First ask: is it dead? The Tribe Log records creature deaths, starvation, deaths in a Cryopod and claims. Our ASE logs hold about 22,400 creature-kill lines, 10,900 "starved to death" lines and 1,349 Cryopod deaths, and one of our four recent "missing creature" reports was an ordinary death recorded there. One experienced player reads the wording like this (not official): "was Killed!" with no killer can mean starvation, the terrain, or a water creature that left the water; "was killed by a … – Lvl …" means a creature killed it.
Then ask: where is it? Creatures load before the structures they stand on, so when an area wakes up, creatures may fall through a building's floor to the ground; most cases correct themselves a few seconds later. ASA has fixed many cases of this kind: babies falling through the map (26.11), eggs sinking into floors on restart (32.12), creatures lost to anti-mesh on restart (38.26), teleported creatures falling under the ground when the spot was in stasis (43.8), creatures sent to a raised Tek Teleporter with nobody near falling through (35.16), tames falling through cave floors (2025) and creatures passing through the mesh (72.28).
Our own cases: on ASE (05/09/2026) a creature had not followed through a realm teleport and stood 120 m away and about 100 m lower; an admin moved it back. On ASA (06/09/2026) two creatures were dropped 1.8 km below the terrain on the return from a boss arena, and the game's kill volume removed them without any Tribe Log line. A developer once wrote that a creature should not vanish without a Tribe Log message, and asked for the location and whether the creature was in stasis.
