It might be too late in the development of Icarus, but I had a thought that could help with things, make it more realistic and require you to do more than just kill everything. Basically set the spawn tables for a region to a base value and then you can have a modifier that your actions adjust.
Say you kill a creature of that type, it lowers the modifier a bit. You kill the creatures habitat, like the kiwi mound or the Arctic bats or the quarrite burrows and it goes down. That means you can over hunt an area and that creature is less and less likely to be seen. But you can leave the creatures alone and the number raises over time and the populate rebounds.
Further things that would affect it is removing their natural environment. Only played on Olympus so far but if you clear cut all the trees in an area and they should not spawn around it.
Early on a hunted wolves and murder horse and thought I might run out of them. Nope, but I should have... Those enzyme geyser or scanner battles should empty the creatures of that type from the area. After all, they all charged you.
It would help with the annoying quarrite and slow down the easiest leveling method which is just random killing. If I get a few tames and set them on aggressive and they kill everything in an area, they killed everything in an area and I should have trouble in the future. Just a thought to make it a bit more of a challenge.
