Factorio Forums

Hi,

I've noticed that my current map has way more water than I would expect. It sort of dots all over the place in an annoying way, and makes it hard to build trains. Link: https://imgur.com/a/pcNLe



Annoyingly, my starting are was fine so it took me a long time to notice this problem.

Has anyone else observed this?

well its much better than on my map, so i can tell yes its "normal" in addion if i had to guess its a railworld setting dueto the extra big desert

Without knowing map settings, hard to tell. Probably you got a larger starting area and frequent small water. I personally prefer more diverse maps, this is our current one (megabase). Intercontinental train traffic ftw. I rather dislike that the minimum uranium spawn still results in a lot more uranium than one could possibly use.

Acacel wrote:well its much better than on my map, so i can tell yes its "normal" in addion if i had to guess its a railworld setting dueto the extra big desert

ASDFGerte wrote:Without knowing map settings, hard to tell. Probably you got a larger starting area and frequent small water.

Acacel is right, I put it on 'rail world' settings, which is supposed to have infrequent but large patches of water. I hoped this would create a few big oceans with lots of land between them, but I guess not.

My guess is that the generation algorithm is something like:

- Every tile in the map has a 'height' value
- Water 'frequency' controls how rapidly adjacent tiles can change height: it is the 'jaggedness'/'roughness' of the height algorithm
- Water 'size' controls a map-wide 'sea level', such that any tile below this level is water, and any tile above it is land.

Here is a gallery that shows 10 maps generated with the same seed, but different settings for water frequency and size: https://imgur.com/gallery/E0R3O


Frequency: Very High, Size: Very Small

Frequency: Very High, Size: Small

Frequency: Very High, Size: Medium

Frequency: Very High, Size: Big

Frequency: Very High, Size: Very Big


Frequency: Very Low, Size: Very Small

Frequency: Very Low, Size: Small

Frequency: Very Low, Size: Medium

Frequency: Very Low, Size: Big

Frequency: Very Low, Size: Very Big

Lots of video games use terrain generation algorithms a little like this, and they are always very disappointing; the terrain is never plausible. I wish all games used terrain generation algorithms as in Dwarf Fortress - modelling geology and erosion patterns. The worlds in Dwarf Fortress are so much more plausible!

Olix wrote:Lots of video games use terrain generation algorithms a little like this, and they are always very disappointing; the terrain is never plausible. I wish all games used terrain generation algorithms as in Dwarf Fortress - modelling geology and erosion patterns. The worlds in Dwarf Fortress are so much more plausible!

Good luck re-rolling maps for speedruns with Dwarf Fortress map generation :p

Btw. you might want to put those images in a spoiler tag.

Yeah, it's terrible. In 0.15 you used to be able to get continents and oceans. Now if you try the same you just get snaky land bridges. And even what could be continents have lakes in them cutting them up. You can see that above with "Frequency: Very Low, Size: Big". That's closest to what it should be, but even then there are annoying lakes in what should be a solid continent.

The huge amount of water is also bad for another reason: water is done after resource generation. Resources aren't checked for being under water. So you can have a nice ore patch being cut in half. Thus potentially putting you at in resource shortage

The huge amount of water is also bad for another reason: water is done after resource generation. Resources aren't checked for being under water. So you can have a nice ore patch being cut in half. Thus potentially putting you at in resource shortage

As long as setting resources to the lowest setting makes them not spawn at all, i love that water reduces resources even further. Most maps have too much resources. Way too much. It would be better if the resource settings would be fixed though...