I have a question, partially regarding the problems grazing animals have right now with starving to death so easily
How do Grazing, Hunger, and grass growth work alongside each other?
To be more specific, I can see that the GRAZER:X token allows X hunger to be removed for every unit of grass eaten.
What determines the rate at which hunger increases? Is creature size a factor?
Is a 'unit' of grass simply 1/4 the maximum amount that is growing on a space?
If creature size is a factor in determining rate of hunger, why is there such an enormous difference in how much hunger is removed?
First, Limegreen, not Green.
Second, one unit of hunger is added every frame, regardless of creature speed. The average creature gets 1 turn every 10 frames, and one of those turns has to be used moving, so any creature with Grazer:19 or less cannot feed itself. An elephant, which only removes 12 hunger per eating of grass, is on a countdown to starvation the instant that hunger is in place. I'm told they generally starve within a season regardless of anything you try to do, short of butchering them immediately.
Third, creature size is only a factor in how Toady hand-coded the raws. I'm assuming hunger coding involves simply iterating a hunger counter for every hunger-tracked creature every frame, and creature size will only have an impact on how much they need to eat at once. You can manually recode Elephants to eat as little as rabbits if you so chose.
Fourth, creature size is such an enormous difference because
the creatures have such enormous differences in size. Toady clearly simply started with 60,000,000 and divided by creature size to find the grazer value. No other factors of creature metabolism or attributes or individual animal size difference compared to the average of the species or even the age category are as yet implemented (although Toady's recent response implies that is coming), so this is purely a function of size alone, and you're comparing a 5-metric-ton elephant to a .5-kilogram rabbit. Hence, rabbits eat 1/10,000 as much food as an elephant. (Only technically not, since a rabbit would starve before it got to 120,000 hunger, anyway. This intermediate-stage hunger thing lacks sanity checking.)