Predators consume things they kill

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I’ve noticed that animals don’t require food to survive - I’ve also noticed that predators/aggressive animals tend to rack up a lot of kills. Like a lot of kills - and since animals can’t ‘eat’ their kills, the wide availability of pre-killed animals frequently gets to the point that hunting/fishing isn’t really necessary. This is most noticeable on the water - I’ve frequently encountered rivers filled with corpses and one large diving beetle that quickly bleeds out.

I am new to modding and wanted to ask how hard it would be to implement some sort of way to give living creatures a ‘satiety’ meter or check list or some sort of mechanic to lessen the frequency of self-depopulation. Ideally, this mod would also include giving animals the ability to consume parts or all of their kills, maybe in the same way slimes and certain special zombies absorb things, but the fact that these mechanics aren’t already present leads me to believe that it is probably pretty complicated and maybe beyond my skill level.

I did a little bit of searching around, but only found a Topic from 2017. Has anyone else tried to implement something similar before? Would the more recent build make it potentially more doable?

2

This sort of thing was recently implemented into the game. Monsters can have the "stomach_size" entry to define a limit to how much they can eat. The special attacks responsible for having monsters consume things adds to this value, and they stop eating once stomach size has been met or somehow exceeded.

Lots of predators still need this entry and the special attacks responsible for eating corpses, so this would be a better entry for the main branch rather than a mod, I believe. The documentation for all of this can be found here.

For reference, a cow has a JSON defined stomach size of 6000.

3

Thank you for pointing this out! This seems like it’d be a relatively easy if slightly repetitive sort of thing, so I’ll try my hand at helping to add more to that list