Mods/Settings/Patches for more realistic animal spawns?

[Mrozak]

I find the world a bit too crowded, with animals almost everywhere.
It reminds me of the mobs from World of Warcraft, and my immersion suffers greatly because of this.

I am currently trying Biomes together with Entities Configuration, and Entities Interact with Feverstone Wilds (to add a little more types of animals).
Trying for hours to find the "right" configuration values, but it is very hit and miss, and confusing - for example, even with same settings, sometimes i get 0 bears, then i start new server (same settings and seed) and the same area has suddenly 6 bears even though i didn't change anything regarding bear spawns.

I am getting closer to what i think makes sense regarding perceived animal population density, but some animal spawns are weird.
Notably the foxes - i lowered the values enough so there isn't a fox every 100m2 as before, but they sometimes come in "bulks" - nothing nothing, one fox, nothing nothing nothing, so far so good, but then suddenly a group of 5 foxes at the same place, which doesn't make sense to me.

To illustrate what i am trying to do, here is how i got the foxes setup in Entities Configuration:

Foxes-Arctic-Worldgen-Vintage: 0.05 # from 0 to 0.2 with step of 0.001 (default: 0.15)
Foxes-Red-Worldgen-READ-Vintage: 0.02 # from 0 to 0.2 with step of 0.001 (default: 0.075)
Foxes-All-Runtime-Vintage: 2 # from 0 to 500 with step of 0.05 (default: 60)

Note the huge difference from the default values.
As i wrote, i got their population under control now, maybe i could even increase it by a tiny bit, but what's with them sometimes appearing in groups?
 

Clearly, i need some help
Maybe somebody else went through the same and can share some tips or even config files?

[Dnd]

I can help you with this since I am the author of Entities Configuration. On my modpage I already discussed how Biomes works, and what might be happening with your bears. There are a few things to know about spawning.

• There are 2 controllers for spawning most of the base game creatures. Worldgen and Runtime.
• Runtime spawn values mostly range anywhere from 0.00001 to 0.001. There are obviously exceptions to this, and you will notice that as you see those specific defaults in my mod. Runtime values are lower than worldgen values for the most part.
• Worldgen spawn values are usually 0.001 to 0.1 and to get an idea on those numbers, chickens are set to 0.1 as the highest of all creatures.
• Worldgen values and Runtime values are different in my mod due to the way I had to make some conversions to make it compatible with the ingame UI.
• Worldgen values in my mod are directly from the game. You can go from 0.001 to 0.2 in-game, or you could adjust the conig file to anything you like and exceed the limits I placed. If you do go above 0.2, things might get a little crazy and you would get tons of those creatures.
• Runtime values can go from 1-500 in my mod. You could go lower, but I wouldn't go lower than 0.5. These values are just a mathematical conversion of the game; 1 is equal to 0.0001 and 500 is equal to 0.005. The conversion for runtime is x divided by 1e5 (x / 1e5), where x is your value. So 500 divided by 1e5 is equal to 0.005.
• Worldgen: Creatures spawn as you explore the undiscovered areas of the map.
• Runtime: Creatures spawn in your vicinity (loaded chunks) and many creatures have a check of distance to player for spawning.

For others that might have the same issues, I will post what we talked about on my modpage.

You are using the Biomes mod (absolutely love that mod), and that has an additional check for creature spawning, and likely is the reason you got so unlucky. The game runs a check to meet all spawn conditions, if those are met, the creature spawns (let's use a brown bear as the example). Now Biomes runs a check, base game bear spawn conditions met, biomes region check fails, nothing spawns.

Now the next part is where I am actually not sure and I am guessing. Perhaps, the game only checks for 1 bear, because bears in the base game can't spawn near each other. If this is the case, it might check for brown bear, everything looks good to spawn, but then biomes does a check; if the game doesn't run anymore bear checks of any other bear species I could see a string of failed biomes checks causing the lack of bears.