Animal Plague

General info
The Animal Plague plugin ensures animals can get diseased, spread that disease, and die from disease. The chances of this occuring increase with the local concentration of animals. The plugin is custom configured for use with the LOTR mod animal entity types by AlteOgre, in line with the starting points and assumptions explained in this thread.

As more animals crowd in a small space, they tend to get a higher chance to catch a disease that can be mortal and contageous. This helps control server performance and discourages grinding of experience orbs (Character_Stats!) and drops (server economy!) from large animal packs.

Main aspects

 * All animals can catch diseases, except bats and midges.


 * The diseases develop and spread without warning. Players will learn to recognise diseased animals when they start showing sickly signs.


 * Animals can be cured by right clicking them with a milk bucket.


 * Animals dying from disease will only drop rotten flesh.


 * A plague develops in three stages: 1) first symptoms and weakness, 2) infection and 3) death.

Settings and effects
The following settings are implemented for the first trial period. Based on experiences we may change these to optimise the performance for both gameplay and server.


 * The minimum amount of animals to enable disease development is 32 in a range of 32x32x32 around any animal.


 * The chance an animal catches disease when the above two conditions are met is 4%.


 * When the animal doesn't catch a disease, it will be tagged immune.


 * The time passing by before a diseased animal shows signs of being ill is 60 seconds.


 * The particle effect of a diseased animal is that of the Weakness status effect.


 * Any diseased animal can infect another animal within the defined 32x32x32 block area around the diseased animal with a chance of 0.4 % for every 5 seconds.


 * Any animal that doesn't get infected will become immune.


 * The time a diseased animal will survive before it dies is 300 seconds. This is equivalent to 60 intervals of 5 seconds during which a diseased animal can infect other nearby animals.