Herbivore bug?

[BawlZack]

Sorry for not posting under bug reports, not sure if I'm doing something wrong. The last 2 worlds I've started, all my creatures evolved into full on herbivores, diet -1. No other variations. Map 1 I started with Predator and Prey, and all the predators went extinct as usual, but no herbivore ever deviated from diet -1. World 2 I started from a Blank Slate and left the simulation running overnight at x10 speed. 14 Species evolved, all of them max herbivore -1. Am I missing something or is this a bug?

[Excellion]

Currently the game is a bit biased towards evolving herbivores over carnivores, mostly because a succesfull carnivore mutation has a tendency to overexpand and wipe out all herbivores. There are a few methods to stimulate a more diverse population though:

1. Use the "Niches" population control option instead of "On" or "Off".
The niches population control set a food efficiency type per food type instead of a global food efficiency rate. More creatures eating the same food causes that types efficiency to decrease whereas no or little creatures eating a food type causes that food types efficiency to increase.

If you have only herbivores around they will gradually become less succesfull whereas meat will because more advantageous. This stimulates the evolution of carnivores.

2. Set the fertility rate low or gradually lower it while your creatures evolve.
Having a lot of plants around tends to generate herbivores (As there are no shortages of that food type). Lowering fertility generates less plants which causes creatures to look for other food types. Also, starvation causes corpses, which contain meat and thus might stimulate a creature to take a bite.

[BawlZack]

Thanks for your response. My population has been stable well below the creature cap. My cap being 1500, my population has averaged around 300 to 400 creatures. Even if the game is biased towards herbivores, I would have expected to see some with a diet of -0,9, -0,8 etc. However I have only seen diets of exactly -1. Has the dietary function changed since the last update?

[Pigeon On A Stick]

How has your cap stayed so low? Mine just inflates until it hits the limit, and I've basically just given up by now.

[BawlZack]

I started off by lowering the world fertility a bit. I also set the temperature to longitude so a portion of my map is too cold and hasn't been populated yet. Also I've gotten lucky as my species have small litter sizes, averaging 1.2.

[Excellion]

Originally posted by BawlZack:

Even if the game is biased towards herbivores, I would have expected to see some with a diet of -0,9, -0,8 etc. However I have only seen diets of exactly -1. Has the dietary function changed since the last update?

Did you check the clade diagram \ map for the diet, or did you also check individual creatures? (Opening the map and selecting "Diet" should color the creatures by diet type).

I had creatures registered as "-1 herbivore" in the overview yet on closer inspection there was also a substantional part of the population that actually had 0.9 in the stat. There were also a few members with 0.5 or even lower though they were rarer. Averaging all creatures and rounding the result up the "average" creature could very well have been a 1.0 herbivore, even though there was plenty of variance in the population.

The average creature displayed can be a tad misleading as it is an attempt to average the entire population. Especially the visuals for the average member of a species might be WAY of when compared to specific members. Its currently broken, but the Web of Life displayed this very well (It generated an overview of all members of a species, and calculated how different it was from the "average" creatures. The outlier creatures might have very well been an entirely different species in some cases).