Is this just bad luck or a real issue?

[Recon777]

Running Bob's mods here.
In our new multiplayer world, we were rather surprised to find coal being so difficult to find. And in all the exploration so far, there has been no nickel at all.
But what's even stranger is that there is an absolutely ridiculous amount of tin. Why all the tin? Look at the number of tin patches on this map.
You'd think coal would be more common than tin. And why no nickel at all? Invar is fairly early-game in the grand scheme of things.

The main concern is that we're running rather difficult alien settings, but in such settings, you still need certain resources relatively close to home so that you can push out against the horde.

For Bob's, one thing that might work well (if possible) would be to ensure that at least a small patch of EVERYTHING is guaranteed to be spawned within x distance of the starting area. Is that possible?

[BlakeMW]

I usually play with angels mods to get the ores, but when I have used bobs mod I've found bad luck to be the norm - when there's about a dozen different ores it's not surprising that at least one will be hard to find - usually I believe that a missing ore would have spawned in the area but had the bad luck of being clobbered by water.

But you should be able to get nickel from galena, unless you've configured the mod to disable nickel from galena.

edit: I now recalled my most memorable case of bad luck. The ore I couldn't find was Galena, which meant no lead and major difficulties. Passing by lots of gold and silver on the quest for some lousy lead I eventually found some quite far away and beat back the biters with gun turrets. Luckily, you can make considerable progress even without lead with the main sucky thing not having assembling machine 2 forcing hand crafting of basic inserters to make green science packs.

[Recon777]

We don't have "lead gives nickel" checked... I don't suppose that can be changed after the map is generated?

[orzelek]

I'm ususally using lead from galena so nickel wouldn't be present but AFAIK it should spawn.
And tin has actually pretty big spawn chance - it's consistent with bob's original coverage set up for those ores. And it's spawn chance is actually identical to coal.
There should be a galena patch in starting area. Nickel is not meant to be there as it's a later game resource. Unless I misread something in bob's ore definitions.

So basically you are unlucky

[Recon777]

Tin and lead have about the same level of usage in Bob's mods, so yeah it was extremely surprising to see so much tin. Honestly look at that picture. lol. It's everywhere. RNG is a weird thing if this kind of thing occurs, especially with so little coal.

What do you think about my idea of scripting a small patch of every kind of ore to show up somewhat close to the starting area but not actually in it? Do you have any control over that at all?

Oh I'm also curious, why is uranium in the starting area? That's absolutely not an early game resource. In fact, it's in the way and you can't even mine it out until later in the game, so the starter base ends up getting built on or around it.

[edit]
Managed to find some, finally! Yay. Had to turret creep through biters to get to it.

[orzelek]

As you noticed rng is rng... never know how strange it will roll.
Scripting patch of each resource around starting area but outside it would make things complicated. And then there would be a need to script second "ring" of resources because if there is a patch close why not second one slightly further out. This would make a new mod then with special resource generation rules

Long search for that one missing resource is one thing you need to be prepared for when using RSO. As you can see with tin in your case it seems that statistics is one thing, reality can differ by quite a bit.
I might need to look at seed generation for regional random generators - there might be some space for improvement there.

[IngoKnieto]

Another example of bad luck, there's no iron outside the starting area... (Factorio version 0.16.22, RSO 3.5.5 with default map generation settings, I only choose no cliffs)

I understand RNG is RNG, but this can really kill a map. I think a lot of people would benefit from a not-so-random setting, that creates a mimimum amount per region for each resource.

badluck.gif (192.21 KiB) Viewed 4905 times

[orzelek]

Please drop me the map gen string - it seems that water might have eaten some iron or rng was very bad on this one. I can try to tweak water avoidance a bit to go further out (at cost of mod performance in those nasty cases).

I've been planning to make some kind of rng nastiness compensation mechanics that would adjust ore chances based on amount of that ore already spawned. It has some potential problems I'm not sure how to address or just leave them - main one being the fact that ore layout would actually depend on order of exploring the map. And regen feature would be no longer useful (would totally remake the map potentially even with same seed).

If there is enough interest I can try to prepare something - but it would have big warnings all over it

[IngoKnieto]

This is the map exchange string of my no-iron map:

>>>eNpjYBBgEGNgZGBi4WFJzk/MYWZm5krOLyhILdLNL0oF8jiTi0pT
UnXzM4FSLGwpqcWpRSVAYZaUTDDNlZqXmlupm5RYDFLMml6UWFwMZHB
kFuXnQU1gKU7MSwFJFpfk54FVlRSlpoJUcZcWJeZlluZCFTIwblhlOr
mhRY4BhP/XMxj8/w/CQNYFBgYwBgKgMqAADLAm52SmpTEwNLgwMCg4M
jIyVousc39YNcWeESKv5wBlfICKROyGijxohTIiVkMZHYehDIf5MEY9
jNHvwGgMBp/tEQyIXSVAk6GWcDggGBDJFpAkI2Pv260Lvh+7YMf4Z+X
HS75JCfaMmbKhvgKl7+2AkuxADYxMcGLWTBDYCfMBA8zMB/ZQqZv2jG
fPgMAbe0ZWkA4REOFgASQOeAODR4APyFrQAyQUZBhgTrODGSPiwJgGB
t9gPnkMY1y2R/eHigOjDchwORBxAkSALYS7jBHKjHSASEgiZIFajRiQ
rU9BeO4kzMbDSFajuUEF5gYTByxeQBNRQQp4LpA9KXDiBTPcEcAQvMA
O4wHjlpkBCTjcPVWUCQBY8JLs<<<

This has actually happened to me before in another game, also with version 0.16. I had explored abouth the same size of the map and I had found one iron ore patch outside the starting area (compared to several copper, coal and oil patches). Unfortunatly I don't have the save anymore.
It's just a feeling, but I think when you migrated RSO to Factorio 0.16 something changed, iron and uranium patches are more scarce now than before.

[orzelek]

I took a look at and there are 4-5 iron ore patches below 1k tiles from center. So it's a bad rng in a way that none of them generated closer. There are 2 big ones north of the coal patch on north-west corner.
I've seen maps that prefer copper or iron so this might work both ways.

[IngoKnieto]

Thanks for checking. I guess I can live with the two iron patches in the north, they are not that far away.
I think for an experienced player this is not a problem, but beginners would would probably struggle a bit now.

Just an idea, but maybe you can solve it like this:
You leave your ore generation algorythm as it is. After it's finished, you do a check: if there is no iron patch within a ~500 tile radius, generate one. Same for copper, coal, oil and uranium (and also modded resources).
So in my example map just one additional iron ore patch would have been generated anywhere within that radius.
That check would obviously cause a lag on map creation, but I think that's ok, it's a one-time thing...

[orzelek]

Thanks for checking. I guess I can live with the two iron patches in the north, they are not that far away.
I think for an experienced player this is not a problem, but beginners would would probably struggle a bit now.

Just an idea, but maybe you can solve it like this:
You leave your ore generation algorythm as it is. After it's finished, you do a check: if there is no iron patch within a ~500 tile radius, generate one. Same for copper, coal, oil and uranium (and also modded resources).
So in my example map just one additional iron ore patch would have been generated anywhere within that radius.
That check would obviously cause a lag on map creation, but I think that's ok, it's a one-time thing...

It could work but would need a lot of checking for modded scenarios where you have 20+ ores on map. And some information added to ores to say which ones should be added or not. It's a tricky stuff to get it right.
Also not everything is generated at first so I would need to roll the whole area to check for the ores first.