At some point, I hope for a serious improvement to the way animals and predators (when they are added) behave. This idea is not for monsters, although I may come up with something for them also. Currently the animals kinda wander around and eat, not going very far at all from what I have seen. There is little determining what they do. I don't want to always find the pigs in a certain valley. I don't want to always find the wolves hanging out at their den.. etc...
First off, we know there will be biomes (hopefully layed out like our earth is.. ), so the world will not be filled with this certain type of long grass and trees with hills as it is now etc.. I'm sure there will be multiple types of grasses even within one biome. So use your imagination to picture what I am writing, don't try to fit it into the current world.
Second, I don't want the players only interraction with animals to be just killing them for meat and leather while they just stand there staring at you...
I want the player to be in direct competition with animals for certain harvestable edibles or resources etc. If there are wild raspberries in temperate forests which the player can harvest to make a pie or whatever, I want bears and deer to also eat these wild raspberries.
Of course the player can harvest some in order to start growing them back home, but that should attract the bears and deer to the players home. If what you grow only attracts a prey animal.. then the prey itself will attract predators.
This can be maintained if wild raspberries only grow in temperate forest where bear and deer can be found. Meaning.. there is no loophole to take advantage of like growing them in a biome where no animals want to eat them. Sure you can kill off all the bears and deer, but I'm assuming they would respawn at some point since we don't want to wipe out all the animals and have an empty world right?...
So in order to make this idea work, the animals need to roam around in search of food. Each animal and predator should eat more then one thing (deer will eat more then just wild raspberries). So the deer come across some wild raspberries, I'm sure a few deer can eat all the berries on a bush pretty quickly, so say in half an hour (game time) they would already be moving on to find the next thing to eat (maybe the leaves of a certain bush or whatever which the player can use medicinally, as long as it is found within the biomes deer live in).
So the distance animals go in order to find food will be determined by how much food generates in the world and in each biome. So I say make things pretty scarce. Even for the player.. we should not be able to find all the harvestable stuffs in a biome within 10min of looking for them. IMO it should take quite some time, hours even.. if not days (normal time). So devs can do some math here depending on how fast say deer can move and then eat what they find, you can figure out how far they could travel in a day based on how the food is spaced apart.
If I could just snap my fingers and have it done.. I would go a step further to have more variety and randomness and create a simple hunger system for animals and predators and base their actions on that. Like if deer are full they just hang out a bit or go for a drink of water. If a predator just ate then it won't be hunting until it is hungry again, thus it may not attack the player but instead run away. This way there is a variety of responses you could get from predators especially, they won't be so predictable.
Prey should in general just run away from players forcing the player to properly hunt them.
Last note, the player could use animals to help them find harvestable goods by following them. But it would take some stealth and patience to do.
I think this idea will make the world feel very alive and much less predictable.
Please post what you think. I know it's a damn wall of text... but I like to write and you can't get this kind of idea out in a couple sentences.... sorry if it was painful! And if ya think I'm crazy.. post that too! haha