Friday Facts #258 - New autoplace

[ske]

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.

Thank you so much!

As I understand, the terrain currently is only meant as eye-candy and minor annoyance when you have the terraforming research. Having at least the resources correlate somewhat with the terrain really gives it some inner balance.

[POPISowyNumer]

The water really needs some solid redefining.
In current state maps look like hydrophobic Finn worst nightmare.

I for one would love a preset that looks like ye olde civ map, with yuge biomes, yuuger seas and continents, and some rivers thrown in for fun.
Also, dear devs, are there any plans for ships, ports and bridges?
Waterways are some of oldest ways of bulk transportation known to man, it would be cool to get 'something'

[Oktokolo]

Good news: Modability of the map gen will certainly get a huge boost in 0.17.
Maybe we will even see mods generating believable rivers using the new shallow water tiles.

Placing the first oil outside the starting area obviously is a bad idea as having some water, wood, coal, stone, iron and copper in the starting area is probably the most common minimum set of requirements for a good map.

Concerning the spawning of trees... I can disable my life long enemies. However, you can't play the game this way : you can't power your first lab !
If only we had a pole or something to start with when there is no tree nearby :/

Yeah, it's an issue with Alien Biomes too...
I have an easy fix : start the player with a single wooden power pole in his inventory !

A generic fix would be to use a mod that changes selected ingredients to something else in all recipes using them. That way you could play any no-X game as long as at least one raw resource keeps beeing enabled. Such a mod should be rather easy to build.
But there also is already a mod that specifically fixes the no-wood case.

[foodfactorio]

Hi Togos, if you are working on map generation, would you be able to please add 3 small buttons which allow us to "set whole column to..." something?

for example shown in blue in the screenshot below (highlighted with a yellow box)

for example, while vanilla is fun, it only has a small selection of Ores, and when people play with mods, the amount of "ores" can really increase.
i have been enjoying over time, about 70 hours worth of a game with Angel, Bobs, Yuoki, and really enjoy having a Higher Frequency of ore patch, but with a Lower Size or Richness. This lets me play a small game session here and there, and then i mine up the small patch, and move out a bit to mine the next patch, (without needing to expand way to fast or be met with tons of biters, but at the same time, it also lets me play for about 5 hours or so before needing to set up a new mine so it is fun and not too tedious).

however, i end up spending ages at the start, just clicking on each and every resource row (in multiple columns), just to set most of them to Very Low, or Very High, and then just adjusting a few of them to something different. If you could please add 3 little buttons (in this case, 3 dropdowns for the Set Whole Column feature, it would be really cool for example:

resource_ui-idea-Set_whole_column_to.jpg (177.86 KiB) Viewed 7505 times

(edit, i edited a screenshot someone else had posted earlier on this thread, but if you were to add MadClowns mods, there would probably be another 10 types of lovely ore at the bottom of that list too), making about 81 settings to select

[TOGoS]

Hi Togos, if you are working on map generation, would you be able to please add 3 small buttons which allow us to "set whole column to..." something?

Not exactly what you're asking for, but we are replacing the dropdowns with sliders, which will make it a lot easier to set a bunch of things quickly.

[Dune]

I feel the 0.16 map generator is a bum. I liked 0.15. Resources, water etc were evenly spread out. Water was natural looking.

Water and land in 0.16 looks completely unnatural, like the swirl in a coffee latte. It's very difficult to work with and need lots of landfill.

If there's not oil in the starting area, I re-roll. Having to search for oil at "that" point in the game when you need it, is a frustrating experience.

[Philip017]

since we are talking about map generation, and a specific lack of the large volumes or lack there of, WATER not mentioned at all in the FFF, but it looks like after reading through this forum posting, you still plan to take a good hard look at it again.
in 15 water worked fairly well and predictably, my preferred setting, medium size, very low frequency, will produce some nice sized lakes, but not oceans, and sparse enough that it doesn't cover ores.
in 16 i cant get a decent map layout with consistent water sizes, i get ponds and oceans depending on the settings, with the lack of decent lakes. i need that large lake to put my reactor on, that thing drinks so much water, and robots cant deliver enough water barrels fast enough. especially when they made them hold less volume.

the other thing about map generation is the biters, i prefer sparse quantity but not completely absent and consistently sparse, instead i end up with if attempting to expand out further and further having to deal with biters covering every square foot. thankfully RSO does a decent job of making this consistent again. maybe that is what nukes and long range artillery is for too.

i agree with most others here, the option to have both oil and uranium in the starting area despite you pinging it as a bug, seems to be a good idea to have in the starting area. i am one of those that would roll the map generator over and over to get everything in decent size and richness to my starting area.
i prefer to have max size ore patches with very low frequency and maximum richness. i ignore the small patches with low richness, why even bother building a mine on it when it will be gone in no time. i would think the smaller patches would have very rich resources, while the larger patches would have less richness. then i would actually feel like i should put a mine on that small patch, instead of ignoring it. balancing throughput with longevity.

[Koub]

Please, rethink the "no oil in starting area" part : pushing the closest oil in biter territory would greatly hinder the ability to go the flamethroer route without before searching for trains+fluid wagons. Moreover, the pumpjack's pollution would attract more biters, earlier, and force the evolution factor to go up more quickly.
One oil field - be it smaller than the default map gen would create - would be great to let you get into the oil industry products before being compelled to fight your way in the biter territory (it would then be player's choice).

[Tricorius]

Please, rethink the "no oil in starting area" part...

I enjoy destroying biters and I love trains, so I don’t mind expanding to find the first oil patch.

However, it really does suck when you get a really bad roll and get a nearly unplayable game. I have started blind generating death world maps (no preview, just drop in and play) and while quite fun, I have had to end a few games due to a combination of no accessible oil and a very small stone patch. This combination means that it is tough to wall in and still ha e resources to go out and get the oil.

I did have one game (out of maybe five or so in this condition) where I was able to go place turrets and “wall-in” a patch of oil before the biters got overwhelming. I then had to transport some oil by buggy before I could get a train out to it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, that was amazingly fun dodging and massacring biters in the buggy...I felt like an oil smuggler. But it is frustrating when you have to throw in the towel on a map. I guess on masochistic advanced settings, not every map has to be winnable...but :: shrug ::

I know this is asking quite a lot, but it might be nice (as others have mentioned) to have a very crude version of liquefaction available early. I would think it should be quite inefficient, and only desirable in emergency situations. And then maybe additional research can “clean it up” and gain efficiency with higher tech?

[Oktokolo]

Not exactly what you're asking for, but we are replacing the dropdowns with sliders, which will make it a lot easier to set a bunch of things quickly.

Please make sure, that these sliders jump to the mouse position when clicking directly on a value marker - so we can use them like radio buttons.

[Drury]

Please, rethink the "no oil in starting area" part : pushing the closest oil in biter territory would greatly hinder the ability to go the flamethroer route without before searching for trains+fluid wagons. Moreover, the pumpjack's pollution would attract more biters, earlier, and force the evolution factor to go up more quickly.
One oil field - be it smaller than the default map gen would create - would be great to let you get into the oil industry products before being compelled to fight your way in the biter territory (it would then be player's choice).

Maybe have a tickbox for each resource in the starting area?

[Lubricus]

I thing the no oil in the starting area is a part of a bigger pacing problem for the game. Where blue science introduce to many new type of puzzle's to solve and there is almost no left for the rest of the game. Blue science also bumps up the resource cost and the amount of assemblers needed quite drastically (It need more assemblers than any other science pack).

Blue science requires
1. Handling liquids (Oil and water)
2. Handling multiple outputs and the need to balance them so one output don't block the others (Oil refining)
3. Using wires, I think it's necessary to use wires to balance gas, light oil and heavy oil so one of the resources don't block the refineries see 2.
3. Resources not in starting area (Oil)
4. Mass production of items with three ingredients (blue science packs, red circuits, engines). (Inserters also have one three ingredients but one assembler will suffice so it's first with blue science you need to figure out an extendable design for three ingredients)

[GenBOOM]

I think while you are redoing map generation you should look into adding rivers. they are simply fractals.

make sure not to put any in deserts or intersecting with ores or cliffs (waterfalls? maybe) and allow them to connect to lakes.

we want boats. this is the first step.

[Oktokolo]

we want boats. this is the first step.

Boats are modable already - they are basically slow cars wich can only drive on water or trains that can only drive on water.
I would not expect to see any boat in vanilla until after the first 1.0 release.

[Engimage]

In the base game we're planning to do this for starting area resources, but not for resources outside of the starting area.

Why not for other areas?

The idea is that changing one setting in the map generation GUI should affect other things as little as possible so that the function of each slider becomes obvious. So if you're changing water level, we don't want resource patches jumping around. Imagine if the map responded in real-time while you move the sliders. Preview generation isn't fast enough in its present state to make that work super well, but that's the star we're aiming for.

The thing is that you will never look at the map while moving your sliders This is not something that should be continuous so no resource patches will ever jump around. You will regenerate the map right after you make those changes anyways.
If you are talking about the result with the same forced map seed then I can definitely tell you that only a small amount of players ever uses this feature at all and it is mostly to mimic some map and not alter it in some way.

All that matters here is the consistency of end result and not what you are talking about. It is more like say every 2nd map generated will actually meet my expectations when I set the sliders. And namely water generation if not applying your algorithm to choose land vs water for resource spawns - can totally mess up your map by randomly hide some or even most of resources under water.

So pretty please allow usage of this algorithm all over the map as an option. I and the majority of players (which I am sure is) totally care much more about generation results and not smooth transition with the same seed. This is a damn random map generator after all!

[Avezo]

I think oil shout be in starting area, very little of it, but still.

[dog80]

most important though: release .17 nao

[ske]

I think while you are redoing map generation you should look into adding rivers.

Rivers and an ocean would be neat. They can divide an area into two fully connected pieces. When disabling landfill that would make for some interesting landscape.

[cookiecat]

That looks great! I have a specific request though... since the story goes that you crashed onto this planet, could you also have an option making the resources completely random in the starting area? Like so random that you could have a ten million uranium patch covering your starting area, while right next to it there's a ten thousand iron patch? This would also create new problems for us to solve, like how to continue while not building on the uranium too much? The same could go for the bugs I think, though that would be difficult to implement also...

Anyway, I think that would be fun.

[Dixi]

Could we hope to have other options then endless swamp, for large water % maps?

Continents with oceans, big and small islands in a water - those are all valid and interesting options.