Friday Facts #258 - New autoplace

[Klonan]

https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-258

[DarkMatterMatt]

Nice! Seems like a lot of effort just so players don't need to spam "regenerate", but awesome work nonetheless

[krystof1119]

Nice! I hope that the oil is supposed to be closer than that in the LAN party. That was insane! It took what, 2 hours with a team of 30-something players to find oil?

Also, how much closer will the biters be now?

[IronCartographer]

All that said, I was perfectly happy when ore placement was unpredictable and sometimes there was no copper in the starting area and really long belts (and walls to defend them) were in order. So if I have my way there will be a "no special starting area resource placement" option.

It's 0.12 all over again!

Sounds like a nice option to have, as long as it can be toggled independently of the biter-buffer starting area effect.

[Dupl3xxx]

I have but one wish; guarantee one oil-spot within X tiles from spawn. I love me a world where there's much more ocean than land, but that also means it might be several thousand tiles from spawn to the nearest oil.

[Hoefnix]

Is there any reason you guys don't mention any fixes for the mess that lakes become as you move further from spawn? The swamp it becomes out there is really crap and the only way to not get a swamp is to disable water outside starting area.

Do you guys consider this not to be an issue?
Is it impossible to fix?

Any news is better than no news and when I saw the title of this FFF I really thought something about #swampgate was going to be in there.

Besides that, awesome work on the resource generation! It's going to be awesome for an any% speedrun since you can crank the resources up to insane again!

Edit: Just noticed the one line about small tweaks to some other features coming. Still, any news on the water generation?

[deef0000dragon1]

Ok I love that the generator is getting looked at. but I have to say, I have ONE major downside to the current decision. Specifically that of no oil in the starting area. I think that should be an option to exclude oil from the starting area, (heck, the ability to set every ore density/size in the starting area would be amazing.) ESPECIALLY for people who want to play rail-world type scenarios. Not having at least SOME oil in the starting area is going to make parts of that particular challenge/play-style drastically different. Im not resisting change because change, but when I play rail-world, I normally get blue science started before I really push expansion, and oil is needed for that. Just something to consider.

[BlueTemplar]

I have to say, I have ONE major downside to the current decision. Specifically that of no oil in the starting area.

It doesn't seem like a decision, rather fixing a bug, since oil (and uranium) were never intended to be in the starting area in the first place ?

I think that should be an option to exclude oil from the starting area

Two (off by default!) options to include oil and uranium in the starting areas would be nice indeed !

[BlueTemplar]

Much more predictable starting area resources that don't overlap each-other and are not covered by water.

Maybe I haven't understood it properly, but from the screenshots it seems like this goal hasn't been achieved ?

It seems from the screenshots that while you're guaranteed to have all of the resource spots to appear, an unknown fraction of each of them might be underwater (and/or covered by other resources?).

Or does this :

In general, spot noise allows us to mess around with the placement of resources while keeping overall quantities constant.

mean that the under-water/other_ore resources are just "pasted" back into the remaining ore patch area, increasing resource density in it?

[Rhamphoryncus]

I once read an article about procedurally generating the facade of a building, placing windows and other details, and using some measurement of entropy to prevent it from becoming spammy noise. I can't find it now but your mention of a point system reminds me of that.

Aside, having separate sliders for large and small scale water/land generation, rather than one slider to choose between large and small, would go a long way to making water more interesting and less of a random noise feel.


Edit: closest I can find is https://github.com/mxgmn/WaveFunctionCollapse. Not exactly the article I was looking for but I probably read it at the same time and it seems to be the same subject matter.

[db48x]

I'm going to have to update and improve my tutorial on the map generator settings: http://db48x.net/factorio-terrain/

In the mean time, does anyone want to take bets on whether the elevation shading in those screenshots is going to remain in the game?

[psihius]

Good stuff,

should have included a preview of a map generated under "Railword" settings

While working on the map gen in general, here's a little request: Ability to generate a chunk of the map by setting width and height, but with offset spawn point so the generated area moves to the desired coordinate and moves the spawn point, but not the starting area.

I want to do a distributed map for Clusterio with borders, but I can't generate required chunks under current system

[Fumelfo]

Concerning the spawning of trees... I can disable my life long enemies. However, you can't play the game this way : you can't power your first lab !
If only we had a pole or something to start with when there is no tree nearby :/

[Beil]

MY biggest complaint about the current map generator and why it sucks, is the Mess high water settings does to a map. What I want to see is Huge bodys of water around large land masses like you see in the older map generator, not this unusable swamp we get now. After that is fixed I feel like the current problem of resources being eaten by water will be massively reduced. I love this game but I have honestly not played at all this patch because of the garbage map generator right now.

[BlueTemplar]

Concerning the spawning of trees... I can disable my life long enemies. However, you can't play the game this way : you can't power your first lab !
If only we had a pole or something to start with when there is no tree nearby :/

Yeah, it's an issue with Alien Biomes too...
I have an easy fix : start the player with a single wooden power pole in his inventory !
(If he manages to burn it in a furnace before that, his loss...)

I'm going to have to update and improve my tutorial on the map generator settings: http://db48x.net/factorio-terrain/

Thanks, great tutorial !

In the mean time, does anyone want to take bets on whether the elevation shading in those screenshots is going to remain in the game?

Why would it disappear ?
What's weird is that I don't have it in my map preview ??
My hope is that they'll eventually manage to make cliffs follow elevation...

[Deadly-Bagel]

It did seem like one oil setting would give you 2 oil wells within 200 tiles and the next setting up would give you 30. Finer controls will definitely be appreciated.

Perhaps a lot of the problems came from the "exploration" side however. The range of a Radar isn't actually that far when it came to Railworld style play, and regularly I'd have cases where the areas I'd explored would have some 30mill Copper Ore and 2mill Iron Ore (spread across several small patches). In most cases I'd find there was a 20mill Iron Ore patch just a little further out, but which direction? The time to explore another chunk out becomes exponentially more time consuming.

This is part of the Railworld style of game, but the exponential increase was a pain to overcome. The alternative was to just drive in one direction until you come across what you need, which... usually worked better, just meant that you'd occasionally need to build some absurdly long rails. I actually did this once to find an 8mill Iron patch a few thousand tiles out, halfway back from building the whole rail I revealed a few extra tiles to the side and found a 20mill patch. D'oh.

I would still love to see a high-tier power-hungry Radar dedicated to exploring new chunks with much greater range than the current Radar, especially one that could ping distant resource patches, but with the changes to map generation it looks like it won't be as desperately wished for any more. Could certainly turn to mods in this case.

[ratchetfreak]

Much more predictable starting area resources that don't overlap each-other and are not covered by water.

Maybe I haven't understood it properly, but from the screenshots it seems like this goal hasn't been achieved ?

It seems from the screenshots that while you're guaranteed to have all of the resource spots to appear, an unknown fraction of each of them might be underwater (and/or covered by other resources?).

Or does this :

In general, spot noise allows us to mess around with the placement of resources while keeping overall quantities constant.

mean that the under-water/other_ore resources are just "pasted" back into the remaining ore patch area, increasing resource density in it?

The goal is that when such an overlap occurs the overlapped patch becomes bigger to compensate for any that was lost in the overlap

That way you avoid the scenario where your copper got covered by the lake and you need to venture out way sooner than you are ready for

[Engimage]

Very nice to hear you finally got to map generator! This is my worst concern about the 0.16 game at all!

Spot quantity can depend on the suitability of the location. For example, we could set suitability to correspond to elevation so that spots are not placed underwater. The system would then continue through the list of candidate spots, placing more spots at locations above water to compensate. In the base game we're planning to do this for starting area resources, but not for resources outside of the starting area.

Why not for other areas?
I really like this algorithm of yours to avoid placing resources under water! As many other players I know I do enjoy playing maps with a lot of water. Currently it often ends up with maps totally lacking some resource due to it randomly getting all the way under the water, especially oil. Can you please consider at least option enabling this algorithm for the entire map? For me this is definitely a game changing option that would possibly be the final of my concerns about game at all. At least you can lower probability of underwater spawns (and not remove it entirely) so that game will at least try to spawn surface resources more compared to underwater.

Also please look into water generation resulting in a swamp-like map with high water settings. Can this be more like sea-ocean like? Like decreasing the base frequency so that overall scale is larger.

Regarding resource patch shapes - personally I do enjoy more rounded patches with different forms from previous releases than currently presented randomized circle ones. So please consider random shapes with lower frequency noise on them so that edges are not like crazy amoeba. All it does is mess up with miner placement resulting in very fast dryout of border miners making resource patch pretty inconsistent.

[wvlad]

MY biggest complaint about the current map generator and why it sucks, is the Mess high water settings does to a map. What I want to see is Huge bodys of water around large land masses like you see in the older map generator, not this unusable swamp we get now. After that is fixed I feel like the current problem of resources being eaten by water will be massively reduced. I love this game but I have honestly not played at all this patch because of the garbage map generator right now.

I even made a mod for this. This really should be fixed.

[RocketManChronicles]

The biggest issue I find with the terrain generator is the water settings. It seems you are either going "only water in starting area" or having lots of lakes/ponds with tiny land choke points. If I were to set the water to very high in size, I would hope to see large "oceans" hundreds of tiles wide. Similarly, the frequency of water is either MILLIONS of lakes or three. There seems to be no progression for either for water generation.

See, water plays a very unique role in Factorio. It is both needed for water (duh) and a natural barrier, like cliffs. There needs to be a general balance between a construction barrier and a biter barrier. I understand everyone's preferences to be different, but there seems to be no scale in water generation; you are either at one extreme or the other. In my honest opinion, water needs to be scaled appropriately. If I choose to have Very Large water size, I want to see massive oceans. If I set it to medium, I want to see lakes that are maybe 100 tiles wide. And in terms of frequency, Very Low is not low enough; they need to spread out more.

I know I am unique, but a "good map" for me is playing on large continent like land masses with huge oceans of water (you probably guessed by this point). But this map only becomes "good" for me when the choke points between bodies of water are huge. I don't want snake-like land twisting in water where choke points are merely 20 tiles wide. It is too easy to defend those small choke points. And the current map generator with Very Low frequency and Very High size gives me swampland. I end up filling in lots of medium-sized bodies of water outside the starting area just to make the map something worthwhile (I did this in my first 0.16 game). Since then, every map has been only water in the starting area; nothing but land to cover beyond that.