Friday Facts #401 - New terrain, new planet

[Tetromiko]

I'm sorry, I had written a hundreds-word message before, but I realized that it was unstructured. Therefore, I prepared an excerpt from the previously written text, it consists of questions to which I would like to get a "Why" answer.
Why is there no water and air transportation in the game?
I'm basically satisfied with the amount of weapons in the game, but why are there so few weapons, I'm talking about handguns
Why are there no weather conditions (wind, hurricane, storm, rain, downpour)? Just why? On the basis of this, it would be possible to develop other energy systems (water, wind), it would also allow to diversify the gameplay.
Why are there so few types of enemies, by the way, this could go hand in hand with the addition of air and water upgrades, for example, bugs that swim, bugs that fly, thus increasing the complexity of the game, because now you can't hide from bugs with a very rough wall.
That's all.

[bobucles]

I am still worried about the cliff explosives delay, but I am reassured to see at least an attempt to fix the more annoying things about cliffs as they are. Will have to wait and see how things turn out.


Personally, I would still like an early game, somewhat expensive (and single use), manual use only way of removing 1-2 really annoying cliff sections.

Oh, everyone wants their high level tech without actually getting high level tech. Well actually...
The ruins world is brimming with tech, but the player has their own starting ruins in the shape of a crashed space ship. What about modifying the starting resources a bit?
For example with recycling tech, you can finally scrap some of the mangled wreckage, and get some good pieces out of it. The damaged old beams might be useful if they were reforged in the smeltery. It could potentially be a whole process, an ultimate spaceX goal of fixing your ship up piece by piece. But it could also be a more involved loot box, with gated objectives that offer some fancy rewards. If one of those rewards was some busted ship pieces that work as a few cliff explosives, I mean why not? Stuff like that would whet the player's appetite.

In that sense, the starting iron panels would be more like the player kicking off the ship's door, or pulling apart crew lockers. They wouldn't have the tech to cut apart and salvage more of the ship until later.

[mcdjfp]

I was initially excited by the cliffs when they were first introduced, but it did not take all that many playthroughs to reach the point that I grab cliff explosives fairly early. Spaghetti is fun sometimes, but the amount that seemed to always be triggered by cliffs just wasn't fun in the long run. I am glad that they are trying to fix some of the issues, but I am hoping there is something between live with it and turning cliffs off because I still like the concept.

As for why, there is (for me) a very annoying tedium zone in the mid game. For me this is caused by a combination of more complex builds which take much longer to fix when I discover halfway through that something is 1 off and I have to (manually) move an entire set of buildings/belts/inserters to fix it, and the need to repair walls and turrets before automation of these tasks is available (construction bots). The previous decision to push bots back made this issue worse for me. Cliffs are one of the leading causes of space issues for me, which is why I particularly dread seeing cliff explosives pushed back behind the tedium period too.

I know there are some ways to mitigate the issues, but I feel like I am being forced down a particular build/play style in what I thought was a sandbox game.


While we are talking about Nauvis, can something be done about the starting ore patches. They are almost always stacked on top of each other, and significantly closer (if not adjacent) to the biters than they are to the player starting position. Even in more recent versions I don't want to count how many games begin with a 50+ biter raid before/at the setup of the first lab. Even forests are not enough to prevent this as the biters are too close to the initial sources of pollution.

[vulduv]

While we are talking about Nauvis, can something be done about the starting ore patches. They are almost always stacked on top of each other,

I also wish for something to be done with the starting ore patches. It just feels really strange that the starting ore patches overlap so frequently. While the naturally generated ores pretty much never overlap with each other. There should be something to keep them from getting too close to each other. Perhaps if they begin to overlap, the ores from the overlapping region is moved to the other edges? Or something similar to keep the richness and size of the starting ore patches much more consistent. (I've had iron get overridden by copper and stone at the same time. Leaving very little iron for me to mine at the start...)
The result is that I always check the map preview before starting due to the annoyance of overlapping starting ores.

[Unknow0059]

I wasn't a fan of the grassy desert so I enquired about changing it, but it seemed like this was an uncomfortable topic that no one really wanted to get into.

Many such cases.

[mrvn]

Great work as always.

Has there been any thought into making the canyons and water bridges friendly to trains? They look kind of narrow and running a rail through them might be impossible.

[mmmPI]

Maybe the new rails shape and additionnal orientation will help adapting to the terrain, but otherwise there'll be elevated rails which were shown used to go over cliffs if running a rail through is too difficult

[mrvn]

Hmm, do elevated rails interact with cliffs?

What I mean is what if I have a normal rail and I drive that off a cliff. Shouldn't it turn into an elevated rail post cliff? Is there a special "cliff ramp" for rails to make bridges across canyons look natural?

[FuryoftheStars]

Hmm, do elevated rails interact with cliffs?

What I mean is what if I have a normal rail and I drive that off a cliff. Shouldn't it turn into an elevated rail post cliff? Is there a special "cliff ramp" for rails to make bridges across canyons look natural?

They will not.

A suggestion was made a while ago that got moved to Won't Implement: Cliffs as natural rail elevators

No.

Rail ramp (for 2.0) is so large because there is quite a lot of collision mask related magic happening while the train is moving on them and so cliffs cannot become place where rails would transition as they are simply too short.

Also this would also create a lot of projection issues because if cliffs would be considered natural elevators, then in my mind the rails would have to look like they are "flat height" (assuming the elevated side of cliff is already high) but trains have to be consistent in 2 cases: using standard projection while in game and using flat projection while in map. If rolling stocks would change layer on cliffs by not changing render position, then they would have to change position in the flat projection in map effectively causing them to misalign with rails.

[oi_wtf]

The islands type map could be nice as an optional preset. There are people looking for that kind of stuff. For example to use with the Cargo Ships mod. And the existing island map is just one larger island.

+1.

When I saw that "many smallish islands" prototype map (titled "Problem: Plateaus tend to create islands.")
I really got the urge to try playing on a map like that.
Would be nice if the map generator could be coaxed into generating something like that.

I agree though, without an early-game way of moving between islands, it might be infeasible to try a completely vanilla playthrough on a map like that...

[Svip]

I agree though, without an early-game way of moving between islands, it might be infeasible to try a completely vanilla playthrough on a map like that...

With elevated rails, you could do an island map in vanilla.

[Toboe]

The rivers looked cool, I'd love to see them in map gen. Just make sure those are not cutting lands from one lake to another, but have really narrow start somewhere in the land and get wider as progressing to closest lake or another river.

[Hanakocz]

I like this, but there is one obvious question. Why the SHALLOW WATER wasn't incorporated?

[oi_wtf]

I agree though, without an early-game way of moving between islands, it might be infeasible to try a completely vanilla playthrough on a map like that...

With elevated rails, you could do an island map in vanilla.

Yeah, but they require "Production science packs" (=purple science) for their research (see FFF-378, last paragraph), which I would not consider "early-game"...

[BattleFluffy]

Stunning work Earendel, well done for displaying the "fearless competence". Uncle Bob would be proud!
The new terran generation system looks amazing. The passageways makes me want to explore. I never thought I would tolerate cliffs but this makes me want to try them again. Just fantastic job!

[Laie]

It's all wrong! There's a reason why both cliffs and water follow height lines, and no reason why forests should leave convenient thoroughfares for the character's car.

That said, this garden will make a much better playground than untamed wilderness. Even if it poses the question of where the gardener went.

[Xuerian]

Fantastic improvements to the base planet. Looking forward to them!

[Impatient]

It's all wrong! There's a reason why both cliffs and water follow height lines, and no reason why forests should leave convenient thoroughfares for the character's car.

That said, this garden will make a much better playground than untamed wilderness. Even if it poses the question of where the gardener went.

I like how you wrote that

[5thHorseman]

I was a huge proponent of cliffs until they were added, then after being annoyed with them for a week I just disabled them.

You make me excited to deal with them again!

[malecord]

EDIT: oh yeah, and what's this about, hmm?

5 planets, each one unlocks a production building, which produces (among other things) the planet themed science pack.