The term hibernation refers to a bunny who has been deprived of food and water for a substantial amount of time (72 hours). The bunny is not dead but rather in a state of literal hibernation.

Understanding Hibernation
While glitches do happen, hibernation normally occurs if the bunny has not consumed food or water in 72 hours. The best option is to do the steps below to get your bunny eating again. This takes time and patience. You may need to frequently wake up your bunny so that it continues eating – rather than sleeping and gaining hunger and thirst again.

After your bunny is eating well, it will take 24 hours before it comes out of its hibernation and it will have 1 less generation. You can revive a hibernating bunny by purchasing a Rise & Shine Sun from the Ozimals store if you don’t want to wait 24 hours. This is not necessary and it’s strongly recommended that instead, you determine and solve the problem that is causing your bunny to hibernate.

A bunny loses 1 generation (opportunity to breed) with every hibernation. The bunny will be flat black in color. Matriarchs/Patriarchs, Elders or Sages will die prematurely if they go into hibernation 5 times.

Keep an eye on new bunnies to be sure they are eating and address it right away to avoid hibernating bunnies.

Sometimes hibernation just… happens. Second Life isn’t perfect and glitches do happen. So if you find your bunny in hibernation, here are the steps to nursing your bunny back to normal and preventing hibernation from happening again.

Check to be sure your bunny has food and water.
If you are sharing food and water with another person, be sure to set both food and water to “group” in their respective menus as well as setting the bunny’s interaction to “group”.

Be sure the bunny can reach its food and water.
It is strongly recommended that you be aware of bunny’s home position and that if you don’t know, you reset it (you can either re-rez your bunny, or you can open the bunny’s menu and click Config >> Set Home). The easiest way to make sure the food will be in range of the bunny is to rez the food/water on or very close to the bunny’s home position.

Set proper Nutrition Level
It’s important that the bunny’s nutrition level is set to the same as the food and water. You cannot always rely on the hovertext as it can often take up to an hour for the hovertext to reflect the nutrition level changes. It’s best to rely instead on the menu-driven config settings by clicking on the bunny and choosing “Show Config”.

None of those things worked? Try one of the following:

• Pick up your bunny and put it back down. Sometimes an SL glitch occurs where the bunny doesn’t accept its new home position.
• Pick up the food and put it back down. Again, glitches happen and sometimes the food/water and the sim don’t communicate properly.
• Change your bunny range settings to 1 meter more than you currently have it.