Animals in Harder Wildlife will age and die over time, as well as attempt to repopulate their local numbers, although small groups can still die out. It is also more resource costly to breed animals, taking on average 6 feeding attempts to encourage "love mode." Each animal has its own probabilities, depending on their type.
As Resources[]
All drops from animals have been increased substantially. Cows drop more leather and beef, pigs drop more pork and additionally some leather, sheep drop multiple wool (and more food, if Gany's Surface enables it), horses also drop a small amount of additional leather. This makes killing animals more a viable food source, especially during the early game, as well as making leather an early-game resource for armor as it was intended to be, rather than requiring massive farms to produce in quantity.
Rawhide[]
- Animals that normally drop leather instead drop rawhide, which needs to be tanned on a tanning rack, before it is usable for crafting. This can be disabled in the config, if desired.
Hostile Mobs[]
- Skeletons drop additional arrows and spiders drop additional string. This makes hunting them a viable tactic for some resources, rather than being a necessity to survive the night. Bones are left as-is, as the millstone already increases the amount of bonemeal gained on average compared to vanilla.
Milking[]
- Cows (and Mooshrooms) have an internal counter for milk (stew) storage, allowing a maximum 3 buckets of milk to be stored up. By default this counter increments at a rate that results in 1 bucket added every 12 Minecraft Hours (twice a MC day).
Breeding[]
The food resource needed to breed animals is unchanged, but the number of attempts has gone up. It is now a random chance, 1 in X as listed. This is to offset the increased drop counts for the later game.
Cows are 8, chickens are 12 (due to the ease of acquiring seeds as well as the chickens that hatch from eggs), pigs are 4, and all others are 6. Sheep are 2 unless Gany's Surface is installed, in which case it is 8.
AI Changes[]
Animals have a small chance of going into love mode automatically. If there are fewer than 12 individuals nearby, the rate increases. If there are less than 6, it increases again. At more than 20, they age more quickly due to over-crowding (with larger and larger populations causing increasing penalties). Populations between 6 and 20 should be relatively stable.
There is also a tweak intended to help counter the natural "spread" behavior of the AI Wander task, helping to keep groups loosely together so that they don't wander too far away from each other, get isolated, and die off from old age due to having no potential mates to cause population replacement. As animals only wander around when the player is within 16 blocks, this shouldn't be needed most of the time.
Herbivorous animals also need a source of food they could eat, their AI task will urge them towards Death's door if no suitable block is found nearby. For most animals this means grass or leaves within a 5x5x5 area centered on them. Mooshrooms will also accept mycelium, while goats will check in a 17x9x17 volume and accept cactus and dead shrubs. No action is taken to consume the located block (unlike sheep wool regrowth) simply validating the existence. For wild animals this check should always succeed. Carnivorous animals don't hunt, beyond their existing vanilla behaviors (the required checks are too broad with too high a range to be meaningful).
Goats[]
Goats were added to the Mesa, Mesa Plateau, and Extreme Hills biomes. They are functionally equivalent to sheep, but with a different model and spawn area. When killed, they drop chevon, which is identical to Gany's Surface's and vanilla 1.8's mutton in all respects. Without Gany's Surface, sheep will only drop wool, while goats will drop both. This change is to supply a survivable quantity of food and wool in the mesa biomes, which are otherwise deserted.