Predator-Prey Oscillations

[Onionfighter]

It might be interesting to make the spawn rate of certain animals dependent on predator-prey relationships.

I am not entirely sure how animal spawning happens, but the way I would imagine this happening is by counting each species individual as it is de-spawned. These animals could count as the living population, which could be tallied every set period of time. The number of the species, and the number of each species it interacts with would determine the amount of animals that spawn over the next time period.

While this may be frivolous, and could end up with weird patterns, it would make the world more dynamic, and I think it would be cool to see the effects of player-animal / animal-animal interaction.

Scenarios I imagine: rabbit population explosions followed by fox population explosions; rabbit population drops leading to player created hunting moratoriums; rabbit/chicken/rat/frog population recovery by players releasing all the animals they have stored in chests.

[EveryTimeV]

Or better yet just give the animals some degree of hunger. Upon reaching the cap where you become hungry the animal would just actively seek out nutrition. This can lead players to massive amounts of rabbits if they were to suddenly un-trap a fox they'd been partially starving - Thus also attracting a hunting ground for foxes in general.

It's a tactic people have used in life too, follow them home.

A food chain should be produced though, cows would be significantly hard to find unless the cattle was given a natural predator such as... Lions, cats even? Depending on the climate. Bears would most likely just eat anything that comes within it's path including you.