Ore gen, there's no middle ground

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BLuehasia
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Ore gen, there's no middle ground

Post by BLuehasia »

I am always having an issue trying to have a game that does ore gen well.

I want a game that has very well rich patches off in the distance, i was excited when i saw the rail world mode. i gave that a try and 100 hours into that game and going really far off there still was only a few ore patches that were in the 5-8 mill size that would take hours of gameplay to fight bitters to get trains there and set up a depot. in wich, my base consumes about a million per hour. the rest of the patches are under a million and all spread out all over the place. not even worth the time to set up a train depot at.

I'm now restarting a game set everything to very low frequency very large in size, in hopes for way fewer patches and just a few good ones. sadly im giving a game now that has ridicules amounts of very large patches everywhere.

the game should divide the map into sectors, like Minecraft chunks there must be a set amount of resources per sector/chunk. so if you set a game to very low frequency and very large patch it can only spawn one ore patch in this Sector of the game, and each sector is huge also. and of course, as you get farther from start patches get richer.

i would really like something like considered.



im not sure how this is considered a very low frequency in ore gen? this is just silly amounts. also, im on rail world mode to
https://prnt.sc/faf7n6

grimdanfango
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Re: Ore gen, there's no middle ground

Post by grimdanfango »

I'm working on building a mod that balances a perfect epic-scale "rail-world" style, with enemy base placement that means that while they're still a major threat, they're placed with large enough gaps between bases to allow you to lay a rail network that weaves between them without needing to wipe them all out... so you can potentially explore massive distances early on provided you're careful. Alas, it's not quite something that can be set up using the map presets alone, as even the lowest enemy base frequency is slightly too high to allow you to walk/lay track between them.
I'll hopefully put that up soon-ish anyway... still trying to find decent balance in some areas.


To actually address your issue though - you may not be entirely following the nature of "frequency" vs. "size"... Factorio doesn't place discrete resource fields, it generates a map and clips off a certain threshold of peaks to allocate as resource fields. Basically, reducing "frequency" implicitly increases the effective size of patches anyway... you're stretching the pattern over a larger area, so the individual peaks become larger by the same proportion. The actual "size" attribute doesn't exactly alter size, so much as the clipping threshold. The effect will be that not only will existing patches grow even bigger than you already made them by reducing frequency, but more of the lower peaks in between will be selected too, so you'll get more of them.

Actually, low frequency combined with small size makes things way too sparse... I found medium frequency but with small size and high richness worked best to reduce the overall number and vastness of patches, but retain a decent enough amount of ore that the game is actually playable. That'll probably give you patches around 0.5-million nearby, but increase rapidly to 5,10,15 million further out, with the default distance multiplier the game uses.

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Re: Ore gen, there's no middle ground

Post by grimdanfango »

Try these settings:
iron-ore - frequency = normal, size = small, richness = good
copper-ore - frequency = normal, size = small, richness = good
stone - frequency = high, size = small, richness = poor
coal - frequency = high, size = very-small, richness = regular
uranium-ore - frequency = low, size = medium, richness = good
crude-oil - frequency = high, size = small, richness = regular

I found I needed to adjust a bit, especially for Uranium, as it has a much different default distribution already, and using the same settings as for iron/copper can make it disappear entirely.

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Re: Ore gen, there's no middle ground

Post by Kelderek »

This is precisely why the RSO mod (Resource Spawn Overhaul) is so popular. It just handles this better and gives you more control to fine tune it the way you want for both biters and resources.

Xterminator made a mod spotlight video recently about RSO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvPAjsxhses&t=3s

I like RSO much better than vanilla for map generation of resources.

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Re: Ore gen, there's no middle ground

Post by grimdanfango »

RSO does have decent enough defaults, but since is was first created, the vanilla default distribution has actually gotten a lot better, and I found after a while of fiddling around with RSO I wasn't really taken with its strictly chunk-based distribution. It can end up making things just a bit too regular - every resource field you come across at a particular distance from the start point will be roughly the same size and the same richness.

RSO is good if you just want it set up for you, but prefering to tweak and tune my own setup, I actually found there was more scope for fine-tuning and for natural-feeling flavour by tweaking and modding the default autoplace settings.

RSO's spawner placement is especially regimented... bases adhere strictly to the chunk-grid, and because placement per-chunk is entirely non-dependent on other chunks, nothing I did could make enemy base distributions that were clumped together to any significant degree.

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Re: Ore gen, there's no middle ground

Post by Tev »

BLuehasia wrote:the rest of the patches are under a million and all spread out all over the place. not even worth the time to set up a train depot at.
Use bots.

Set up central train station in middle of such area. Dump 1-2k robots into roboports. Make roboport-highways (I use simple big pole with roboports on 2 opposing sides and some lights) in direct line between station and such small patches. Miners outputting directly into chests.

This is so easy and simple to setup (especially now when you can place blueprints from map view), and after a few tries very easy to maintain and tweak. It IS expensive (but for these sparse patches I guess blue belts are also pretty expensive and lesser belts are just pain to manage with all 3 colors around), and requires a bit of electricity . . . but it allows you to use all those "little" patches giving you a lot of extra resources and is super fast for setting up . .. once I tried that I never wanted belt based outposts again.

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Re: Ore gen, there's no middle ground

Post by Aeternus »

Unless you also defend these highways, you're gonna lose a lot of bots to the odd biter that sneaks inbetween. Spitters especially can wreak havoc on undefended botlines. I usually end up laying a yellow belt to the nearest mine of the same resource and then stripmine the small patch instead. If it's too small for even a temporary 1-wagon station, it'll not have over 100k resources anyway.

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Re: Ore gen, there's no middle ground

Post by c0bRa »

The main problem with the default settigs is that very rare is quite not really very rare...

I've set up my Railworld with RSO and the first non start orefield is about 50 big power poles away (and has about 7M ore inside), that's what I undestand under very rare... ;)

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Re: Ore gen, there's no middle ground

Post by Terukio »

I loved RSO, but when playing with a newbie through my .15 play through, I opted for normal generation so he could get the ore he needed nearby without diving into trains while I build up my rails and towns.

I can't speak for vanilla generation besides that stone is always abysmal, but RSO is pretty much what you're looking for.

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Re: Ore gen, there's no middle ground

Post by arbarbonif »

grimdanfango wrote:RSO's spawner placement is especially regimented... bases adhere strictly to the chunk-grid, and because placement per-chunk is entirely non-dependent on other chunks, nothing I did could make enemy base distributions that were clumped together to any significant degree.
You can turn off RSO's controlling of biter spawning in the options for it. Or use both RSO and vanilla spawning (so they get added together).

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Re: Ore gen, there's no middle ground

Post by vanatteveldt »

I'm now playing with frequency very low, size and richtness very high. This creates very big (>10M) patches in reasonable distance. The starting area was too rich for my taste, though, allowing me to turtle up quite a while until needing to get my first outposts.

(low frequency + large size & richness is still the way to get the largest patches, right?)

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Re: Ore gen, there's no middle ground

Post by BLuehasia »

vanatteveldt wrote: (low frequency + large size & richness is still the way to get the largest patches, right?)
this is my understanding

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Re: Ore gen, there's no middle ground

Post by HurkWurk »

vanatteveldt wrote:I'm now playing with frequency very low, size and richness very high. This creates very big (>10M) patches in reasonable distance. The starting area was too rich for my taste, though, allowing me to turtle up quite a while until needing to get my first outposts.

(low frequency + large size & richness is still the way to get the largest patches, right?)
yes. frequency is how many locations it shows up, richness is how much is there. so low frequency means less total fields, but each one will be larger. richness means the content of that field is higher.
on of the things i do for water is set it to high frequency with tiny size, so that i get small patches of water that i can use as needed, then i landfill the ones i dont.

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Re: Ore gen, there's no middle ground

Post by grimdanfango »

HurkWurk wrote:yes. frequency is how many locations it shows up, richness is how much is there. so low frequency means less total fields, but each one will be larger. richness means the content of that field is higher.
on of the things i do for water is set it to high frequency with tiny size, so that i get small patches of water that i can use as needed, then i landfill the ones i dont.
Again, that's not exactly what frequency is. Frequency is, in pretty much direct spatial terms, the "scale" of the pattern used to generate the ore. It would actually probably be better to call frequency "size" instead of "size", and call size "threshold" or "proportion" or something.

The net effect is, that for the same size setting, a lower frequency will indeed get you fewer patches over the same area... and they will be proportionally larger - because what you're really doing is getting the same exact pattern of patches, but enlarging it to cover a larger expanse of terrain.
The issue with considering frequency to be the literal number of patches is, when you pick a larger size for the same frequency, you'll have slightly larger patches, but you'll actually end up with more patches too, as areas of the pattern that were previously below the size threshold will now poke above it.

The take-home from this is, you can't really assume either setting does one specific thing in isolation... they're intrinsically linked, and you can only really understand what effect changing them will have if you understand that relationship.

Thankfully richness is much more straightforward, as it doesn't alter the placement of ore at all, just the raw numbers in each patch.

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Re: Ore gen, there's no middle ground

Post by Tev »

Aeternus wrote:Unless you also defend these highways, you're gonna lose a lot of bots to the odd biter that sneaks inbetween. Spitters especially can wreak havoc on undefended botlines. I usually end up laying a yellow belt to the nearest mine of the same resource and then stripmine the small patch instead. If it's too small for even a temporary 1-wagon station, it'll not have over 100k resources anyway.
I never lost even one logistic robot. Your problem isn't in robots, but in not setting up perimeter. Even sparse one prevents problems you have. And without perimeter biters can make base there, inrerrupt belts, attack your train stations .. Basically you have much bigger problem which you're not solving

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