal Population Scanner
- Animal Population Changer - Revived
Setup:
I used APC to change the levels of all the males bears and fallow to the same weight and trophy rating as my lowest ranking male which was a level 2 in both cases. APC is probably only ever used to spawn in GOs, but it has an option to "explore" and then edit individual animals with sliders which is what I used to bring all the males down to level 2s - thus creating the perfect HM scenario.
Grinding:
I then jumped on the game and began grinding all my zones as normal. Then next few spawns were all max weight diamonds but after a few rotations the population evened out somewhat. But I would see around 2 - 3 diamonds spawn in every rotation.
Great Ones:
On the fallow grind a GO spawned in on the first rotation - roughly 10 harvests in.
On the bear grind the first GO spawned in under 100 harvests.
Observations:
To me, spawning GOs this fast on two different grinds which have never produced any GOs shows that there is without a doubt a link to the average population weight and the chances of spawning a GO. This also shows that animal spawning follows a bell curve where the game tries to put the bulk of the animals in the mid-levels, and in a case of an extreme unbalance to one side it will spawn in an animal to compensate the unbalance. GOs are not tied to a percentage chance like rare furs are, they are tied to the weight balancing system.