Ooh, er
The search routine you are using atm is rotation, when it sees a veg it moves toward the veg.
A more extensive search routine, if you are finding your bots end up sitting still, not seeing veg and therefore not getting the energy to reproduce, might be to add some movement to your bot. Either if it's not moving to accelerate to a speed and then start rotating again while it travels across sim decelerating, or if it hasn't seen anything in X rotations to stop rotating for a cycle or two and accelerate, then start rotating while moving. (Increasing the area bots can scan for food)
Another way to increase the area that your bots cover; multiplication at start to increase number of eyes and then bots moving away from their own species. Having your own bots sitting next to each other is obviously going to reduce the area of the sim that they can scan for food.
Tieing to friends and using the ability to violently stretch and break the tie is, or was, an effective way to give your bots kinetic energy for little or no cost.
I'm just about to test the latest buddy drop, I'll probably have a better idea of what makes a succesful bot now once I have run the leagues, or at least the F1 league.