For wild animal spawners, use something like pine cones

I like the idea of hiding certain types of decorations entirely, like POT phonographs, ankhs, and maybe spawners.

But considering them when they're visible, I think a bad idea to use carrot spawners for wild animals like deer. Using a "carrot" to attract something is of course an obvious metaphor but I don't think its necessary. Players are going to not just be making towns but wilderness scenes, or have wilderness areas on the outskirts of their towns and might want to place deer spawners where carrots don't make sense. And even within towns, carrots stand out a bit much I think, and if you're placing spawners for pigs and other farm animals that might be in a farmstead area or green market area it might be OK, but just having carrots lying around where they shouldn't be is jarring.

There are a lot of "wild" food sources that might attract wild animals, including nuts and acorns from trees, mushrooms, certain plants/weeds (ie. goosefoot is commonly eaten by animals so was then grown by farmers for animal feed). Pine cones are a food source, though, and probably the simplest and least distracting to implement. And often, animals that don't chew the actual cones eat the seeds inside. I also know there's a pine cone model somewhere, since it was used in Kickstarter demos.

- Deer will eat pine cones
- Squirrels will eat pine cones
- Rabbits will eat pine cones
- Turkeys will eat pine seeds (inside the cones). Not in all cases wild animals, but I don't think they eat carrots anyway, do they
Etc.

 

i do like the pine cones idea, and there were kickable ones in early scenes, but not every template has pines. i don't know why the spawner has to be visible at all: it could be a hidden box as they do for fogs and butterflies.

 

Yea, you're right. Some scenes will be deciduous, others swamps, others deserts. But I still think for scenes where it makes sense to see those animals anyway, its better than a carrot and think its possible for players to suspend disbelief about it. If needed, they could always code it to switch out the deco depending on the biome. I remember them talking about changing roof tiles on houses depending on the biome or something like that.

I'm not sure what design decision is behind showing the spawners.

 

Pine cones would make sense. I was a bit confused by the reindeer spawner being a carrot.
I like the idea of using something that also doubles as 'deco' and looks like it belongs.
The cat spawners are little food bowls, which is perfect, tho. Leave those alone!