yeah, some kinda of funnel fungus, they drop vital orbs and reactive lamella.
Looking around, some of my more distant harvesting grounds are more plentiful, which is helpful, but there are a lot of barren spots that I had marked as full of plants before.
I guess the plants move around a bit and don’t stay in the same clusters forever. At least I can run around indefinitely.
I’m unsure if this is true, since I have a little area of desert swords near me, and I just harvest those with my axe and they seem to regrow perfectly fine without me breaking any blocks. It could very well be that someone else is breaking blocks there that make them respawn, I can neither confirm nor deny that 
I got that info directly from a dev on a similar post. 
It has to do with whats broken within a “chunk”, which iirc is 2 plots or 16m square, from mantle to ceiling.
Ah! So if anything in the chunks is broken, it will auto generate? Because that would definitely explain why my patches regrew without me breaking the blocks under the flowers.
Any block like soil, rock, or trunks and foliage will initiate regeneration. Not surface resources like mushrooms and desert swords or boulders.
Edit: @lucadeltodecso maybe you could explain it better?
Found it! @Splutty [quote=“lucadeltodecso, post:2, topic:15694”]
‘only’ gather surface resources and never place or modify other blocks, then a current issue is that this wont trigger regeneration of the chunk (as nothing has changed to be regenerated) which also means resource regeneration which occurs as a result of regeneration wont trigger
[/quote]
Edit: that is from the besevrona surface resources thread. If you want to read the whole post they do explain it more like the chunk deal and whatnot
So you should break a block afterwards whenever you dig something out?
Exactly. This will trigger regen counter and at some point stuff will regenerate.
If you won’t do that and you are gathering in a place where no miner will ever come, than tough luck, it can take undefined amount of time until finally regen occurs.
I bet there are spots on land which has never regenerated 
without surface resources.
Imma go break a bunch of blocks around ny place. 
Incidentally the graveyard I was breaking blocks in yesterday was teeming with mushrooms again today.
I had previously believed regeneration was working properly, because I was finding resources in abundance far from the portal hubs, and would also find some in high traffic areas. But it now seems possible that I only found resources in distant places because hey had never been harvested, and the ones I found close to portals were the only regenerated resources.
It seems like a sub-optimal algorithm if players need to make special accommodations to make it work as intended…
What do you guys mean by “graveyard?”
It’s a biome with grass, trees with no leaves, and stones arranged to look like headstones. If you dig under the headstones you can find gleam, growth, or sometimes just dirt. Some stones are arranged to form more elaborate tombs, which more often contain growth if you’re into that.
There are usually lots of monsters around. There tend to be many plants in these areas too, particularly trumpet roots and mushrooms (but not the shadow orb mushrooms).
Are they on T1 worlds, or just T3+?
I havent seen them on T3, but then again i havent searched the entirety of them all, so maybe. However, there are quite a few on the T4+ worlds.
Would placing a block down, instead of breaking blocks in the chunk, cause regeneration too? Placing a soil block down instead of mining one up for example
Yes if it is “out of place” the world will try to remove the “extra” block. Thereby initiating regen
Sweet, I have something to do with all that sultry soil hanging around!
Maybe auto breaking the block underneath the plant when harvested is a solution for the devs?
Good to see this is being addressed The no regeneration kind of makes sense in a limited way, but actually solving the underlying issue is much better!