New 1.18 version terrain generator disappointment....

[Rhyagelle]

  

14 hours ago, Copperman said:

Personally I have found the world I generated at random pretty bad in terms of mountains. I like the idea of mountain ranges but it seems often that every little area of flat grass is surrounded by enormous tight waves of mountains that shoot up to the build limit and then plumet straight down to like y level 100 abd then straight back up. It makes exploration in those environments really nasty

I think I know exactly what you mean. Sort of like this in generation, right? If so, 100% agreed. You could find a beautiful place, flat or even slightly bumpy, and then it's almost entirely walled in by steep, flat sided mountains and that makes traversing through or about the area hideously annoying.

1 hour ago, imperialwaltz said:

NGL I've seen you on Steam doing the exact same kind of pocket moderating and it's fairly annoying trying to share one's experience when someone else is constantly crowing in the background how great theirs' is with multiple comments. It's a weird form of one-up-manship that I'm not fond of, especially when the thread itself is simply about what people are disappointed with, with the current generator, in an Early-access game, where the developers ask for this kind of feedback.

Being annoyed isn't being upset as well, not everyone is a "u mad?" troll. We're real people with real money and real opinions.

Having said that I was able to find the setting after fiddling around with the "uplift" option in the customize world and I found that 10-20% seems so much better than the default 40%, though I found 0% to be very flat with unnatural formations.

Spoiler

Pocket moderating? What are you talking about? So I'm not allowed to state my opinions anywhere—not even on Steam where you apparently stalked me to—because it disagrees with someone else's? Sharing an opinion, even if you don't like it, isn't in any shape or form, "pocket moderation". How is it my fault that you're taking my opinions, which I'm freely allowed to share even if you hate it, as me "trying" to shush you or somehow discrediting you and your experiences? Look, it's a public forum. If someone posts a thread in a public space, expect other people to pop in and state their own opinions, and expect not all of them to reflect whatever it is that you believe/like/dislike/etc etc. Or are you trying to discourage me from talking because of your behavior? Are your publically shared experiences an attempt to discredit MY experiences? No, and I certainly wouldn't accuse you of it if I didn't like what you were saying or because it disagreed with me or my experiences. In fact, nothing I ever even said even remotely implied that my experiences made yours less of an experience. You just took it that way and for absolutely no reason.

No, but reacting to someone initially in the matter that you did, certainly defines being upset. I also never accused you of being a "u mad" troll or that you weren't a real person, what are you even going on about? I didn't even say anything wrong, and in fact, I even agreed about the hill problem. You got so caught up in my explaining why there's a hill problem (and that I found some flat grounds in 1.18?), that you actually convinced yourself that I was (am?) trying to "discourage" you and others from talking about your experiences. I'm sorry that you took it this way, it wasn't even close to any intention. I'm excited about Vintage Story, I love it, and I like to engage in discussions about it—even those that may not align 100% with my own opinions. I didn't come into this thead to shut you or anyone else up about their (terrible) experiences with hills, especially since I actually agree with the problem. I wish you would have just asked me if that was my intention or something, instead of reacting the way you did and doing the things you did, because clearly there has been a massive misunderstanding and this was all not necessary whatsoever.

And might I just add; I've never seen someone stalk another person to another platform and complain about them sharing their opinions before on a different platform. Talk about creepy behavior. And yet despite this, you expect me to not believe that you were upset earlier? It sounds more like you have a problem with me in general, not that I actually did anything wrong here or to you, and you've used this thread as an excuse to act on it. I don't even know what to say about this all. It's such an overaction to a harmless comment... lesson learned though. Block and enable privacy mode, because someone angry about your game opinions will, no doubt, stalk you across sites. 

 

Edited May 8, 2023 by Rhyagelle
images and further defined responses added

[Copperman]

3 hours ago, Rhyagelle said:

  

I think I know exactly what you mean. Sort of like this in generation, right? If so, 100% agreed. You could find a beautiful place, flat or even slightly bumpy, and then it's almost entirely walled in by steep, flat sided mountains and that makes traversing through or about the area hideously annoying.

  Reveal hidden contents

Pocket moderating? What are you talking about? So I'm not allowed to state my opinions anywhere—not even on Steam where you apparently stalked me to—because it disagrees with someone else's? Sharing an opinion, even if you don't like it, isn't in any shape or form, "pocket moderation". How is it my fault that you're taking my opinions, which I'm freely allowed to share even if you hate it, as me "trying" to shush you or somehow discrediting you and your experiences? Look, it's a public forum. If someone posts a thread in a public space, expect other people to pop in and state their own opinions, and expect not all of them to reflect whatever it is that you believe/like/dislike/etc etc. Or are you trying to discourage me from talking because of your behavior? Are your publically shared experiences an attempt to discredit MY experiences? No, and I certainly wouldn't accuse you of it if I didn't like what you were saying or because it disagreed with me or my experiences. In fact, nothing I ever even said even remotely implied that my experiences made yours less of an experience. You just took it that way and for absolutely no reason.

No, but reacting to someone initially in the matter that you did, certainly defines being upset. I also never accused you of being a "u mad" troll or that you weren't a real person, what are you even going on about? I didn't even say anything wrong, and in fact, I even agreed about the hill problem. You got so caught up in my explaining why there's a hill problem (and that I found some flat grounds in 1.18?), that you actually convinced yourself that I was (am?) trying to "discourage" you and others from talking about your experiences. I'm sorry that you took it this way, it wasn't even close to any intention. I'm excited about Vintage Story, I love it, and I like to engage in discussions about it—even those that may not align 100% with my own opinions. I didn't come into this thead to shut you or anyone else up about their (terrible) experiences with hills, especially since I actually agree with the problem. I wish you would have just asked me if that was my intention or something, instead of reacting the way you did and doing the things you did, because clearly there has been a massive misunderstanding and this was all not necessary whatsoever.

And might I just add; I've never seen someone stalk another person to another platform and complain about them sharing their opinions before on a different platform. Talk about creepy behavior. And yet despite this, you expect me to not believe that you were upset earlier? It sounds more like you have a problem with me in general, not that I actually did anything wrong here or to you, and you've used this thread as an excuse to act on it. I don't even know what to say about this all. It's such an overaction to a harmless comment... lesson learned though. Block and enable privacy mode, because someone angry about your game opinions will, no doubt, stalk you across sites. 

 

Unfortunately it's far worse, when I say tight waves of mountains I mean like this. This is really really nasty to travel through because it's too thick to mine through and too far apart to bridge past. The world is mostly wide flat areas surrounded on all sides by walls of these mountains and ravines that go for hundreds or sometimes even over 1000 blocks.

Combine these slow slogs to travel over that you can't really prospect effectively with a bear randomly punching through iron chainmail and an iron shield  in 3 hits and exploration is dead on arrival.

I hate to be a naysayer, this update is really great but this world gen imo just has to change.

 

 

[Thorfinn]

I play mostly Wilderness, so take this for what it's worth.

Because there is no radius search for the propick in Wilderness, this new mapgen is a godsend. The alternative to running past kilometers of cliff faces looking for ore outcrops is delving through caves, which is often a real slog. If the propick reads High or Very High, a vertical shaft can work, but that kind of reading is rare in my experience.

The mostly vertical walls are also great for the rare occasions when I cannot dodge or outrun a bear -- just a handful and I'm up higher than he can reach. True, I could do the same thing before, starting from the ground, but it's a heck of a lot faster getting out of the way when the mapgen spots you several of the ladder sections. And if I'm stuck in a sudden storm in terrain that I can't plausibly fight in, I can go up far enough to be out of reach, build a roof, and box myself into a minimal space to wait it out. 

I get that you like the lower uplift. Awesome that when we create the game we can select the kind of terrain we get, yea?

[dakko]

44 minutes ago, Copperman said:

Unfortunately it's far worse, when I say tight waves of mountains I mean like this. This is really really nasty to travel through because it's too thick to mine through and too far apart to bridge past. The world is mostly wide flat areas surrounded on all sides by walls of these mountains and ravines that go for hundreds or sometimes even over 1000 blocks.

Was that before the default values for upheaval and landform scale were reduced in 1.18.2-rc-2?

Oh, dang! Just noticed that the change only applies to "Standard Survival."  @Thorfinn

[Thorfinn]

Oh, there's a new RC? I really should look a little more often...

I did several 1-3 day starts on RC-1. I'm not sure I was seeing a lot of difference from 18.1. There isn't a whole lot of change in terrain that I could tell. Occasional widely separated spaces with water, flat enough for me to do an early farm, which is all I'm really shooting for. I'm still getting lousy luck with loose copper on the sedimentary layers. Out of 4 starts on conglomerate, I've only found one set of bits, and those were revealed in the cliff faces anyway. Got one more slate start, still no copper. I did get a few patches of bits on a chert start, enough for the triple set of tools on late day 2. But it still looks to me as though basalt is king.

[Rhyagelle]

9 hours ago, Copperman said:

Unfortunately it's far worse, when I say tight waves of mountains I mean like this. This is really really nasty to travel through because it's too thick to mine through and too far apart to bridge past. The world is mostly wide flat areas surrounded on all sides by walls of these mountains and ravines that go for hundreds or sometimes even over 1000 blocks.

Combine these slow slogs to travel over that you can't really prospect effectively with a bear randomly punching through iron chainmail and an iron shield  in 3 hits and exploration is dead on arrival.

I hate to be a naysayer, this update is really great but this world gen imo just has to change.

 

 

 

Oh, that's what you meant by waves. Yes, they are way worse than the one or two giant flat sideded mountain walls. At least with those you  just have to scale/go around (or if you want to, drill through it) one of them, this this one is worse. Because on the sides of them, there are rarely any safe ways down. No dirt scaling to go down, almost never waterfalls or deep lakes y ou could drop into. But somehow, the tops are almost always overgrown in thickets and trees, so you can't see where you're going until you fall straight down several blocks. 

These shattered mountains look beautiful, they remind me of the Wulingyuan mountains in China, but they appear too frequently and without any other means of quick travel or traversing giant, hazardous geographical features, their visual attraction can only take them so far. I used to primarily want to live in mountains until recently. The headache is just too much. 

Now I wouldn't mind 1.18 generation beyond these points, because the new method of generating hills, mountains, etc etc looks better, but I think the priority that is taken when its hills and these mountain ranges are considerably higher than anything else. I don't think anyone would be complaining (too much) if the hills and these sorts of mountains popped up more occassionally rather than every other minute you've scaled a hill/mountain... 

Edited May 9, 2023 by Rhyagelle

[The_Cheeki]

My biggest gripe with the current world generation is that it breaks at high heights. It did not use to do this in the .17 version. This is a 1024 height world, but otherwise normal worldgen settings. No mods.

This issue is still present but slightly reduced by setting upheaval to 0%. I think this new system needs some more fine tuning for 256 worlds first and foremost, and then made compatible with higher height worlds.

[willkydd]

I cannot imagine myself enjoing VS anymore because of this new worldgen. Hard to understand how some other people like it - it's aggressively wasteful of player's time and ridiculously unlike anything in real life.

[dakko]

I was pleasantly surprised by worldgen in 1.18.3. Several attempts using default (Survival) settings were very nice. 

[Doom_Possum]

some of those new generated things are cool and OK (like the weird islands)

------------ but That Old Map, still is really killer, along with the MAIN MENU, which can be replaced by a MOD

 

does the new generation still include all the new FLOWERS?

[brndd]

I find the new worldgen to be way too bumpy and jagged 90% of the time. Seeing terrain like this makes me wonder if it's actually even supposed to look like that or if it's a bug.

 

It feels like there's too many "extreme" terrain features competing for attention, and as a result almost all terrain ends up being extreme. I prefer using the Plains and Valleys mod (or the Fields and Plateaus mod) since that gives more naturalistic worldgen.

[dakko]

2 hours ago, brndd said:

I find the new worldgen to be way too bumpy and jagged 90% of the time. Seeing terrain like this makes me wonder if it's actually even supposed to look like that or if it's a bug.

 

It feels like there's too many "extreme" terrain features competing for attention, and as a result almost all terrain ends up being extreme. I prefer using the Plains and Valleys mod (or the Fields and Plateaus mod) since that gives more naturalistic worldgen.

Are you using default Survival settings, and in which version was your world created? I'm wondering why I am not getting these extreme terrains.

[Streetwind]

It's probably a specific landform, because I've seen that particular "pimpled rubber surface" terrain before in some areas, but not in others. Similarly, I think the "shattered rock pieces reaching up to the world height limit" is another specific landform that offends a lot of people's sensibilities.

After playing on 1.18 and ruminating about it, I'm more and more convinced that it's not so much "the terrain generation" that people object to, but rather a subset of the new landforms that produce particularly not-believable-looking and/or hard-to-traverse-on-foot areas. This is corrobated by the fact that the couple of mods that exist with the aim to "fix" terrain generation are all simply replacers for the landform definition file, and reduce/remove some vanilla ones while adding some new ones of their own.

Ergo, perhaps we should be identifying these specific, objectionable landforms, and request their removal (or at least the reduction of their relative weighting).

[Maelstrom]

18 hours ago, Streetwind said:

perhaps we should be identifying these specific, objectionable landforms, and request their removal (or at least the reduction of their relative weighting).

THIS!!!

[1Joachim1]

On 6/1/2023 at 7:46 PM, Streetwind said:

It's probably a specific landform, because I've seen that particular "pimpled rubber surface" terrain before in some areas, but not in others. Similarly, I think the "shattered rock pieces reaching up to the world height limit" is another specific landform that offends a lot of people's sensibilities.

After playing on 1.18 and ruminating about it, I'm more and more convinced that it's not so much "the terrain generation" that people object to, but rather a subset of the new landforms that produce particularly not-believable-looking and/or hard-to-traverse-on-foot areas. This is corrobated by the fact that the couple of mods that exist with the aim to "fix" terrain generation are all simply replacers for the landform definition file, and reduce/remove some vanilla ones while adding some new ones of their own.

Ergo, perhaps we should be identifying these specific, objectionable landforms, and request their removal (or at least the reduction of their relative weighting).

i'm really newbie player, even tho i've played 3-4 runs (never post steel tbh i used to rush the tech tree and that's it) and tried to make a server with a friend that never played before and the new generation is making my survival rate drop like crazy. not only makes it difficult to traverse, but it makes it impossible for the new player to spot food plants (most of the time they are looking on how to climb that serrated mountain rather than exploring and looking for resources) there are wolves that feel less agressive than in previous versions of the game, however the bears are quite brutal. that mixed with terrains with a lot of bushes (in forms of birch leaves) and my nemesis, the Ferns (they use a lot of space and hide a lot of entities, and they also allways find their way into your inventory (makes a great fuel to heat up the fireplace before using the hard working materials) makes for a really bad experience. i tried to make new worlds with the default settings both in the server and in the single player way and all of them were allways looking like Dakko's picture. which as i said, it's a nightmare for my friend that's not gonna play it anymore because it's quite difficult (and we are quite busy irl) 

[Thorfinn]

On 6/1/2023 at 12:08 PM, dakko said:

Are you using default Survival settings, and in which version was your world created? I'm wondering why I am not getting these extreme terrains.

I ran into one of these the other day playing Wilderness. Just the one so far. But then again, unless I spawn in the middle of that, I would never know the extent. I would just look at it and head in some other direction.

Now there have been several worlds that may well look like that, but all I do is run through the valleys looking for resources and suitable terrain. Starting from either of the entry points on the bottom of the screen, I think you can probably go past that lake then head NE through that valley. Not familiar with the perspective because I don't nerdpole that high, and climbing a mountain that high would be pointless, but it looks to me as if you can weave your way through there.

But I certainly appreciate @1Joachim1s point that it is decidedly n00b unfriendly.

Edited June 5, 2023 by Thorfinn

[dakko]

2 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

[snip] But then again, unless I spawn in the middle of that, I would never know the extent. I would just look at it and head in some other direction.

Now there have been several worlds that may well look like that, but all I do is run through the valleys looking for resources and suitable terrain. Starting from either of the entry points on the bottom of the screen, I think you can probably go past that lake then head NE through that valley. Not familiar with the perspective because I don't nerdpole that high, and climbing a mountain that high would be pointless, but it looks to me as if you can weave your way through there.

Well, THAT'S a good point! That is exactly what I do as well; no telling how much janky terrain I've skirted past, blissfully unaware.

[dakko]

Installed 1.18.6-rc1, created a world using my previous seed that I was happy with, and got -- hmm, maybe I cannot use that word here. Anyway, it was absolute [insert word]. I mean, this is so vertical that it doesn't even invite playability. Not sure why the same seed is completely different in 1.18.6-rc1 but this result is so bad that I don't even want to play or explore.

[brndd]

I tend to evaluate my chosen worldgen settings somewhat carefully with creative flight before I begin playing on a world (either that one or a different one created with the same settings), so I suppose it would make sense I notice the janky terrain more often than someone who runs along on foot.

[dakko]

This could be just a matter of luck, but since updating to 1.18.6-rc1 I'm getting a lot of really ugly and jagged starting points. The beautiful landscape is what inspires me to play, so I sure hope it makes a comeback.

[Thorfinn]

Wish you luck, then, @dakko.

I've only started a 4 games in 1.18.6-rc1 and I'm not seeing much difference.

However, I did change stuff around this last start (a couple hours ago) and went heavy on sticks so I could get a full stack of ladders on day 1 so I could see the same perspective as @brndd . Yeah, there are quite a few areas that look kind of like what was posted. I just never noticed, as I either avoided it entirely or ran through the valleys looking for a region more traversable.

It occurs to me map is not your friend. I wanted to go check out a ruin that I probably would never have seen, and the only way there was through that mess of a terrain. When I shut off minimap, it was not much problem because I went where the terrain dictated, not trying to get anywhere in particular.

@1Joachim1 if I can make a suggestion? I had forgotten how much easier this game is with StepUp installed. Highly recommended for anyone but the most die-hard vanilla player. When I did a clean install of 1.17, (or maybe it was 1.16), I forgot to add it to the mods folder.