Preventing nearby bases

[Telarin]

Has anyone come up with any good tricks (other than running manual patrols) for preventing biters from building bases right outside their walls? It seems like they wouldn't build bases in areas with high pollution, since supposedly they don't like it, but it doesn't seem to slow them down.

[Nirahiel]

What i do is i usually place a few lone wall blocks every once in a while, they have a minimum distance to the player where they can spawn, doing this will make them not able to spawn too close to me

[cube]

The creeper base building doesn't pay any attention to pollution.
Since 0.7.1 there is a rule not to build bases too close to player's buildings, but there was a bug in it, causing the standoff rule to work ... well .. only sometimes
In 0.7.2 it should be all right. Single building will still not count as a base though, there has to be a few buildings close to each other to discourage the creepers.

[Nirahiel]

Yeah, a few walls
(I check the candidate chunks to make sure it works xD )

[Telarin]

What kind of spacing are we talking about with the standoff rule? Are we talking roughly the "blocks" that the mini-map is broken up into, or is the setback a bit larger than that? In 0.7.1, it seemed like they ignored power poles for purposes of picking base locations, but this may have just been a side effect of the bug you mentioned.

[slpwnd]

The spacing is I think 3 chunks ~ 3 small squares in the minimap ~ 100 tiles. However this applies only from the chunks that have more than 5 player structures (hardcoded solution:)).

[Dakkanor]

The spacing is I think 3 chunks ~ 3 small squares in the minimap ~ 100 tiles. However this applies only from the chunks that have more than 5 player structures (hardcoded solution:)).

by player structure does that just mean player entities? or does it exclude walls/belts/electric posts?

[ssilk]

Is there a way to see chunks on the map? I think to press F7 or so...?

[ficolas]

I think the only way is look at the cords and count multiples of 32

[ssilk]

I think to see the chunk borders is very useful and could be in some situations very important.

[slpwnd]

Player structure means anything that the player built (including poles, belts walls, etc.).

At the moment the most convenient way to "see" the chunks is via the pollution map. Pollution is calculated per chunk - so those little squares on the pollution map represent chunks (only visible when your pollution gradient is significant enough). Maybe there could be a setting for the debug mode to show the chunks.

[Nova]

But seeing chunk borders is some kind of exploit the game engine. It should not be possible to use this knowledge to your advantage.

[Nirahiel]

Then what ?
Make the pollution map smooth ? (aka, no squares)

[ssilk]

Don't see that problem. It is part of the physics in the game engine, it doesn't make sense to hide it. And if there are hidden borders I want to see them, because I don't like to count.

The equivalent to the real world: I have some ground and I need to count my steps all the time, because otherwise I stand on the neighbors ground, which knows exactly, where his ground begins and will get very angry and tries to kill me. How practical to draw a line one the ground, so that I always see the borders.