0.16 Map generation Feedback

[zOldBulldog]

I think it makes sense that you get the same amount per unit of land. You don't have to explore, take over and control water, only land.

Like take a look at this map. Some pretty big oceans. What should happen to the ore that tries to spawn in the oceans? Should it find the nearest place to spawn? If so the coasts would be completely covered in ore.
https://i.imgur.com/Hl5wkbV.png

The following is probably not the best solution but it is probably the simplest to implement:

- If the patch is partially underwater, move all of the ore to the part of the patch that is on dry land. Yes, that would make them look like very concentrated ore patches but it should be a reasonable compromise.

- If the patch is completely underwater, move it to the nearest piece of dry land, maybe trying to center it on the strip of land.

Not a perfect fix, but it would at least ensure we get the originally intended amount of ores.

[Hedning1390]

I don't really know how generation happens, but it seems that the map spawns chunk by chunk. If an ocean chunk is spawned what should happen with the ore in it. Should the map "remember" that it has some ore to place? What if all nearby land is already discovered before the ocean chunk is spawned? Where should the ore spawn?

Also ores override each other. If you are looking to move 50 patches from the ocean onto a piece of land what should happen? Should ore mixing on the same tile be allowed? That would cause a nightmare when mining. Even if things can be moved like you suggest then ore bunched up on the beaches or the center of each landmass is going to look rather strange.

I think the best way to "fix" this is to simply increase the range of "size" and "richness". That way someone could get as much ore as they want regardless of their water settings. Change the settings from a 6 valued drop down to a slider going from like 0-100 where 100 is almost infinite.

[nosports]

I like it, its reasonable as per moment.

my suggestion would be an added tech for sea-mining.
Would include a bridge tile which could carry only belt, pipes, poles....

[Dry Hairy Tree]

Some Ecological rules/principles that might help map generation.

Specific land types have specific plant types. The patterns:

some plants ONLY go on their own land types

some plants can grow on more than one land type

edges (where two land types meet) always have more species than the interiors of specific land types

As well as gradients in and out of specific land types there can also be gradients with proximity to water (rainfall actually, but Factorio doesn't rain). Mineral/fertiliser resources come from water bodies onto land then rain moves them back (e.g. salmon eaten, excreted out on land; e.g. seabirds feed in ocean, excrete over land). This is how nature does it, and partly why central deserts can be so depauperate though temp extremes may affect things just as profoundly.

Some plant species have most of the biomass for their respective ecosystems. In other words, some dominate. With thousands of species in the Tropical rainforest I could walk through and convince you I knew nearly all of them. The trick would be to learn the 10 most populous. Some are so rare you'd never find one…

Creature density is entirely dependant on vegetation density. Evolutionarily, the more resources/area a species has, the faster they can evolve/populate. Energy begets evolution. This will be in science books eventually, for now it's the thesis I just completed (backed by a data set of hundreds of species DNA).

Rotten rocks belong in aged landscapes (Desert, sand). Others in other landscapes. Mixing is fine but there are always discernible patterns in nature, it's just the discerning is often shoddy.

All these 'rules' should be able to be mapped with some basic equations. At this point I can only make suggestions my math is awful though I do try…

Landscape A takes plant types B, C, D, E… n. These plants have a dominance hierarchy specific to that land type so they're like 40% 30% 10%.... n% of forests on that land type. (add small range of percentages instead of fixed figures for more realism). Overall density of specific forests is influenced by proximity to other land types (less for desert neighbour, more for water/grassland). Textures/shrubbery etc should be treated the same.

Landscape A merges with landscape B – two types of plant communities share the borders. These 'edges' are also where humans thrive, and likely biters. More productivity and variety, and typically water proximity. e.g. river/land or ocean/land. Two productive ecosystems.

We'll ignore temperature, hugely important in evolution, not a feature of the game… or we'd have

Cold – Amenable – Hot (temp variable) to blend with
Desert – Forest – Swamp (water variable)

In terrestrial systems:
The plants will be found with the water
The creatures will be found with the (harvest ready) plants

Some biters could be migratory hordes…

A desert full of biters has no means of existing. Their density dependence should be a function of plant density and water proximity.

Bit disjointed but hopefully some ideas get through to the folk working on map generation.

[Amarula]

Excellent ideas to make the maps more realistic.
Just one thing...

A desert full of biters has no means of existing. Their density dependence should be a function of plant density and water proximity.

These are aliens, maybe they eat rock dust, maybe plant life is toxic to them, maybe they subsist on aether, I don't have to have fauna that acts like earth animal life...

[Drakken]

I purposefully play on all desert maps, very small starting position, maxed out biter nests, with with minimal trees, marathon/deathworld to increase difficulty to the maximum in the base game with no mods. At this setting I often have a hard time getting to blue science and I love it. I need these settings otherwise it is just a sandbox game for me.

If this was added in it would ruin the game for me. Your ideas are valid but they would have to change up a lot to make it challenging for me again.

[Dry Hairy Tree]

Great feedback.

Amarula - yes I had considered aliens eat dirt/mineral matter. On earth creatures of this type (e.g. the lowly worm) are actually eating microbes. So Factorio worms could very well be eating 'dirt'.

The biters I see as the potential predatory types. The spitters as herbivores with cool defenses. Here on earth we've several species that spit acid!

Drakken - I hope that map generation rules are applied on top of a users preferred settings. So when you ask for maxed out biters and desert you get that. That shouldn't change at all. What would change is after your settings, the algorithm for ecological aspects of what you've asked for kicks in to paint it. There'd be a standard template of how these rules apply (default), and user settings can alter that to more/less of things in both density and frequency much like things are done now. The desert fluff on the ground would be more specific to deserts, edges would show changes in floral patterns not just randomly spray painted kind of thing.

These 'rules' for ecology could also lend weight to any potential future edition, where exploration of the planets resources might shift from mineral to mineral and biological entities. The potential is enormous. Then specific ecotypes are required for specific crops, habitat, etc...

Regardless, I think it might be relatively easy to implement? Categorise trees and widgets for specific ecotype/s. Set their frequencies so some are favored over others to mirror typical distribution patterns. Densities are up to the user, default densities to game creators. There's also rules about distribution. Basically even, clumped, and scattered random. Even is rare. More an anomaly. Entities could have differing distributions according to ecotype if they are shared across more than one, further allowing for individual looks/feels to specific situations.

There are three types of aliens (so far). Distribution might be (for default) more strategic. So they get distributed with a higher probability of being placed beside rocks or water, or in trees. So if x amount of biters was to cover y chunks of real estate, that still applies but they'd be more likely to be densest near the water and vegetation, or rock cover. Migrations likewise might settle in 'better' locations in that, when they migrate, if they encounter predetermined conditions after (and before) covering a certain distance, they settle on the spot.

[nuhll]

I purposefully play on all desert maps, very small starting position, maxed out biter nests, with with minimal trees, marathon/deathworld to increase difficulty to the maximum in the base game with no mods. At this setting I often have a hard time getting to blue science and I love it. I need these settings otherwise it is just a sandbox game for me.

If this was added in it would ruin the game for me. Your ideas are valid but they would have to change up a lot to make it challenging for me again.

WTF? XD

Do you record your fight?

[Jan11]

First of all Factorio is a great game and I played it hundred of hours but there is one thing what isn`t good. It`s map generation. Really I know you work on it but I have to say it.

If I change something in settings it often feels like hmmm it hasn't changed anything or to much.

Size of landscape. Example: Reduce desert size. I still get deserts in the map preview wich are sooooooo big. It doesn`t changed anything. Half of the preview is dessert.
Landscape patches there are often to much different biomes in each other.

Cliffs : Normal settings I miss them often. High settings The whole map is full????? or only the startlocation???

Starting location: Really ?? only one water patch??. I have to play with small startlocation to get a better area with a little bit more water and so on.

That are some things that bother me a lot. I don`t know how many maps previews I generate each time before I start a new map...

[zOldBulldog]

Completely right. It is supposedly being worked on for 0.17... which I think I read will be around December.

Until then your best bet is to look for the few good maps that people have found.

[Koub]

0.17... which I think I read will be around December some time in the future.

FTFY

[db48x]

I've just noticed this thread, and haven't read much of it, but by pure coincidence I've been working on an interactive explanation of how map generation in Factorio works. I too think that the map options are cryptic and hard to understand; it took me ages to understand what was going on. I think that an interactive display like this is a great way to learn how the options work. In principle it could even be done in-game, on the map preview.

http://db48x.net/factorio-terrain

Let me know what you think

[adam_bise]

I've been playing DWM with 50 max biter group size, starting area = very small, and some changes to resources.

I've noticed the huge oil patches, tried tweaking them down. resource settings seem... off... example, richness seems to influence rarity, size seems to influence rarity etc...

Also, starting area=very small on death world is HAARD. my map is almost completely red!

dwm.png (382.8 KiB) Viewed 7224 times

[drachma]

just picked up 0.16 after not playing since 0.15

looks like there was some kind of minor fix introduced between the beginning of this thread and the latest version of 0.16, as I am not getting the ridiculous oil patches shown previously. they are still a lot bigger than 0.15.

same issues... I used all default 0.16 generation settings and greatly enjoyed the previewers!

- on minimap, stone is same color as terrain. please improve this!
- tons of uranium, more than necessary
- iron still seems rare compared to copper, in terms of patches that are within early-rail-distance of my base. could just be my luck since it sounds like they improved this.
- stone very rare in start area. this was OK though as it forced me to play a bit differently, going for rails earlier than normal and having to avoid wasting stone on walls/paths to go out and get more stone. still it is something that i think should be fixed.
- water/lakes are super rare on default mode. i really enjoyed the large oceans/lakes of 0.15 which made base perimeter defense a matter of walling off chokepoints and defending those.
- cliffs are a super-cool concept but I am very skeptical. right now they are a huge nuisance which forced me to kludge together messy systems just to tech up to cliff explosives so that i could make room for myself. I thought these would take the place of the "borders" created by large oceans by allowing us to defend chokepoints in cliff bands instead. but as it stands cliffs are just EVERYWHERE scattered haphazardly, and are just more of a nuisance to clear than trees. it would be better if cliffs spawned in more "snake" like configurations so they would create mountainous borders around larger areas of flat land. this would add some interesting defense gameplay that is a bit different than just walling off land-bridge chokepoints between lakes. it doesn't need to be 1 long continuous cliff band (I read the FFF on their design decision to make them broken up and passable and I agree), just limit the area they generate in to be long and narrow (like 30 tiles x 500+) creating a "mountain range" much like a river might be.

[zOldBulldog]

I am starting to wonder if the 0.16 frequency implementation might be coded backwards.

I recently came across in a post an excellent map generation string (I must remember to put it here when I get home). Big patches, separated, rich enough,. Good amounts of what I need,oil, uranium in two large patches at the left of the map.

I figured "cool, this guy found a decent low frequency map". But looking at the settings I noticed pretty high frequency settings!!!

[Alyssa]

Hello

I've started Factorio again after some time of inactivity,my idea was to make a railworld-like map,with "Very Low" frequency on all resources.

Well,I spent a good 30 minutes in the settings and...maps just weren't right.

The resource is distribution is nowhere near as "very low" and "very small", have a look at this example:



There's a ridiculously high amount of uranium(set to very low / very poor / very small!) and iron / copper as well (again, all set to very low frequency / very small and very poor!), and that oil patch over there? that's supposed to be "very small"? it looks between big and very big to me.

I don't know if the map generator is supposed to work like this, but this is ridiculous to me, absolutely so, when I think of a "very low" frequency I think that there should be like 95% of the map empty with very small patches there and there,not that overwhelming amount of resources everywhere and there's no way I can play a proper rail world game like this.

Edit:
Another example:


= = >



Huge, ENORMOUS iron / copper deposits on the map, so much for "very small"! and wasn't uranium supposed to be a very scarce / rare resource by default? look at those uranium deposits....

[Koub]

[Koub] Did a bit of merging of map generation feedback topics.

[Hannu]

There should be possibility to give multipliers in numerical form to resource algorithm instead of (or in addition to) vague verbal choices. That would give possibility to extreme values for experimental games.

[Alyssa]

There should be possibility to give multipliers in numerical form to resource algorithm instead of (or in addition to) vague verbal choices. That would give possibility to extreme values for experimental games.

This! would make the generator vastly more customizable and flexible.

[Zavian]

I think extreme values would simply break the generator.

@ alyssa. I think that most of your problems comes from not understanding the interaction of frequency and size. Low frequency means that resource patches tend to be big. low size means that resource patches tend to be frequent. With the current generator, what you want just does not work. RSO (https://mods.factorio.com/mod/rso-mod) is a popular alternative generator, that can probably be tweaked to do what you want. (Have played with it's options enough to actually be sure).