Friday Facts #401 - New terrain, new planet

[mrvn]

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.

Rivers often dig themself into softer rock creating cliffs. Those will follow the water and go across the height lines. Or the sea digs into an island creating cliffs. Again they follow the water but now they go along the height lines.

Mountains and hills will have cliffs going along height lines with water going downhill across the cliffs. Hmm, now I really do want water falls going down cliffs.

There are also valleys where glaciers have pushed through in the olden times. They can create features in the valley going across the length. That will be along height lines and water will flow across.

So I think cliffs can be many shapes and in many places.


As for the forest having fortunate gaps in them to allow driving more easily those were explained as game trails. If enough behemoth biters travel between two lakes then there will be a nice path there for you to drive along. But yeah, that's a bit of hand waving. I think the QoL improvement from having somewhere to drive is worth a bit of unrealism.

[Tertius]

I'd like to get a visual improvement of the cliff graphics. Currently, they often don't create the illusion of elevation or depth. Instead they are just walls on an equally leveled terrain. By the way, that's what I initially thought what cliffs were after I started with Factorio: strange natural walls. I didn't see any elevation at all.
Whenever I bomb them away, I don't feel I'm leveling the terrain, instead I just bomb some obstacle.

To improve the illusion, I suggest to create slightly different terrain on the two different sides of the cliff, at least for the 1-2 tiles next to a cliff. Higher side: more sand, less trees, less green. Lower side: more grass, more trees, more green. On a desert: higher side: sand more white. Lower side: sand more grey.
Add some filter to lighten up the higher part and slightly darken the lower part.

[Azzinoth]

This is purely a visual improvement, but I think cliffs should "break" the terrain continuity. Look for example at the fourth picture from the bottom, you can clearly see how the grass pattern grows across cliffs, but in real life grass would not look like that above and below the cliff. The second picture from the bottom is much better where the terrain inside the canyon has slightly darker color, but it doesn't necessarily need to have a different color, it just needs to break the pattern. This would definitively help with the 3d illusion.

[Christent]

Hello Dev Team,

Specifically when reading about things being submerged in water(cliff paths,etc) I remember a certain gripe I always had with the mapgen: ore placed near water had the tendency to be "cut off" and just warp around the water, just ending there.
To formulate a feature request out of it:

Make ore deposits placeable underwater for the mapgen. It could then be "unwatered" with landfill.

Side effect would be that ore patches tend to have a more organic shape even close to water. Would also create an interesting gameplay element of impacting the Environment as Engineer and also give landfill a purpose outside of "get rid of water" or "need a shortcut here". And most importantly, would mean the ore density on Water rich mapgens to be more manageable and fun.

Hope this idea sounds as cool to you as to me!
Cheers

[adambyte]

This all looks amazing! I will admit, when I saw the picture of the river I let out a quiet swear of delight... too bad it doesn't look like they actually stuck around. Could've used shallow water to make some areas crossable with that paths system....

Which, to that end:

The images of the dead ends made for quite the good laugh.

I not only agree with this, but I also hope it doesn't get completely removed. While I understand and agree with the idea of not completely blocking player movement and making it annoying, at the same time I kind of feel like it'd be wrong if we can just hop in a car and go for a 1000 chunk drive unimpeded, even if technically we're going along very curvy/not straight paths. I think going down a path for a while only to find your way eventually blocked by some trees (which you can hop out and cut down, really), or even a small lake would feel great and natural.

+1 to both parts of this. And on a related note, the paths through forests seem way too generous. The post mentioned that the rationale for them was wildlife trails, but that last screenshot has them being never less than ~3 metres wide, which I'm pretty sure is much wider than wildlife trails ever get on Earth. It looks extremely, jarringly unnatural.

[IronCartographer]

Starting in deserts has been a common problem. I added an additional slider so that you can customise the starting area moisture without affecting the rest of the world. A forest start is significantly easier.

Will there be a positive bias for the moisture in the starting area on the Default and maybe Rail World map presets (Death World players know they're asking for it)?

The players who would benefit the most from this are the least likely to consider its effects in advance, a long-standing issue of players trying a desert map not realizing it's so much more challenging for a beginner (or even that it's any different).