smaller update so i'll just reply to this post, but..........
the base trainer is officially functional! they now have a chance to drop food every 15 seconds by default; 100% if they didn't drop food last tick, and 50% if they did. once there's more... game in the game, i'll be able to tweak these odds depending on how viable foraging turns out to be.
additionally, there's now a shopping_threshold that gets checked against the current size of their food inventory; once food stores get low enough, they add a "grocery shopping" event to the front of their queue, which will make the next event a "grocery" event. grocery events also ignore the event queue cap, and can be added to the queue even when it's otherwise considered full. as i explain this i'm realizing i should add a check to make sure the next queued event isn't ALREADY grocery, otherwise they might queue a ton of shopping trips...
while events can be queued and technically triggered for testing purposes, they don't do anything yet except delete themselves. working on that is the next step because it involves drawing another background, LOL