Animals eating plants should not destroy the plant

[Nickvr628]

Like the title says, currently if an animal eats a plant, that plant is destroyed. This means that if you have lots of hungry animals on the map (I'm looking at you elephant herds) they will decimate the plant life and nothing will ever grow.

I suggest that when an animal consumes a plant, it reduces the growth level by a certain amount. Lets say by 60%. That way, when an elephant munches on an agave plant it is not gone forever. It just has to spend several days regrowing until it can produce food again. This would make the food sources sustainable, instead of the map turning into a barren wasteland after a herd of elephants wander through.

TL;DR: When an animal consumes a plant, it should reduce the growth level by a certain amount, instead of destroying the plant.

[mumblemumble]

I actually really like this idea, would make pastures more pheasable,  and critters eating gardens less hair pulling frustrating.

[SadisticNemesis]

Honestly this would help with the plant life regrowing a lot... its normally a nightmare after a cold winter, all animals dart after each and every plant or bit of grass so nothing ever grows again.

[NephilimNexus]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbits_in_Australia

[Mikhail Reign]

I actually really like this idea, would make pastures more pheasable,  and critters eating gardens less hair pulling frustrating.

Oooooooohhhhhh. you mean feasible. That other post makes so much more sense now.

On topic - def. I have a paddock with about... 15? animals in it and almost no matter how large I make their allowed area they strip it bare. Even planted a hay feild in there and I still occasionally get animals starving. If they eat a plant they should do about as much damage to its growth as they would have eaten of its end product - havested plant would yeild 100 food and they would eat 10 each 'eat' then they should knock off around 10% off its growth (maybe 20% to account for damage done as well as eaten plant).

Also as a reply to the rabbits link - yeah they cause heaps of damage to our crops - not strip the ground to bare soil over the course of a couple of days and never allowing anything to grow again.

[Keychan]

I feel like with the corpse eating mechanic, this should work as well.  It'll also balance small vs big animal diets as a rabbit should not be eating the same amount as a muffalo everytime its hungry.

[Boston]

In the real-world colonization of North America, settlers had some pretty big problems with wild animals sneaking in (or, commonly, just waltzing in) ans stripping crops bare.

Seriously, a couple of rabbits or a single deer can strip a house-sized garden clean in a couple of nights.

Solve the problem by killing them. Even if you don't need the meat. That is what the settlers of New England did, once they got fed up with deer eating all their corn.

For the poster running out of animal fodder, that is a sign you have too many animals. Slaughter the ones you don't need. If you aren't planning on growing your herd, why keep the juveniles? Or the males, for that matter? I raise muffalo, and I can get by quite happily with a single breeding female. When I want calves, I go out and tame a male, let them do their business, then kill the male for food. If the calves are male, they get killed too.

Animal husbandry, in-game and in-real life, is highlyresource-intensive. It takes 10x the amount of corn (and 10X+ the amount of land, for that matter) to raise one lb of beef than it does to raise one lb of corn for human food.

[Regret]

This definitely needs re-balancing though maybe in a different way.
How about an increase in the number of seeds and/or seed spreading rates?

Maybe a different way to achieve a similar effect would be to let every plant on being eaten spawn a seed. (or let the animal spawn/poop the seed)
This should be a bit less of an hit on the performance though I have no idea how much memory that would take. (Hell, it may be processing power and not memory, I am quite ignorant about the details of programming.)

Or dormant seeds in the ground if you want to go for full realism.
Dormant seeds can be used with trees as well so you never completely run out of trees.
You can even make dormant seed activate based on soil quality or something.
That way some parts grow so dense with trees that you can barely pass through them.

That reminds me of a game mechanic in The Horde where planting trees stabilized the soil so other stuff could be built/grown there.

I just hope overgrazing doesn't get taken out completely, I just don't want it to be so completely irreversible as it is now. Usually after 1 year over half of the map has suffered serious ecological damage through visiting beavers and large forest fires.
I don't mind either if trees and grass ever grew back.
I think a good forest fire takes about 70 in-game years to get filled with grass again. Even planting dandelions doesn't work because they barely spread. Even just having plants start growing every spring would bring a lot of balance back to the ecosystem.
Usually in early game I can let predators live and they only occasionally bother my animals (more often in winter, which makes sense and is a very cool emergent event) but later when most of the unused map has burned down too often there is nothing for their prey animals to eat so they leave soon and the bears etc. come for my farm animals. Obviously I lock my farm animals up, and I would love to see this happen if I was the main cause of them not having any food but for it to always happen is annoying.

[mumblemumble]

Higher seed rate means more lag,  i think having 2 -  4 bites depending on plant sixe would be nice.

[Regret]

Higher seed rate means more lag,  i think having 2 -  4 bites depending on plant size would be nice.

Fair, but there needs to be a downside to eating a juvenile plant though, just as in real life.

seed spawning from animals based on what plant they last ate would be fun without adding a lot more seeds to be simulated.

[Limdood]

animals require scaled nutrition based on size

Each plant provides an amount of nutrition at 100% grown, and scales to the % grown (a plant with 50 nutrition at full would give 3 nutrition at 6% grown)

If an animal requires enough nutrition that they COULD reduce a plant to -50% growth, they eat the plant.  If the plant is at 0% and they cant get it to -50%, they ignore it.

Take the 50 nutrition plant.
Plant is fully grown:
a muffalo needing 80 nutrition would kill the plant and get 75 nutrition.
A muffalo needing 60 nutrition would reduce the plant to 0% growth and gain 50 nutrition
a bunny needing 30 nutrition would reduce the plant from full growth to 40% grown and gain all 30 nutrition

Plant is at 0% growth:
A bunny needing 20 nutrition would ignore the plant (but would drop it back to 0% once it gets up to 2% and gain the 1 nutrition)
A capybara needing 30 nutrition would kill the plant and gain 25 nutrition.

So plants would give an amount based on their growth and overall provided nutrition, but would have a reserve of about 50% of their total max that can only be consumed all at once, and if it is, destroys the plant completely.

This gives the spirit of the original suggestion while still maintaining the realism of animals stripping a map/area barren....just...harder