Separate spawn rate factors for monsters and animals/other passive things?

[arockperson]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

I like to change the spawn rate factor in worldgen to 2-4 to make the game harder with more enemies. There's a problem with this, though. It actually makes the game easier as well, since there are also 2-4x as many animals! This makes the difficulty of hunting enough food go from pretty easy to extremely trivial.

Additionally, the increased animal spawn rate is flat out annoying in rivers, where there are swarms of ducks and water striders everywhere.

Solution you would like.

Split spawn rate factor into two parts: one for monsters and one for other creatures. The cutoff isn't exactly clear, sure, but it's pretty obvious that things like deer and ducks, etc, that can't even attack (I think?) aren't monsters. So more or less "things that will attack you / make the game more difficult" and "things that won't attack you (99% of the time) and make the game easier"

Splitting it in two would allow the player to fight more zombies without an absurd amount of harmless critters, or even give the option of reducing animal spawns to make the game far more challenging if relying on hunting for food.

The spawn rate even mentions that it is for "monsters", which makes it surprising that it applies to cute little ducklings.

Describe alternatives you have considered.

Just remove animals, etc from the spawn rate factor. But I think giving an additional option would only be a positive.

Additional context

Stuff like this is pretty common.

[Night-Pryanik]

We already have separate multiplier for animal spawn. It's located in game_balance.json:

{
    "type": "EXTERNAL_OPTION",
    "name": "SPAWN_ANIMAL_DENSITY",
    "info": "A scaling factor that determines density of wild, formerly domesticated and mutated animal spawns.",
    "stype": "float",
    "value": 1.0
  }

[arockperson]

Huh, well I'll definitely use that, thanks. I still think it would be good to add to the worldgen settings so you could play on different worlds without adjusting the animal spawns every time (if I'm understanding this correctly).

[Night-Pryanik]

I still think it would be good to add to the worldgen settings so you could play on different worlds without adjusting the animal spawns every time (if I'm understanding this correctly).

Not gonna happen: #28349 (comment)