Friday Facts #217 - Just another Friday Facts

[torham]

Making sure the starting area is not covered by trees.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If a scenario included crash landing and a debris field, the explosions and resulting fires would make a nice clear area in which to start building, while adding some initial excitement.

Hmm, let me try that out

I always thought that this will be in game for 1.0
I never really liked how the player just spawns in the middle of a field with no context as how we got there.

[Nemoricus]

Nice.

Counter-suggestion: remove the resource "pecking order" entirely and just assign each resource patch a random weight. What patch swallows up other patch would depend on their relative weights and distance from the patch center tile. This will result in greater variability (iron won't always override copper or vice versa) and more natural borders between overlapping patches.

I'd really like this idea, please.

[Alice3173]

What if you allowed all resources to spawn wherever the generator designates and create tiles of resources that are a mixed resource?

This is what I was going to suggest. It'd require some work to get dynamic graphics going to actually make it clear they're mixed fields by appearance but it'd be a completely viable option that would not only avoid the issues caused by overlapping that previously existed but would also add a bit of complexity to get full use of your resources since you'd need to handle mine output differently for these patches.

[Avezo]

I would prefer if resurces never overlapped in the first place. Filtering them when you put shared miner is annoying, even more so when it's shared with uranium and you need to provide acid to mine both uranium and other resource. No idea if I were just lucky or did it work differently back when I started playhing, but my first map had everything separate and it was much more fun than playing puzzles with miners and ore patches.

[ratchetfreak]

I would prefer if resurces never overlapped in the first place. Filtering them when you put shared miner is annoying, even more so when it's shared with uranium and you need to provide acid to mine both uranium and other resource. No idea if I were just lucky or did it work differently back when I started playhing, but my first map had everything separate and it was much more fun than playing puzzles with miners and ore patches.

The starter patch and closest ring of patches should be single resource

however once you have researched filter inserters then dealing with mixed ores isn't a big deal any more.

[ske]

Making sure the starting area is not covered by trees.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If a scenario included crash landing and a debris field, the explosions and resulting fires would make a nice clear area in which to start building, while adding some initial excitement.

I'd also expect parts of the ship wreck and some burning trees lighting up the place during the night while a few biters come by for a visit. (The game would start shortly before sunrise and the biters don't attack but disappear into the night.)

[Xterminator]

Awesome awesome awesome! This is the most exciting Friday Facts (for me personally) in at least a month or more. Having a passenger seat in vehicles is fantastic and will actually make combat a lot more interesting and fun in multiplayer I think.

I am extremely thrilled about the resource tweaks! I always wondered if it was just a coincidence that I always found more copper than Iron, so glad to know it's actually true. Tweaking it to have more Iron will be much better and make the iron grind a bit better hopefully. Having the starting area contain all resources and be tree free is godsend! AntiElitz will be very happy with that change.

Even more optimizations, and that 50% improvement in the preparation step is great. Rseding delivering as always!

[_alphaBeta_]

Making sure the starting area is not covered by trees.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: If a scenario included crash landing and a debris field, the explosions and resulting fires would make a nice clear area in which to start building, while adding some initial excitement.

This makes sense to me. Even outside the immediate starting area, however, I think we still need a means to remove (and perhaps harvest) trees in an fast and/or automated fashion. The automation / harvesting can come later in tech research, but shouldn't I be able to start a forest fire in the opening frames of the game if desired? I'd think the early game before grenades and poison capsules would be the one time I'd consider burning a forest, but I can't until much later in tech research. Seems a stretch that I'm building boilers and furnaces early on, but I can't seem to light a tree on fire. There would still be a balance here since burning major forests down in an over-attempt to clear initial area would probably generate enough pollution to trigger a sizable attack you're probably not ready to deal with. Further enhanced gameplay and strategy could come in by the player cutting fire lines through larger forests to control the burns. Still saves the agony of cutting down large forests in their entirety by hand.

Counter-suggestion: remove the resource "pecking order" entirely and just assign each resource patch a random weight. What patch swallows up other patch would depend on their relative weights and distance from the patch center tile. This will result in greater variability (iron won't always override copper or vice versa) and more natural borders between overlapping patches.

What a great idea. Always bothered me when multiple resources are on top of one another. It's just an annoyance really that requires careful placement of miners. Not sure how I feel about resources that are truly mixed in that it's not possible to mine one without the other. I'd almost prefer this over the current adjacent system though since you'll know you definitely need to sort, and not have one miner accidentally overlap another resource that chokes up your whole smelting system.

Yay for resource spacing. Railword preset right now feels like it's nothing special - resources are way too close and playing with the resource settings does not help much

I've been enjoying my last few maps that are railworld-like in that I set most resources to be larger, but less frequent. Gravitating this way for base values makes sense to me to cut down on useless patches.

I've been tempted to reduce the frequency even more on future maps and increase size and density. I don't particularly enjoy having to constantly setup mining outposts that don't last very long, only to tear them down again. It's more fun for me to set up a proper outpost with all amenities, and have it stick around for quite a while.

[ske]

I'd very much like to have the resources correlated with the terrain.

Every ore goes well with desert. Especially stone.

Trees don't go well with desert but do go well with grass. Especially close to water you'd expect dense forest.

Iron and Coal usually are non-toxic. Grass could grow on them.

Copper usually is toxic. Grass does not grow on copper. So, the presence of copper ore would turn an area into desert.


Maybe you can correlate your map generator values in such a way that if the copper is close to the surface, there will be desert instead of grass surrounding the area. (Maybe your new red desert?) When water is close to the surface, the area is grassy and many trees start to grow there. Far from the water the terrain is desert and stone gets exposed.

[Xeorm]

Personally I really liked that expensive mode required much more copper than normal. Made it harder as I could mostly concentrate on just iron in normal. Expensive requires both a hefty copper and iron base. Fitting, I thought.

[PunkSkeleton]

I believe that copper to iron ratio is pretty good in expensive mode. Please tweak the ratios in normal mode. Also as suggested earlier the resource overlapping should be random for any given patch (not single field as this would make it impossible to mine without filter inserters).

[Pure Ownage]

That tank rescue was awesome . I hope Rseeding was humming the Indiana Jones or something.

A couple of things:

I am always using military packs before production but in the tech menu production is shown first making the military only tech hard to spot immediately. Could you change the ordering of the sort to show military before production techs please?

Don't worry too much about how interesting the FFF is, I like the insight into the development of a video game and I've found very few boring

[viveks711]

Personally for me, I find that I need more copper than Iron at the moment.

I'm currently trying to build a 1 RPM mega base in sandbox, peaceful mode and for that, I need a lot of Production Module 3's & Speed module 3's. Though I'm far from achieving that goal, I do consume a lot more copper than iron at the moment. This would probably change once I start mass producing rocket / satellite parts.

Question for the ages: How do you balance the resources in the game when every time you try and maximize the production of one item, something else ends up being in imbalance.

[abtinf]

> Making resources much more spread apart.

Yes, please! I get a big thrill every time I discover a new oil patch, because they are so precious. It would be fantastic if other resource patches were comparably rare. It would also help turn map exploration into something more than "I need to find more oil".

A super-ultra-low frequency setting would be great, or maybe just the ability to specify the probability like, "on average, 1 patch of this resource will appear every 100 chunks" or (equivalently), "This resource has a 1% probability of spawning per chunk."

A story-preserving set of presets to customize the starting area could be a setting like "How much time did you have to plan your crash landing?". "I woke up a year in advance and was able to pick the planet" - start in a giant starting area, free of enemies, with lots of resources. "I barely had time to grab the steering wheel" - very small starting area, thick forest, with roaming biters (but no nests) in the starting area.

[malventano]

Regarding the map generator changes - in addition to rebalancing the weights, will the sort order also be changed to something that makes more sense than alphabetical?

[vedrit]

Holdup, that's it? All we get about an exciting new feature for multiplayer is a gif?
That's all?
Nothing else?

C'mon! You could dedicate an entire FFF to passenger seats! Will trains have passenger seats? Will modders be able to specify number of passenger seats? How are different vehicle functions/guns allocated? What does this mean for network syncing?
Don't just tease us with 1 gif, not matter how awesome it is!

[lovely_santa]

@Rseding91

Reworking how the starting area works so that it always contains a predictable amount of resources.

As addition to this, I find myself looking for "The Perfect Map (TM)". Even when I find a suitable map, if it has uranium in the near area I usualy skip it as thats way end game (purple, yellow) till you finaly have kovarex enrichment, nuclear isn't much worth before that in my opinion as it takes quite long to get the fuel with the uranium processing on its own...

So maybe I would say also remove uranium out of the starting area?

Except from that, great job! Looking forward to see the result!

- lovely_santa

[eradicator]

I think you need to actually make the copper:iron ratio a function of distance, my reasoning is as follows:

The Beginning (Factory-to-Ore distance = up to 100 tiles)
After landing the player needs to construct lots of transport belts, inserters and mining drills. Science is green and red. All of these cost 3-4 times more iron than copper. I also recently completed the "90 Minutes to build a locomotive" challenge and ended up with 35 iron drills, but only 6 copper drills.

Electric Smelting (Factory-to-Ore distance = up to 300 tiles)
The players base has expanded and they've moved on to electric smelting and maybe logistics. This requires more and more electric circuits which require about twice as much copper than iron. Small ore fields in the starting area are not enough to meet the factories ore demand anymore so the player must scout for new fields. The player has no module production yet. If the factory is solar powered this also requires more copper than iron again.

The Rocket (Factory-to-Ore distance = up to 1000 tiles)
The player is now producing purple, yellow science, and a few modules. They will be producing rocket parts when the research is done, which require a bit more iron than copper. (Looking at my savegame my factory uses about 5:3 iron:copper at this stage)

The Endgame (Factory-to-Ore distance = more than 1000 tiles)
If the player is still playing then they're probably going to build large module production facilities, requiring in turn large amounts of copper. Depending on how many productivity modules are available the larger bonus on copper processing (wires and each stage of circuits) might push the copper ratio down a bit, but i think it's still going to be more copper than iron for modules. Infinite science is also a large drain on the factory at this stage.

Conclusion:
There's no "one fits all" ratio for ore. But you'd need a pretty large number of sample savegames to get sufficient data on realistic ratios in the different stages of the game.

[FasterJump]

I think you need to actually make the copper:iron ratio a function of distance

Good Idea. Anyway, please take into consideration production III modules and infinite research cost.

Also it would be interesting to calculate the cost {iron;copper} of 1000 science packs of every type (white included) + one satellite, with and without prod III modules everywhere. Because this is what endgame bases consume on the long term.

[vanatteveldt]

I think you need to actually make the copper:iron ratio a function of distance

Good Idea. Anyway, please take into consideration production III modules and infinite research cost.

Also it would be interesting to calculate the cost {iron;copper} of 1000 science packs of every type (white included) + one satellite, with and without prod III modules everywhere. Because this is what endgame bases consume on the long term.

I'm planning for a modular "all science packs" factory unit, and the helmod calculations show that (with max prod modules) it it pretty evenly balanced: 60/min of each science pack (except military) plus .06/min satellite and 6/min rocket parts gives 11.1k copper plus 13.7k iron. So, a base dedicated to infinite mining prod research consumes 23% more iron than copper...