Friday Facts #258 - New autoplace

[Ohz]

I play this since approx 100 hours on last 0.16 in vanilla marathon hardcore.

Map gen works fine for me

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[Zaflis]

The generation changes are welcome, but not quite as frustrating issue as the UI itself. We need the dropdown lists gone, they're far too slow for changing a hundred different setting. Replace with something like 5 grouped buttons each.

OR additionally add to the top a dropdown which sets all the values at once.

[MrGrim]

I agree with a lot of folks here that it was good in 0.12 and that something between 0.13 and 0.15 made the lakes too small and uninteresting.

A man after my own heart, here! 0.12 map gen was by far the best, imo. Although, 0.13-0.15 got a lot better near the end. Shortly after the release of 0.13 I made this image which beautifully demonstrated the difference, imo:

viewtopic.php?f=5&t=27655

Fortunately, a few tweaks throughout 0.13 reduced the "splattered paint" look of the biome distribution and made things a lot nicer overall. I also generated these images to compare my 0.15 base with 0.16:

https://i.imgur.com/vZOXP1y.png
https://i.imgur.com/OxO1q43.png

The map in 0.16 gets even worse the further out you go, with more and more water and more "noodle" like bits of land snaking their way around.

Getting 0.12 back with its huge biomes and epic lakes with large continental land masses would be _amazing_. I'm glad you agree.

[Koub]

The generation changes are welcome, but not quite as frustrating issue as the UI itself. We need the dropdown lists gone, they're far too slow for changing a hundred different setting. Replace with something like 5 grouped buttons each.

OR additionally add to the top a dropdown which sets all the values at once.

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-246

[blavek]

I have noticed in map generation that biter settings seem to be ignored. I don't have any images at the moment but I recall creating a rail world base and modifying it to have very low biter settings and seeing a Sea of Red in the preview. Do you have anyway to verify that the settings which are entered are actually being take into consideration? I will try to recreate the issue but I found it quite frustrating.

I'm not sure about anyone else but I don't consider those biter nests to be Very Low Frequency Very small Size or Very Poor richness.

Map exchange string which illustrates this example
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Mapsettings.png (315.05 KiB) Viewed 7168 times

factmap.png (2.56 MiB) Viewed 7168 times

[beiju]

Chiming in on the water placement issue — in every single map I’ve played in 0.16, water frequency increases with distance from spawn until pretty soon, landfilling huge lakes is the only option. It completely eliminates water as a constraint to building, because there’s just not enough space. It worked well in 0.15, so I hope this issue gets looked at for 0.17.

[Hyenna]

Sounds intresting to have more control about randomization map generator.
for the ressurce in starting areas i would think the options from none, low, medium and high would be good
so the player can set it depending on their experience.

[ske]

Is the resource placement correlated to the terrain or is the placement chosen independently from the surroundings?

In the starting area it avoids water but what is happening outside of the starting area?

[ShasOFaiz]

I think that should be an option to exclude oil from the starting area

Two (off by default!) options to include oil and uranium in the starting areas would be nice indeed !

Seconding this, as I'd like to have oil close to my starting water but don't care about U as much!

[RocketManChronicles]

Is the resource placement correlated to the terrain or is the placement chosen independently from the surroundings?

In the starting area it avoids water but what is happening outside of the starting area?

I had my water rant earlier, so I will not go on. But I am really curious about this as well. Are they separate? It seems like it. I think it was mentioned that if water were to cover up resources, it would "move" the resources to a new location. So, the balance of resources away from the starting area is relatively maintained. Any information about this will be appreciated.

A further question I have is if resource placement has any dependency on biomes, or could it be through modding?

[TOGoS]

A further question I have is if resource placement has any dependency on biomes, or could it be through modding?

In vanilla there's no correlation between resources and temperature/moisture (what primarily drives the biomes), but in 0.17 mods will be able to define whatever 'named noise expressions' they want and reference them from as many others (elevation, temperature, etc) as they want or change probability of specific prototypes to be dependent on them. This way you can correlate different things to be placed together.

[RocketManChronicles]

A further question I have is if resource placement has any dependency on biomes, or could it be through modding?

In vanilla there's no correlation between resources and temperature/moisture (what primarily drives the biomes), but in 0.17 mods will be able to define whatever 'named noise expressions' they want and reference them from as many others (elevation, temperature, etc) as they want or change probability of specific prototypes to be dependent on them. This way you can correlate different things to be placed together.

This is rather exciting. I have ideas!

[Amarula]

I like the sound of the changes to map generation! Thank you again for taking the time to share what is happening behind the scenes! Add my vote to those who would like to see options to control everything, including whether or not to get oil or uranium in the starting area.

One small thing I have noticed, landfill (made from stone and only from stone) magically produces beautiful green grass:

Before landfill

Screenshot from 2018-08-31 14-12-35.png (95.77 KiB) Viewed 7144 times

After landfill

Screenshot from 2018-08-31 14-13-02.png (116.98 KiB) Viewed 7144 times

I would expect landfill to produce desert or sand. Turning that sand into grass should need something more, like planting trees...

[bman212121]

So if I have my way there will be a "no special starting area resource placement" option.

I can get behind that, as long as it's an option. The best part about Factorio is when it's flexible and allows the end user to decide what they'd like to do. You can have a default that hopefully works for NPE and the masses, but if people want to make the experience their own configuration it's really nice that the options are present. I don't know if I'd ever use that option, but It sounds like other people would love to see that as well. I'd love to see a section just for the starting area that has toggles for each resource. I don't expect that to make it in game, but hopefully it's now possible through mods.

To continue that though, maybe I'm playing a custom mod which adds several new resource types. I might really need a couple of them to be in the default starting area. It would be awesome to enable the starting area, and just select which ones I would like. It would also be possible if someone did want to just have a little bit of everything in a huge starting area, then make the rest of the resources hard to find. They would have what they need to progress to the point of exploration without having to worry about getting stuck, but if they want to scale up production of resources they need to go find larger patches.

[5thHorseman]

Map gen works fine for me

That image pretty much defines what most people say "sucks" about map generation right now. I personally also don't like it but try to avoid the word "sucks" because - well - it sucks as a way to get your point across.

[irbork]

I love how in the last picture of the map there is no oil in the starting area and no oil outside as well

[Serenity]

I agree with others that you should please, please give a higher priority to water generation. That's completely broken in 0.16. So much that I disable water outside the starting area and play with the Waterwell mod.

You used to be able to get large continents connected by land bridges. Then you could have choke points on the bridges. Biters were still an issue when you needed to clear more land.
But now you only get your large starting island. Then if you increase the water size to maximum you get very thin snaking land bridges, but really no continents or land masses. You can see were larger pieces of land are supposed to go, but even they have lakes inside them that break them up. There is no room to build a larger factory area.
Alternatively you can decrease the water size, but with increasing water frequency you just get an endless, regular swamp outside the starting area that needs to be landfilled to do anything.
In both cases it just gets worse the farther out you go. Please bring back actual oceans and continents.

The medium settings aren't really satisfactory either. Water is more of an annoyance than anything. It doesn't look natural. Just like the regular random noise it is

Here are pictures of all settings:
viewtopic.php?f=5&t=56521
The only thing that comes even close is the second to last (Frequency: Very Low, Size: Big), but here too you get the thin snake bridges and lakes in continents instead of oceans


Resource generation has some issues. Like there being the chance for ridiculously large oil fields. But I prefer RSO for resource generation anyways. That way I can live with an imperfect vanilla solution. Though of course improvements are welcome.

I also agree that putting less resources under water when you play with large water sizes would be nice


Rimworld has a very nice world generator that consistently produces nice and realistic results. I know it's on a different scale and for different purposes, but it has continents, different biomes, oceans, mountain ranges, and rivers that flow into oceans. The terrain features are so distinct that they are even randomly named

[mathturtle]

Another vote for fixing water generation here! Keeping all the ore from being underwater is a good start, but the map being swampy anywhere far from spawn is annoying. Although I guess landfill does give me something to do with all this stone...

Oil not in the starting area is annoying. I like to have bots before starting on trains, but bots require oil (and blue science for the personal roboport). I wouldn't mind an option for oil in the starting area, but I guess I can always freehand a single fluid tanker rail line.

Uranium I don't care... 0.16 has way too much of it even if you set it to very rare/very small/very poor.

[BlueTemplar]

I love how in the last picture of the map there is no oil in the starting area and no oil outside as well

There is ? Zoom in the picture !

[BlueTemplar]

The generation changes are welcome, but not quite as frustrating issue as the UI itself. We need the dropdown lists gone, they're far too slow for changing a hundred different setting. Replace with something like 5 grouped buttons each.

OR additionally add to the top a dropdown which sets all the values at once.

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-246

This is great -

- but it would still be very nice indeed to be able to move all the sliders at once !