All the animal icons reflect spawn points, not living locations for the animals. Boars tend to stay near to their spawn point until villagers come around then they avoid the villagers and will move off, sometimes far off. Once found and killed though, they will respawn back on that original spawn point.
the animal sighting icons are not always in the same place, they seem to follow the actual location of the herd, unlike wolves spawn points that are fixed.
if it was an actual spawn point, they would respawn within the walls of my village and be immediately killed by the guards, which would make the icon disappear.
animal sighting icon is located at middle of spawn area (64 x 64) = 13 x 13 game square
spawn area can be moved by placing buildings in its
you can check spawn areas with Preview generated map - #5 by Mitr if you are playing on 0.7.6
Had something similar happen, in which I ended up with a ‘spawn point’ on the immediate edge of my village (as in, between the residences and the fields) which kept right on spitting out Boars. Ended up placing a Guard Tower next to it and harvesting Boars for X years.
Seemed pretty buggy to me, but this being Early Access and all didn’t feel it merited a comment.
Now it occurs to me that Spawn Points really should reflect the fact that animals are Mobile and Large Animals like those shown in the game Cannot breed (spawn) in the middle of human settlements unless they are being domesticated.
Perhaps a mechanic in which the Spawn Point migrates after a certain concentration of Human Buildings are within X tiles of it?
And a randomization of where it ‘migrates’ to, to keep the map dynamic until you’ve filled it so completely that there is no room for any of the wild animals - thus recreating the historical pattern rather neatly.
Well, I lost more than 5 hours of gameplay because I didn’t save on a separate file and relied on autosave, then stupidly started another village…
I’ll once again develop the village in that direction, but on my previous attempt I built a bunch of houses under that icon, so by what you’re saying it should have disappeared.
There’s always the possibility it was one square out of the house though, so maybe building should be given a radius for this kind of things?