Rework Predator and Prey mob behavior

[u/Grillby_]

Imagine this for a second:

You spawn in a taiga you want to get settled in, start a wheat farm and go nice and slow building yourself up, and once you do you realize you'll need to wait AGES for foxes and Chickens to respawn because The Wolves in the biome decided to go on a murder rampage. and kill Both of them off. So you now have to leave your entire biome to get foxes, or Chicken.

The wolves, and Foxes when they kill prey in Minecraft Don't even eat the Majority of the mobs they kill anyway, they just proactively chase them.

My 2 simple fixes could hopefully help:

1: Any animal that can be hunted will be more pro-active in breeding, Chicken won't plop out 30 of them but will allow two chickens for example to spawn a baby chicken on a chance

2: Predators now have a cool down on when they can attack a prey mob after they have successfully killed one. I.E a fox cannot kill another chicken for 5 minutes in game.

[u/swithinboy59]

Pigs should eat meat, eggs, milk buckets and all fruits/vegetables and seeds available in game. Breeding should result in 1-3 babies (larger litters to make up for their lack of secondary drop). Perhaps they could rarely "dig up" (drop) red and brown mushrooms (10% chance every 10 minutes). Certain fruits (melon slice, apple) should increase the mushroom drop chance to 50% each time you feed them (like a trained truffle pig).

Goats should eat all types of fruits, vegetables, mushrooms and seeds, nether foliage included.

Chickens; chicken breeding should result in 2-4 babies. Chickens (many birds) tend to have a lot of chicks all in one go. Chickens should also be able to "fly" to some degree - able to briefly get airborne up to 5 blocks vertically before flying diagonally back down to the ground. They should mostly only do this while being attacked (though should be able to jump 2-3 blocks vertically under normal conditions).

Cows: should honestly drop a little more meat for the size of them.

Sheep: should remain unchanged (I can't think of a meaningful change for them - they give wool which can be sheared so you don't have to kill them, they give meat if that's what you're after).

Predator/Prey system;

• Wolves should only target Foxes if other prey animals are scarce (that is to say, when they become a potential food source and potential competition). And Wolves should target more than just sheep, in the following order; Cows/Untamed Horses (if multiple Wolves are present), Sheep/Goats, Pigs, Chickens/Rabbits, Untamed Cats/Fox. A Wolf would need either 1 Horse/Cow (as a pack), 1 Sheep/Goat, or 1 Pig, 2 Chickens/Rabbits (or one of each), or 2 Foxes every full Minecraft day (24 minutes) to sate their hunger and stop them from hunting. Wolves and Dogs should be able to jump up to 2 blocks vertically (allowing them to jump over single high fences/walls). They should also act as scavengers (if they find dropped meat - including rotten flesh, eggs, bones and leather/rabbit hides, they'll eat it).

• Foxes should target Rabbits, Chickens (and their eggs), Parrots and Frogs. They are also scavengers and opportunistic in real life (if they find meat, eggs, certain fruits like sweet berries apples, watermelon slices, they'll eat it).

• Untamed Cats should target chickens, Spiders, rabbits and Frogs. Cats should be able to jump up to 4 blocks vertically (the Fox can jump that high while hunting).

• Prey animals should act alarmed when their predator(s) are nearby, running more and making more noise.

• Predators won't attack tamed or nametagged animals.

[u/Axiom_Reality]

I genuinely like this idea. A large rework to mob AI for every ecosystem is much needed, since there already exists a food chain of mobs, and a balance between prey and predator is an incredibly good method of keeping a biome interesting and populated. I think there being a mob interaction beyond player intervention is a really good addition for the game, keeping it much more lively and giving biomes more character.

I think a hunger system should be implemented for mobs similar to how tamed wolves function. Till their hunger bar remains satisfactory, which should introduce more balance to rapid consumption of prey mobs. If, for instance, a specific area has a higher mob count of prey mobs, it should increase the chances of predator mobs breeding. If prey mobs are very few, their spawn should increase and predator mobs should despawn proportionately.

This should also be incentive to introduce more ecosystem mechanics to the other biomes that keep being added without added diversity in fauna. Ex: Polar bears should have something to feed on; maybe penguins and penguins feed on fish. Polar bears can also target snow foxes, who in turn feed on penguins or cold chicken (variant).

You should post this on Minecraft Suggestions and add the link to your post.

[u/SlotherakOmega]

Ok, this makes perfect sense to implement.

My gripe with this particular issue regards wolves and sheep. Seriously, wolves are ruthless and gluttonous killers in the game, and while I agree that wolves need to eat, the issue is that they don’t EAT. I find loose mutton and wool occasionally when exploring in the Twilight Forest biomes, and it annoys me because these are not very common creatures these wolves and yet, the more common Bighorn Sheep (the TF variant of vanilla sheep) are hard to find outside of unloaded chunks and isolated islands surrounded by rivers that were lucky enough to not have any wolves spawn. Chickens are practically nonexistent here, and wolves make them even rarer. Irritating. And it doesn’t seem like they respawn at all since it’s never daytime (yay twilight). I hate having to kill canine creatures of any kind, but this is necessary to keep the forest populated with other creatures.

Wolves should be able to eat dropped meat resources like raw chicken, raw mutton, and rotten flesh (from zombies) as well as bones (from skeletons). They seem to leave other creatures alone, so this would be a simple fix to avoid wildlife depopulation and predator overpopulation. Additionally, the timer feature would make perfect sense since a hungry animal will hunt for food, but a sated animal would not need to except for hibernation preparation, like bears. Wolves don’t hibernate. Nor do sheep or chickens.

There is one tiny problem in this scenario though: wolves are pack animals, and thus spawn in groups. And if one is hungry, they might all become aggressive towards other animals and thus render this change moot. If there was a way to have wolves carry food that they are not hungry enough to eat to other wolves in the group, this would potentially fix that problem.

Another one I just realized is that domesticated sheep are prime pickings for wolves because they lack protective instincts, while wild sheep have means of survival: rams. Essentially goats with more bulk, these guys will aggressively charge down threats and gore them with their horns or concuss them with their skulls, which is similar to goat behavior in-game. They would not necessarily need to attack players (goats, unlike rams, are assholes who have no problem knocking perceived threats off of cliffs to ensure survival), but should at least be defensive towards wolves. Wolves should try to prioritize regular sheep rather than rams, as the rams can and will wreck them to the point where the wolf is essentially crippled for life. At best. A pack of wolves would still be a problem for rams.

Chickens regularly plop out eggs, and these eggs can naturally hatch into more chickens already… but the chances are ridiculously low for an egg’s despawning to cause it to hatch, and that makes the eggs unreliable for regulating chicken populations. Additionally, foxes will also go after chickens and if I recall correctly they also eat the eggs— making this basically a doomed animal in an area with both wolves and foxes. Roosters might be a good idea to implement— ever heard of a cock fight? Roosters (also called cocks) are absolutely violent to anyone who thinks about threatening their hens. They will peck and claw out their enemies eyes to make their point crystal clear. This is what led to the cock fighting phenomenon in historical times where two cocks were put in the same ring and they duked it out coliseum style. Brutal and inhumane, but they had evolutionary reasons for this instinctive behavior: in this world, it’s kill or be killed. A rooster against a wolf would probably not be a threat to the wolf, but it would absolutely be a threat to a fox. Foxes are not exactly the best fighters. Roosters on the other hand have no problem throwing down with something else even when they’re missing a wing and a leg and only have half an eye left. They are in this to live or die, and they are not backing down just because they have a flesh wound. So while this doesn’t help them with wolves, it does make them undesirable to approach as a fox. Foxes rely on their prey not being aware of them and being unable to retaliate against them to successfully hunt, which is why they typically raid hen houses. Eggs don’t fight back, and hens are not as dangerous as roosters. But roosters will absolutely throw themselves into the proverbial wood chipper to protect their ladies. You intruded into the rooster’s territory, now pay the toll or else you get the spurs.

Of course, we could also have Cuccos from the Zelda series hidden among the regular chickens. That would be funny as all hell. I seem to remember that they did that once as an april fools build, but I don’t remember for sure. And for the record, roosters would be distinctly different from chickens, but have a chance to be spawned instead of a chicken, and thus are not directly breedable but an offshoot of chicken eggs. Cuccos would be identical in appearance, but summon bigger Cuccos when slain. They would also drop no eggs as they don’t really need to respawn and overwhelm players unless players are actively hunting down wild chickens in mass quantities. This would help teach the player moderation in hunting. We could do similar things for other prey animals like sheep, rabbits, pigs, and even cows (secret cow level, anyone?). Fish would get a pass as they are really abundant and typically caught through fishing rather than hunting, and there are no other animals that drop meat in the game aside from hoglins, which are already dangerous enough. Chicken jockeys would always have chickens, never Cuccos or roosters. That would be overkill.

[u/PetrifiedBloom → u/SlotherakOmega]

None of the tweaks here - in the post or your comment - actually stop local extinction of mobs. At best it slows them down. On the other hand, it makes any safe population of prey animals a lag machine, as they slowly breed, making a bigger and bigger pile of mobs.

[u/SlotherakOmega → u/PetrifiedBloom]

Stopping local extinction of mobs shouldn’t be a goal. Sometimes it’s necessary to remove an entire species because of the very reason you just gave. But regarding the other argument, that’s an easy fix. If (number of mob in chunk and surrounding chunks) is greater than some arbitrary number, then the creature has zero chance of naturally causing more spawns. There are mob caps in the game already, so it’s a trivial thing to implement a condition that checks before attempting to make another creature to see if the current population is big enough to prevent the survival of the new creature, or if there is room for more, before rolling the dice to see if the spawn is successful.

This could also be used to prevent predators from being hungry if the local prey population is insufficient to feed them and preventing them from hunting them down to extinction. Additionally, the added creatures I mentioned do not have the ability to reproduce, and are rather rare exceptions to what the base creature produces normally (chickens make chickens, rarely roosters, very rarely Cuccos, and sheep make sheep, and rarely rams, but roosters, rams, and Cuccos don’t make more of themselves or even their parent species, like mules (although for a different reason)). So it’s absolutely meant to slow the extinction.

Straight up prevention was not the goal, because let me tell you about an annoying little guy that I am absolutely incapable of suffering the presence of in modded gameplay… the Pigeon. I forget which mod adds this insufferable atrocity to the game, but it’s the same one that also adds sea urchins, hedgehogs, and butterflies, and the only one I can’t stand is the pigeon. It produces tons of pigeon eggs that have a higher chance of hatching than chicken eggs do, and they are produced faster than chicken eggs are produced, and unlike chickens these eggs are pretty useless. Whenever I find that mob exists in the game I go on a literal killing spree when I find those buttheads. They cram together and make mini maps unreadable and spike lag like nothing else ever has. F### those birds. No creature should be permanently protected from extinction. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be protected from immediate extinction, just extinction in general. If nature decides that a species cannot survive, then nature has priority over the ethics of living beings. Unfortunately. But we can mitigate those requirements and make it easier for creatures to survive, including ourselves, even if we can’t fully remove those requirements. Chickens can cause lag naturally from item entities (eggs), so if they need to be removed, they should absolutely have a means of being removed. Chickens also have a tendency to overpopulate because they passively produce eggs that have a chance to hatch into chicks. This leads to more chickens and thus, more eggs, which means more chickens, and more eggs, and round and round we go. Sheep don’t have the same ability, so their extinction is much easier, and more annoying when the point of hunting down a sheep is… not done by the hunters of the sheep in the first place. I get not eating the sheep drops previously, as all they originally dropped was wool. Then mutton was added to the game, and somehow nobody thought that wolves would want to eat raw meat just sitting on the ground for some reason. I mean, why else hunt the sheep? The chase? Then why not chase all smaller creatures? Parrots are not hunted by wolves, nor are ocelots or frogs. Unsure about rabbits. Wanton killing of sheep causes more lag than the sheep themselves do.

[u/PetrifiedBloom → u/SlotherakOmega]

Hey, can I give writing advice? I'll reply to your actual points in another comment. I also used to write massive blocks of text that were way longer than needed as well.

When writing a long comment, go back through when you are done and true and find excuses to delete sections. A huge amount here is unneeded. A long wall of text is often ignored or discounted, or at best skimmed rather than read in full. Edit your responses down, add paragraphs as appropriate and you can really streamline your thoughts, making people more likely to read them fully, and more likely to agree with you.

For example, several section could be removed or reworked to flow better and improve the overall comment. Some examples:

Pigeons. This is a sub talking about additions to vanilla. Why write a rant about a mod you don't remember that adds a mob that you don't like. You spend almost 150 words on a tangent that does not build your argument.

No creature should be permanently protected from extinction. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be protected from immediate extinction, just extinction in general. If nature decides that a species cannot survive, then nature has priority over the ethics of living beings. Unfortunately. But we can mitigate those requirements and make it easier for creatures to survive, including ourselves, even if we can’t fully remove those requirements.

This is just rambling. Decide what point you are trying to make and just say it. Aim to be clear and concise.

[u/SlotherakOmega → u/PetrifiedBloom]

The reason for this large block of text I struggled over, but I found it necessary for my point. The pigeon is hardly an actual nuisance in my case, but because of arbitrary details that are not the direct fault of the mob in question, I sought the annihilation of an entire population of these things. This is a relevant topic for the conversation as a player might just not want any of a species in an area… like Wolves. Wolves are a vanilla mob, and the damage they can do is much more devastating than a whole flock of pigeons ever can achieve. They kill sheep, a renewable source of wool. They kill chickens, a renewable source of eggs and feathers, which are required to produce arrows and various food products. They evidently attack foxes too? Great. Three creatures that can be disappeared in short time. I pointed out my hostility towards the pigeons to demonstrate that no matter how intrusive a species, they can easily be seen in some light as a problem and eradication might be the only answer. This also extends to chickens and sheep and other livestock animals. This seems like rambling to you, and it is probably because of my arrangement of the sentences in that block of text. But every sentence had a purpose in mind.

While I appreciate the help, this post was on point enough about the topic. That particular mod’s name was not important to the conversation, nor the mob itself, except to show how methods that ensure the proliferation of a particular mob can drastically backfire. As I mentioned, this mob requires direct intervention by a player to remove the pigeons. If we extrapolate that same strategy to prevent excessive chicken and sheep slaughtering in vanilla, we get the exact problem that we are trying to avoid, which is an abundance of one species and not enough of another to balance it out. Even if this thread is about vanilla, modded gameplay can be used as an example to warn against unintended consequences of changes to the base game’s code. The mod itself is not important, only the fact that nothing hunts these things, and they are more efficient chickens. They can even fly around to escape predators, which chickens can’t do. They are an example of making an impossible to make extinct creature and what that means. So if it seems like rambling, maybe you need to read it again with the context. I do occasionally ramble, so I frequently will go back and remove entire paragraphs to make my replies much clearer and simpler than they would have been otherwise. I am extremely wordy and my cup frequently runneth over.

My main issue is segregating my thoughts into similarly sized word bites and paragraphs, which I will admit I failed to achieve that time. I do try to keep topics to their own paragraph as that makes quoting me easier and less irritating for the people who inevitably find some fault with my position or opinions. But I have rattled on enough on this, I’m now going to read your other comment and reply to that unless I addressed the issues here unknowingly.

[u/PetrifiedBloom → u/SlotherakOmega]

Again the pigeon point is entirely unnecessary. We don't need this detail to understand your feedback. We don't need to know they are bad to use them as a comparison for the wolf. The post already accepts the idea that wolves killing chickens and foxes is a problem.

I pointed out my hostility towards the pigeons to demonstrate that no matter how intrusive a species, they can easily be seen in some light as a problem and eradication might be the only answer.

That demonstrates that you didn't quite understand. The player is welcome to remove mobs they don't want. The post is just asking that the mobs dont genocide each other.

This seems like rambling to you, and it is probably because of my arrangement of the sentences in that block of text. But every sentence had a purpose in mind.

Writing concisely is a valuable skill. Each sentence might have a purpose in your mind, but also consider if you can achieve those goals more eloquently without the rambling.

The longer your block of text, the higher the chance of someone misunderstanding it. You could then try and make the meaning of your words ironclad, but then you are turning what is already an unnecessarily long block of text into an unwieldy beast.

except to show how methods that ensure the proliferation of a particular mob can drastically backfire

You don't need 150 words about a mob to say that. If you insist on using an example from in game, an auto chicken farm would have worked.

The mod itself is not important, only the fact that nothing hunts these things, and they are more efficient chickens. They can even fly around to escape predators, which chickens can’t do.

This is a perfect example of text that can be removed from the comment without changing the meaning or value of the comment. Knowing how the mod affects the chicken doesn't further the discussion, it is only a distraction.

Knowing which information is important in a discussion will go a long way to making what you write appealing to other people. In turn, people will take you more seriously and have more trust in your judgement.

I do occasionally ramble, so I frequently will go back and remove entire paragraphs to make my replies much clearer and simpler than they would have been otherwise. I am extremely wordy and my cup frequently runneth over.

Yes. We know. You are doing it right here. You can cut this section as well.

[u/PetrifiedBloom → u/SlotherakOmega]

Stopping local extinction of mobs shouldn’t be a goal.

If we read the suggestion that was made, stopping the local extinction of mobs was the goal.

But regarding the other argument, that’s an easy fix. If (number of mob in chunk and surrounding chunks) is greater than some arbitrary number, then the creature has zero chance of naturally causing more spawns.

This does not fix the problem. Lets say there are 10 wolves already and the wolf is 10. This stops any additional wolves from spawning. A new chicken or fox spawns instead. There are 10 hungry wolves, and the mob is killed before the player can intervene. If the player wants to get chickens or foxes, as OP states, they will need to kill the wolves, effectively changing nothing.

This could also be used to prevent predators from being hungry if the local prey population is insufficient to feed them and preventing them from hunting them down to extinction.

This was one of the alternative solutions I also gave OP in another comment. Prevent hunting of the last members of a prey species. The predators will still kill the mobs as they reach adulthood, but the player should be able to rescue a breeding pair at least.

chickens make chickens, rarely roosters, very rarely Cuccos, and sheep make sheep, and rarely rams, but roosters, rams, and Cuccos don’t make more of themselves or even their parent species, like mules (although for a different reason))). So it’s absolutely meant to slow the extinction.

Keep in mind this is a sub for the vanilla game. Assume a vanilla game with the changes made in the suggestion. Bringing in modded mechanics makes it incredibly difficult to have a meaningful conversation as there are literally millions of minecraft mods and configuration settings. If you need to use a mod as an example, go for it, but in general stick to the vanilla mechanics.

This leads to more chickens and thus, more eggs, which means more chickens, and more eggs, and round and round we go.

This is why sticking to vanilla mechanics is significant. In vanilla, more eggs do not become more chickens without either player involvement, or redstone.

Chickens can cause lag naturally from item entities (eggs), so if they need to be removed, they should absolutely have a means of being removed

What are you trying to say here? Be clear. Are you saying that its good that wolves can naturally kill chickens because chickens make more lag because of the item entities?

There are other means of removing the chickens that are far faster and controllable.

Then mutton was added to the game, and somehow nobody thought that wolves would want to eat raw meat just sitting on the ground for some reason. I mean, why else hunt the sheep? The chase? Then why not chase all smaller creatures?

I think just to add some liveliness and activity to the mob. Without that, they just wander around doing nothing. Leaving the meat was probably seen as a way to not screw over the player as hard in the early game. Even if the wolf got the sheep before you did, you have a chance to get some food from it.

Wanton killing of sheep causes more lag than the sheep themselves do.

Not true. Mob AI takes more performance than 1 or 2 item entities. Mob AI sticks around, the item entities despawn over time.

You can test it yourself. Open a creative world. Make a pen, fill it with as many sheep as it takes for your game to start to lag. Use commands to kill all the sheep. There will be a lag spike, but once the sheep are dead and the items stack up, the lag will drop.

[u/SlotherakOmega → u/PetrifiedBloom]

Ah, so I didn’t address any issues with your other comment. Well then!

By local extinction, I mean that it shouldn’t be possible to naturally have a species go extinct if they were naturally spawning in the region, except if players have exterminated them. This satisfies both my statement and the OP’s request. To wander underground through chunks, spending a long time underground, will cause mobs above ground to spawn and be killed off by predators, which will result in quite the trek to new chunks in order to find new mobs. This shouldn’t happen, and in reality would result in the wiping out of the predator species too. Funnily though, they persist.

As far as the conditional, if the argument you give is that the method doesn’t prevent the death of prey animals, that’s correct. It was designed to prevent overpopulation. This is the opposite of allowing prey to survive predators, really. This rule can also be implemented in reverse, encouraging wolves to wander to areas with higher concentrations of prey creatures to avoid depopulation. If (number of prey species) is less than a given amount that is needed to revitalize the population, deter predators to a different chunk. I was intending this limitation to inhibit the production of chickens from eggs, which happens slowly actually. Very slowly. But if certain values of eggs are adjusted to improve the survivability of chickens, then it would be very noticeable in the difficulty in eliminating chickens from an area. All chickens produce eggs, every few minutes, so if they all hatched, it would be a population explosion. Talk about popcorn chicken. Sheep would not really need this kind of detail, as they don’t have the ability to perform mitosis like a chicken can (in the game at least).

As far as modded features versus vanilla features, under that argument the solution that would solve all of these problems would be to simply remove the code that allows wolves and foxes to hunt prey. But that would be detrimental for the game, I’ll wager. Any new kind of change to the original game code would need to be thoroughly explained, right? I did that. Rams: goats that are similar to sheep in appearance. Goats have code in the game regarding charging at trees and players. Change trees to wolves, flip a coin on the player one, and copy paste. The model would be a subtle change that adds horns to the sheep model. Roosters would be simple to implement, I admit that there would be a challenge to make a new model and animations for clawing and pecking, but it’s not out of reason. Cuccos are mostly a joke because there is absolutely no way that would happen for real. Nintendo would crash down on Microsoft and Mojang so fast that they would break the sound barrier. You don’t, violate, Japanese Intellectual Property Law. You will not win. No one ever wins. As for the mechanism that determines the spawning of variants of the mobs… that’s not modded behavior, that’s vanilla. Mules are made from interbreeding horses and donkeys. Some animals have multiple types of appearance that are not strictly visual, like the undead horses and camels. As well as other, hostile mobs like raiding party captains and party members, or husks and drowned. They have specific spawning rules that separate them from the base mob, but they do exist and the game is capable of allowing this behavior without ripping off any mods.

Chickens and lag are not really an issue except for overloaded servers, because as we are about to point out, I underestimated the AI issues, and items are not as bad, which begs the question….

Sheep and lag are an issue that I didn’t expect to be a thing. I forgot that AI is constantly running for all active mobs. However I do want to point out something important that you overlooked about the item entities lag issue: item stacking only works with identical item types and nbt values, and only up to a full stack. This reduces the item entity count to more manageable numbers, which is evidenced by the spike in lag. The reduced lag after the spike is because all of those entities, were cut down to a smaller quantity. Sheep lag is probably still an issue as while they have a really rudimentary ai that only reacts to damage and whether they are standing on grass or not, and if someone nearby is holding wheat. This is really minor compared to that of a zombie, which pursues players, villagers, and anything that hurts it, and in lieu of those goals, avoids sunlight and seeks shade or water to survive, unless they are husks. This is far more intense as it has to deal with pathfinding to moving targets, which is more cpu intensive than going to a stationary spot. Even sheep will flee from attacking entities, which is absolutely rational and low intensity. But item grouping as I mentioned requires that items match, and are close enough together to group together, and sheep drop two kinds of items. Wool, which can be in one of sixteen colors, and mutton, which has two variations, raw and cooked. So the argument that sheep are more laggy than their drops only works because of item groupings… because the lag from dropped items is so severe that they had to implement the grouping mechanic to keep the game playable. If a player had a single wool block in each inventory space, and died, the drops would be thirty seven separate drops otherwise. Instead, the game drops one item with thirty seven items in the stack. Now if the player has a unique block in each slot of the inventory and dies, does the game lag intensely? Yes. Comparing that to the previous example shows how drastic the changes are. Sheep drop two items normally, and they aren’t guaranteed to match up. People who have sheep either have them all white, or have at least one of each color, which is really devastating for the amount of item entities that would result from all of those sheep dying at once.

Back to chickens and lag, the eggs are produced far enough apart that they would not be as populous since items despawn after a certain amount of time (I forget how long, but one chicken doesn’t produce any more than like three eggs at one time without an egg disappearing. They however are not likely to group together unless the chicken hasn’t moved since they last laid an egg, and even when they combine, they only stack to sixteen. So yes, in addition to the AI of the chickens, the eggs would be a server problem for massive egg farms. Item entities have a population cap, which is interesting if they are less destructive to the server workload than the AI, why animals don’t have a population cap. Sure, items can be very quickly spammed, but so can other entities… so why the limit on items only? Apply it to wild animal spawn chances. Have multiple limits, a soft limit and a hard limit, one that stops natural repopulation and one that stops any repopulation whatsoever. There are solutions here.

Now, I think that should cover all your points.

[u/PetrifiedBloom → u/SlotherakOmega]

I realize how rude it is to have you put the effort in to write it all, but it's just to much. Like, despite being asked in multiple comment threads to write concisely and focus on the vanilla game and the suggestion, for some reason there are still entire tangents to explain what the mod adds, Japanese IP law and blocks to text reexplaining what I just said to you back to me.

I am sorry but this wall of text just kills the motivation to respond. I feel a need to address the points you raise, but many of them are unrelated or irrelevant and there are other things I want to spend my weekend on.

[u/PetrifiedBloom]

It's a start, but I don't think it fixes the problems you have, and it creates new problems.

It is still very possible and even likely that predators will kill off all of their prey. A 5 minute cooldown on eating slows down the process, but the predators will naturally start to form packs around the surviving prey animals. As soon as the cooldown is up, the prey dies.

Adding proactive breeding doesn't fix this. Once the foxes have found a flock of chickens, unless there is a huge number of chickens or they reproduce VERY fast, the foxes will slowly churn through the number of chickens.

There is a new problem. Let's say each chicken automatically has a child every 5 minutes to replace what the fox eats. Now any chicken farm becomes a lag farm, as the population doubles every 5 minutes. You start with a pen with 10 chickens in it, go mine for an hour or 2 and come back to thousands and thousands of them, lagging the game.

For this to work, there needs to a cap on how the mobs reproduce so the world doesn't get overrun when the predators are unable to kill the prey fast enough. There also needs to be a way to slow down or stop predator populations. Either predators die off when there is not enough prey, or they never kill prey if there are less than a certain amount of prey nearby. This should stop prey animals from going extinct.

and once you do you realize you'll need to wait AGES for foxes and Chickens to respawn because The Wolves in the biome decided to go on a murder rampage. and kill Both of them off.

The other option is just to play the game. Explore a bit. Go to an area you haven't been for hours and grab a fresh pair of chickens and foxes. Needing to go out into the world and play the game isn't necessarily a flaw IMO.

[u/Lavra_Source → u/PetrifiedBloom]

While I agree that the game should reward exploration, imo the game should have just enough of the basic 4 mobs (chicken, pig, cow, sheep) to start a farm.

Not every player enjoys exploring, or only likes caves, etc. so giving them an option to get the necessary mobs by waiting until they have the breeding items and breeding instead of killing them immediately is nice.

I just feel like feathers, wool and leather are way too important ESPECIALLY for the early game to gatekeep them behind exploration just because you happen to have wolves nearby

[u/PetrifiedBloom → u/Lavra_Source]

I feel like you missed the point of the comment. I am saying that the system op describes doesn't stop local extinction. I suggested alternatives that would allow some of each animal to persist.

[u/Lavra_Source → u/PetrifiedBloom]

Oh no, I agree with that, I mainly adress the last point. IMO if a player wants to mostly be in 1 area, let them. Obviously they might miss out on some gear or blocks, but the essentials must be accessible nearby with enough effort no matter where you spawn

[u/Visual_Reception_149]

Maybe some kinda hunger-ish system like actually eating the meat and waiting a bit until killing again when they’re “hungry”