wicked tinsel
Unpopular opinion here but I feel like the game has become: set drink time, hunt waters edge. Which nullifies the concept of hunting in my opinion.
My solution idea is to limit drink times to much less such as 1 hour. Meaning if you want to farm then you can either pay to reset the time if you're committing to it or hunt the natural way.
trail pawn
Honestly the drink time meta has also irritated me for quite a while as well. It feels more like a cull then hunting and on top of that animals usually don't drink at the waters edge in a realistic way, it is better than in the past but there's room for improvement for sure
winged ferry
Even having the animals move between drinking by the water directly and foraging nearby would break it up.
Basically just have the animals actually… feel alive and active
soft canopy
Yeah the animals do feel like they are on some kind of schedule lol. Maybe just having an often and rare zone for certain herds could make them feel more living. Maybe even letting them not come into their zones sometimes could also help.