Factorio Forums

I was looking for ideas about differently generated map, that has water as a base, not a solid terrain.

Currently, as I understand, whole map is generated as a solid terrain of different biomes, after that resources are generated, and as a last step water lakes are placed. (I know it made of chunks)

All attempts to generate a map with a lot of water either leads to northen lakes style map, or swamp kind map.
Also it's clearly visible that water is placed on a map after resources and wipe underwater parts of deposits. And this leads to missing resources, or not enough resources.
I think if there is a way to place resource deposits after water generation, it will be much better. We will always have full resource piles (exactly as resources generator were planning them).
This change in map generation will let us have islands map. Like in Civilization 5. Map that has water as base, and a lot of tiny, small, and some medium sized islands. I understand that Biters threat will be nearly negligible, since they can't swim. Main challenge of this type of map will be to build roads between islands, to get to resource deposits. And it will be a little different play experience in whole, I hope.

In a way RSO does what are you are asking here but only partially.
It will try to move resource spawn if it ends up in water area but it has a limit of 1 chunk in each direction since tests like that are quite performance heavy. So it can still lose a deposit on big water areas.

Trying to actually hit land with ore would require using different algorithm to check if ore patch should be present. Not sure how complex it would be to try and generate ore patch based on actual terrain - might get a bit tricky.

Whole thing would be a lot simplier on ore generation but more complex overall if mod in question would also create the islands while having whole map as water in map gen.

Here are a few suggestion threads that also are about water maps, but go a bit further than you are suggesting:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=52686 Cargo Ships
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=58795 Underwater Nodes

I saw those posts. They propose more significant changes to the game. Those changes need new game mechanics, or/and new graphics and will likely be implemented much later or as addons.

I'm proposing only a change to resource generation. If deposits will be generated after water (not before, as in current version), on acceptable terrain, then this change will fix existing problem of resource deposits cut or totally destroyed by water placement. Same time, this change will allow easy generation of island type map. What generated first - water or resource deposits is programmed in game engine, and I doubt that this can be changed in addon.
After this change, I think, a map generation addon could be used to create an island type map.

I haven't dug too deep into the map generation code, but something stands out to me:
- Resources are generated by taking a noise function, transforming it, and placing resources around the peaks.
- Water is generated by taking a noise function, transforming it, and placing water in the valleys.

So now the important question, is it possible to alter the noise generator for elevation so that it automatically elevates areas where resources will be generated?