Plants vastly outnumber animals, and every herbivore forage decision scanned ALL
plants — the dominant per-decision cost. New PlantGrid (uniform cell grid, cell
lists pooled so rebuild is alloc-free) is rebuilt once per frame from plant
positions; TryFindPlant/TryFindBestPlant now gather only candidates from cells
overlapping the vision radius instead of iterating every plant. The entry carries
position/id/toxicity/palatability so no component refetch is needed. Selection is
unchanged (nearest / max-attractiveness, id tie-break), and since the result is
order-invariant the behaviour is identical and deterministic. Build + check clean.
Note: the animal-side neighbour scans (threat/prey/mate/herd) are still O(animals)
per decision — animals are far fewer than plants, and an animal grid is a riskier
change best done with a GUI run; deferred.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Leonid PershinandClaude Opus 4.8
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