Factorio Forums

EDIT: I'm using the current experimental on Steam, 2.0.19

1. What did you do?
While currently viewing the Vulcanus surface, I used the editor (with the /editor command in the console) to Edit map gen settings on the Vulcanus surface shortly after landing on it. I have tried changing settings in either the Resources, Terrain, or Advanced tab for Vulcanus from the initial settings that I had set at save creation. E.G. Changing the Frequency, Size, Richness of resources, or Vulcanus volcanism, or Technology price multiplier

2. What happened?
All newly generated chunks on Vulcanus no longer spawn Ashland trees or Flaming ashland trees ever again in that save file, even if I use the editor to revert the map gen settings back to what they were initially set to at save creation. If using a mod to delete existing chunks to force them to be regenerated, this also applies to chunks which already have Ashland trees, IE it erases the Ashland trees. The only way to get Ashland trees to spawn again is to reload an earlier save from before changing the Vulcanus map gen settings. This can be a potentially soft-locking problem if the player is somehow stranded "naked" on Vulcanus, as without any other items Ashland trees are the only local source of fuel for Stone Furnaces to create plates required to progress further.

3. What did you expect to happen instead?
I expected Ashland trees to keep spawning regardless of any changes to map gen settings since I expected that the only things affected by editing the map gen settings with the editor to be the specific Resource, Terrain, or Advanced features listed, and for any changes to be reversible (on newly spawned chunks) by reverting the sliders back to earlier positions, the way it appears to work for the other planets I've been changing settings for in my save (Nauvis, Gleba, Fulgora). I did not expect the presence of Ashland trees to be affected by these settings, did not expect it to be a binary "present / not-present" change, and did not expect the change to persist even after changing the settings back to what I had previously. I further did not expect game-wide settings such as Technology price multiplier to have this effect when viewing the Vulcanus surface, but not have this effect if the setting is changed while viewing other surfaces / planets (EG I can safely change the Technology price multiplier without any negative effects so long as I am viewing a different surface when I do it, such as Nauvis).

4. Does it happen always, once, or sometimes?
At least for my current game, this is very reliable every time I do this while viewing the Vulcanus surface. I've reloaded various saves and experimented doing things differently, such as exploring very far from spawn, changing only one thing in the Resource, Terrain, or Advanced tab at a time, etc. and the trees no longer spawn in newly generated chunks after making a change while viewing the Vulcanus surface, but will reliably spawn if I make no change, or make a change while viewing a different surface. (Notably the issue appears to be changing the settings from whatever they were set at save creation, not changing them from the game defaults of 100%. In my case the settings were already different from default because I set the frequency & size of resources on Vulcanus to 50% & 200% when I started this save. )

Example without changing the map gen settings on Vulcanus before the chunk is spawned. Example after changing the map gen settings on Vulcanus before the chunk is spawned (or forcing the chunk to respawn via deleting it with mods). EDIT: Just to clarify, while I initially had mods enabled to allow changing map settings without using the console, after noticing this issue I then did my testing just using the in-game /editor command and with all mods removed to ensure the issue was with the base game and not a mod.

Thanks for the report, this is fixed for the next release.

Thanks for the quick turnaround time!