Factorio Forums

I'm relatively new at playing factorio, but one of the things that has bugged me starting out is the fact that I cannot select a starting environment. If I start in a desert or badlands environment, I quickly seem to run out of available trees to create small electric poles, well before I'm ready to move to Medium electric poles. I end up having to restart the level whenever I start out there. I would agree that environment can be a useful factor for replayability, in that it forces certain choices in research and factory layout, so a default random environment setting would be good, however, as a new player, an inability to select where I start, without using the map editor leads me to struggle through and often die unsatisfying when the only source of wood is too close to a biter nest.

Please have a look at how the map works:
https://forums.factorio.com/wiki/inde ... _generator
In other words: The map is not generated and then the starting point is chosen, it is more so, that the starting point is chosen and then the map around the player it is generated.

So it is eventually not making much sense to choose the starting location. If you want to have that, you can use the map-editor.

Tholomyes wrote:I'm relatively new at playing factorio, but one of the things that has bugged me starting out is the fact that I cannot select a starting environment. If I start in a desert or badlands environment, I quickly seem to run out of available trees to create small electric poles, well before I'm ready to move to Medium electric poles. I end up having to restart the level whenever I start out there. I would agree that environment can be a useful factor for replayability, in that it forces certain choices in research and factory layout, so a default random environment setting would be good, however, as a new player, an inability to select where I start, without using the map editor leads me to struggle through and often die unsatisfying when the only source of wood is too close to a biter nest.

I really like this idea. A simple drop down to say what biome you want the starting area to be. Not saying easy to implement but a nice to have feature. Sometimes you want to start in a forest to help cut down on your early game pollution spread etc.

I'm usually setting my server up to start in a biome rich on trees because of 2 reasons:
(1) a lot of trees to cut down and being able to use them as fuel
(2) Pollution is not that far-reaching, because of the huge number of trees in the way

When I set up the last playthrough (Bob's mods) I regenerated the map about 30 times because each time I got a desert spawn.
So I support this decision, maybe by making the grass lands more common or by being able to choose in which biome you want to start.

The easiest way to do this would be to generate the map, and if the starting location is not in the specified biome, re-generate the map.

Please try to understand, how the map generator works, because this is not a possible solution, it will take too much CPU time.

The solution to this problem is in my opinion, that we generate a "world of worlds"; two stages, instead of one. The "stage one worlds" can then be generated in a way, that such biomes are guaranteed. No need to look, if the map contains it.

I made some suggestion about map generating:
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 80&t=13022

merged topic with already existing one -- daniel34

A Suggestion to be a feature.

Summary : A feature to select the type of world/biome/starting position to spawn in, such as Desert, Plains, Island, Forest, ect

I think it would be a cool feature or "Mod" but i think as a mod its quite impossible since it has to go with World Generation.
to be able to select in the "New Game" menu what type of biome to generate a world on or where you would spawn in a certain biome being Desert, plains, island, forest, ect.

Idea From - OTTD world generation, "Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe"

Devildog wrote:I think it would be a cool feature or "Mod" but i think as a mod its quite impossible since it has to go with World Generation.

Check out the thread linked by ssilk (https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 80&t=13022).
The basic idea there is that mods are able to add their own GUI to the world generation screen and then can overwrite/replace the map generated. The only limit then would be the modders capability.