I’ve been enjoying the blog posts about development of the larger Around the World; but it seems like the absolute opposite of a hackathon project. And that’s okay. But based on the pace of development it seems like there’s still plenty of time to wait for something playable.
Achieving maximum density appears related to the NP-complete Knapsack problem ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knapsack_problem )
However, for low-density areas, the bias should be too low to notice.
Trees grow closer to one another in dense forests - perhaps dividing the exclusion radius by the density factor would keep the bias low enough to be invisible?