Food doesn't have an effect on energy, only 'hunger' which is pretty much a hidden value.
the idea is, certain types of food will change the monsters mood over time - but to limit the player forcing the monster to eat it all the time, i've made the monster a bit picky, he only looks for food when his hunger is at minus, and he'll only eat food he's put near if his hunger is down to 20%.
I should also point out, the only items which the AI can use are the training aid and the food bowl, the others dont have any 'configuations' yet so are just null objects which the monster doesn't even bother looking at yet.
the monsters dont need to sleep, as it'd make the game far to dull - so i made the energy regenerate when the monster is just walking about or doing nothing, whenever he uses training aids of fights, his energy will go down - if he over exhausts himself training/fighting he will fall asleep, but most of the time he'll just run away from the fight/training when his energy starts getting low.
i'm spending most of my time atm just balancing the AI out, then adding a new type of 'object' and repeating - as later on when the map has 50 odd types of objects, other monsters all walking about - it'll be very hard to figure out what one object is making him behave 'incorrectly'.
I'm looking foward to getting the monster/monster interactions done, monsters will fall out, make friends, follow each other about and maybe even train with a little 'sparring' between one another.
i've yet to add monster class's, but depending on the class and level you'll get a choice of skills the monster can develop, sorta like special moves which he can use. so if you make a team, u might make one monster a brute force attacker, another monster a ranged fighter, and maybe one who uses stealth. as that team would perform better together than 3 of the same.
path finding needs to be re-done, so he can walk diagnals, also collision detection needs to be done so he cannot walk thru objects (thats waiting on the path finding).
anyway, i could go on all night about stuff which i need to add - i'll get another beta out once some of its added
thanks for suggestions everybody, i need some sleep now.