[Klonan] [2.1.9] Oops! All worms!

[juliawtapp]

Playing 2.1.9 I came across a nest outside of my base that is literally all worms. This may be normal behaviour but I thought it was very odd so I figured I would make a post just in case.

I have attached an image of it and my save. The base is to the west of my character.

[Genhis]

Ref. 134446

[Klonan]

This is not easy to reverse, I suppose you don't have a save game from a few hours earlier?

What I suspect, it may be a little bit funny, that there is this 1 chunk with just spitter spawners:

factorio-run_jkr7uZXpIs.png (3.56 MiB) Viewed 615 times

And with 2.1 I made it more 'naturalistic' with the base spawning, that:

• Biters -> Spawner
• Spitters -> Worms

And by chance it seems that only spitters reacted to the call to expand, which naturally means that only worms were created.

Until I can reproduce anything during the build process, I will chalk this up as a funny RNG emergent outlier, but that there is no underlying issue with the base building code that needs to be fixes

(Also, I could also change it so both biters and spitters become bother spawners and worms with a random chance, but that is a question for a different day.)

[Fletch]

Until I can reproduce anything during the build process, I will chalk this up as a funny RNG emergent outlier, but that there is no underlying issue with the base building code that needs to be fixes

These odds are not coming from a "fair" RNG/chance, there is a bias that made the expansion prefer only spitters (and zero biters). If there's a fair 50/50 split between biters/spitters, then the odds of getting 140 spitters / 0 biters (that's roughly how many worms in I see in OP's screenshot), that is:

1 in 1,393,796,574,908,163,946,345,982,392,040,522,594,123,776

That's essentially the same as 0%. If every single person on Earth flipped a coin 140 times every second since the beginning of time (13.8 billion years ago), the odds of anyone successfully hitting this streak even once is still effectively 0%.

I think you are on the correct track where it is probably that closest chunk's contents (that is absorbing all the pollution?) which is driving this bias -- since 100% of the closest chunk is spitter-spawners, then 100% of the expansion is spitters, which result in 100% worms. That explanation is far more likely than this ever being a fluke of a fair RNG.

If I could cast my vote, I'd go with:

Also, I could also change it so both biters and spitters become both spawners and worms with a random chance, but that is a question for a different day.

That ensures a decent randomized distribution and would never result in what is shown in the screenshot.

[Klonan]

I decided to change it for the next release, so biters and spitters both have a chance to be spawenrs and worms

(I think the caste 'system' where biters become spawners and spitters become worms could be cool, some lore or biology implications, but its just too subtle for these problems it causes)

[Fletch]

I think the caste 'system' where biters become spawners and spitters become worms could be cool, some lore or biology implications, but its just too subtle for these problems it causes

It is a neat idea for lore implications -- perhaps a tweak on the implementation could be that a spitter has 80% chance of becoming a worm (and 20% to be a spawner) -- and vice versa for the biters. That could provide the variety so players could still run across worm-heavy bases (or spawner heavy bases), but shouldn't see bases that are 100% one type or the other.

In OP's example (starting with 104 spitters), they'd end up with ~83 worms and 21 spawners, which I think would be an awesome site to run across in the wild.

[Ogro]

I think it was a feature. Some diversity is always good. If they are all the same it is boring. It gives immersive exploration experience of finding different things in the planet. And might cause the battles to go a little different each time.