[Twinsen] Ore Availability

Deadly-Bagel · Post by **Deadly-Bagel** » Sat Mar 17, 2018 11:26 pm

This is seriously bordering from "balancing" to "bug" and tbh I wasn't going to create a topic but came across this post:

Twinsen wrote:I would be interested to know the exact problems you have with the new map generation. Please give me map exchange strings.

So as requested:

mapstring

First of all, I'd like to point out that yes the Map Preview is great and all but I am quite colourblind and there are no tooltips on the ores so it's practically impossible for me to see that there is almost no copper on this map. Literally the only things that aren't green to me on it are water and iron, makes it rather difficult.

From what I have currently explored I can see 58.735 million Iron Ore and 0.842 million Copper Ore, with the same frequency, size and richness settings. There is also significantly more Uranium Ore, almost 8.5 million, despite it being set to Low / Medium / Regular (instead of Very Low / Very Big / Very Good) Frequency, Size, and Richness, respectively. The same was with my last game, I had disproportionately more Iron Ore, Uranium and even Stone in spite of the map gen settings.

I'm not expecting this to be fixed in 0.16 but this is seriously messed up.

Deadly-Bagel · Post by **Deadly-Bagel** » Sat Mar 17, 2018 11:53 pm

I used a command to explore further out and there are eventually some decent deposits (one something like 80 million) but I have to go pretty far for them, I don't particularly mind in general but for the start of the game before you get bots it's a long way to manually lay rails.

There is also next to no stone nearby on this map, I usually don't have a problem with that (and it's usually not used in great quantities) but given that I've set it to Very Low / Big / Regular it's still weird that there's this huge abundance of Iron Ore, Uranium Ore and Coal but no Stone.

Post by **Twinsen** » Mon Mar 19, 2018 5:39 pm

Given that you selected "Very Low" frequency I would say this is working as expected. The resources are very far apart. Also by selecting "Very Low"/"Very Big" the randomness range is very big meaning that what you get in quite unpredictable and random.

If you want more predictable ore please select "Normal" frequency, "Very Low" is for exploring quite vast distances.

Stone is made to be much less than the other resources, so it's normal that you find very little. It does seem a bit extreme on that map, but apart from that everything seems reasonable to me. There will still be some tweaks in 0.17, so I will keep this in mind.

Deadly-Bagel · Post by **Deadly-Bagel** » Mon Mar 19, 2018 11:04 pm

Far apart, sure, but I'd still expect it to be a bit more balanced with the similarly-consumed Iron Ore on the same setting. And some randomness is to be expected, but not a range of nearly 7,000%. That big patch of 77mill Copper was at -1100 / -550 which just about balances the numbers, but just a little further out is an Iron Ore deposit of 98 mill.

Some other examples;

mapstrings

Generated consecutively, the first two have significantly more Iron Ore which only seems to be balanced past ~1000 tiles. The last is somewhat more what I'd expect between Copper and Iron (though it's less iron, not more copper), but both are overshadowed by the amount of Uranium Ore and interestingly there's even slightly more Stone as well, most of it very close (6.2 million stone to <300k Iron and Copper within 250 tiles of 0,0). All three of these were generated with the Rail World preset (removed enemies, if that changes anything).

Actually if I remove the water from that third save there's slightly more Copper than Iron in a 900 tile radius, though overall it's a lot lower than the other railworlds and there is still just as much Stone and Uranium. This is more what I'd expect from a Very Low frequency, at least in terms of iron and Copper, and if it were consistent you'd at least know what to expect with it. So one game out of five got balance right, even if not with 2/3 other resources or consistent with other seeds.

The "last game" I mentioned in the OP:

mapexchange

Within 900 tiles there are two Copper Ore patches around 2 million each, and a scattering of 1 million patches. In the same area there is just as many scatterings of Iron Ore, plus a patch of 5.8 million, one of 6.5 million, and one of 11 million. This was generated with the Deathworld preset, except I removed Cliffs.

Post by **Twinsen** » Tue Mar 20, 2018 1:00 pm

The further the resources are apart, the consequence is of course that they average out over longer distances. The resources are balanced, you just need to explore further.

Also keep in mind that the generator iron:copper:coal:stone ratio is 9.8 : 6 : 4.5 : 2.3

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