Giant lizard pack retaliation can recurse infinitely and crash MC queue

[666Evil666Child666]

Testmerges

None

Round ID

local reproduction

Description of the bug

When two nearby giant lizards retaliate with no active target, they can recursively call each other’s Retaliate() until BYOND hits recursion depth. This produces repeated runtimes and degrades the Master Controller queue (RunQueue failed, SoftReset).

2026-03-03_giant_lizard_retaliate_recursion_raw.log

What's the difference with what should have happened?

Retaliation should propagate once to nearby pack members without recursive re-entry. No recursion runtimes, no MC queue degradation.

How do we reproduce this bug?

1. Spawn two giant lizard within 7 tiles of each other.
2. Ensure both are alive and have no current target
3. Trigger retaliation on one lizard ( attack it once at distance more than 7 tile)
4. Receive a issue about reaching the recursion limit in debug mode.

Issue Bingo

• Issue could be reproduced at least once
• Issue happened in a recent (less than 7 days ago) round
• Couldn't find an existing issue about this (https://github.com/cmss13-devs/cmss13/issues)

[Drulikar]

Implementation is pretty significantly different on pvp so likely will be fixed w/ modularization once pve gets various fixes to simple animal logic.