Animal and predator behaviour overhaul

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

I thought about animals leaving tracks to follow but figured that would be too difficult to do. Droppings might be easier to do haha

Geneo, you think what I wrote is going overboard with it? If so in what way? What parts?

When I say that players should be in direct competition with animals, I just mean that they both can eat or use the same foods etc.. I don't intend some crazy game mechanic. Simply the player could find a bush of berries.. yay! Later comes back to harvest more and finds they are already eaten and possibly learns that deer or whatever is what ate them. I don't want players harvesting stuff that is just for them, and animals eating other stuff that is only for them. That's it. Just in case it isn't clear. Raspberries was just an example

Yes it would be fairly easy competition since a player could just run around collecting all he/she can of the berries, one result will be the animals will be forced to go further to find food. I suppose a player could decide to prepare the ground (not sure how farming will work..) and plant berries out in the wild and create an abundance of them in a certain area, more deer might go there because of that, but that should also attract more predators. Or the player could build fence around the berry bush haha... So there would be an influence on the world which the player has aside from building and mining. There could be downsides to this for sure, but there are downsides to any system like this. I don't pretend this idea is perfect at all.

It is true that without humans around nature would be balanced, especially in the last like 5000 years. But it was balanced with humans also. Go back a thousand or more years here on the west coast of Canada, the natives didn't over fish.. they didn't over hunt, they just took what was needed and left the rest alone. The natives were PART of nature. I would like us to feel the same as much as possible while in the Rising World world, at least in the survival mode.

I don't want animals to appear where the food is, they can spawn in random places but then move to where the food and water is, but when that food is finished have to move on again to the next bush or whatever they eat is to be found. So if not killed, a deer could move from one end of the biome to the other and back again. They don't just stay in one valley. Once you know where things grow, yes it could become somewhat predictable where the animals are. But then they could be some distance from you and they won't be back in that area for an in-game week or whatever. So predictable in some way yes, but is that information all that useful? You would still need to hunt instead of just camp there.

Same for the predators, you could get an idea of where they might go, but not know exactly where they currently until you find them.

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However, I wouldn't say that it should take hours for us to find plants etc., only if there are already a lot of bioms and plants to find.

Yes only if there is a full range of biomes with healthy population of flora and animals. I just don't want to have everything in the game after a week of playing... I hope it takes months at least.

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The idea of having animals reacting according to their hunger etc. sounds pretty nice, as well. I think it shouldn't be that hard to implement that. If it is not possible, I think a randomization would do, too.

Yes just a simple hunger and thirst meter. Nothing visual that the player can see.. just something that dictates their actions. Full hunger = hang out or wander. Medium = start to look for food. Near empty = getting desperate and might approach player farms etc..

Dung and animals affecting the land and flora physically is IMO going overboard haha Sure it would be great! But I could deal with them just eating things players want to harvest and that shows where they have or have not been recently.

And yeah, I don't intend this for the first update with new animals or predators haha This is a long term idea. An end result I hope for.

Thanks!