Can we stop the cycle of mutation of the animal encounter rules? Every edition since CT has tweaked the animal building tables a little, and most have done so in defiance of attached modifiers, described procedures, and, frankly, biology. It has reached the point where the current versions cannot replicate reality. IIRC, only carnivores get armor under current rules, so you can't replicate an armadillo, pangolin, porcupine, or ankylosaur.
All animal types roll for armor in the current rules (pg. 71, first sentence of second paragraph.)
However, I have to say that I don't use the current rules to create creatures, they just don't produce results I find interesting. So I fall back to designing the creature first, then giving it characteristics to match the design.
On the current system:
The planetary quirks are the most interesting item and the strongest guidance to the nature of the creature. Yet they're planetary, meaning they apply to everything that lives there. Every animal I roll up for Grue 1107 is a nest-stealer? Who builds them, extraterrestrials? Obviously the system isn't intended for build ecosystems, but just the occasional one-off creature, in a supposed more general (and less well defined) environment.
Weapon -6 DM for herbivores? Yeah, right! There isn't much of anything I know of that benign. Anything from the size of a hamster on up can hurt you bad enough that you don't want to mess with it.
That's on top of the lack of variety overall. There's a lack of the exotic or unexpected everywhere but in the short lists of planetary quirks. When I roll up a creature, all I get is something that comes out as an ordinary, familiar creature with a few quirks. I look at the results and say, "Uhhh, I guess it's a groundhog with sensitive hairs? But no...no claws. Hmm. Clawless groundhog with senstive hairs?" I should get a better image of what the thing is or could be.
What I do:
For plants, I use a system that mixes and matches traits for plant encounters and plant-like resources for planets. Every item that comes out is interesting enough to use. With a bit more work I could associate specific characteristics and skills with each trait (with scaling by size) so that I don't have to work that out on a case by case basis each time, as I do now. I use a computer program, but it's based on d66 die rolls.
I've been looking at doing something similar for animals, since I've been happy with the results of the plant system.
Originally I used a system based on the old Eon game Quirks to do iterative creation of creatures and plants using traits with different scores for different environments. I used the scores to determine what environments the plants and animals lived in, and the relative strength of the score to determine which were dominant.
Building creatures is so fun and easy this way it's like building subsectors--in an afternoon you can generate more than you can use in a campaign (allowing me to pick and choose my favorites for the game.)
Now I typically skip the iteration, and just build some organisms and place them. The iterative process allows for genetic variation of the organisms over time as a result of competition, radiation, etc., and it gets to be a distraction.
Edit: I now see that the creature creation is about 80-90% the system from Traveller Starter Edition. Kudos for going with a system that's established CT "canon" as a base, but the original CT '77 system, a close sibling to the Starter Edition, didn't excite me, either. I built my own creatures then attached the CT terminology to them afterward. I did use in-game skills and weapon equivalences at build, though.
