I was thinking while trying to find a specific tree among many, perhaps forests needs to be fleshed out.
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Different forests could have different preferences for wildlife, trees, bushes
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Having forests diversified on a map-generation basis could allow for more content, including forest-but-weird specific things
Examples: Pine forest, Maple forest, fruiting forest, etc. Squirrels like hickory, birch, maple, and oak, from a quick search that’s oddly relevant. What trees do moose like? Do deer and the wolves that follow have a preference? Rabbits?
Going the second step, it would allow for “trifified”/fungal forest regions. An exceptionally rare “abomination” could have forests, with trees that are actually ents, or trees that stretch out their roots to harass you. There could be a fleshy/zombie forest where you get many chunks of zombified meat from picking plants. On that note, different kinds of forageable bushes. A cyborg variant could have metallic trees that drop metal chunks, and you could get scrap from foraging, besides cyborg enemies and small robotic critters.
- The different forests could have less-traditional setpieces, and themed variations. Maybe there was a log cabin, but now it’s made of zombie flesh and drives you mad and makes you nauseous from being inside too long. A “pulsating flesh mound” could spit out zombies nearby, or robot critters if a mill (with lots of motors and tools) was making them, with a themed “master controller” enemy to destroy/disable to shut it down.
It could need some tweaking, because fungus spreads fungus etc, but it could be a long-term (realistically unmaintainable) goal to limit the spread of malignant forests.