Celestial Navigation (and primative cartography)

[EmperorPingu]

Celestial Navigation

So I decided to try playing without the map because I love the idea of going as realism as possible... but I suck at it. I can look up at the sun and I can get a bearing of west-east (I think) but apart from that the strat I'm going for is building beacons to help navigate back to base.

I think a navigation overhaul could be neat. Here's what I got:

Realistic Night Sky
Having a real map of the stars at night can be a useful way to get your cardinal directions as you can use things like the "Big Dipper" to show you which way is North for instance. Also, if we consider the distance from Pole to Pole, you could program it so that the angle of incidence of the night sky image is slightly different depending upon how far away you were from the pole/equator (tldr: big brains could work out what their relative North/South position was within a Pole to Pole region).

Sundials
Could be a neat way to tell the time if you played without time on screen (not a thing but it could be...).

Maps
First, make some paper by soaking stripped papyrus reeds in water for a few days, then roll out excess water (with a rolling pin or something) and weave together and leave under a heavy rock or flattening thing (like boards or a press) for a few more days. Mix some charcoal powder with water and arabic gum (from acasia trees) and boom you got yourself some ink. Sit in a location with ink and draw the location of what you see!

That's all I've got for now. Would be great to have some other aspects of navigation implemented for immersion. Any suggestions?

Edited October 24, 2024 by EmperorPingu

[EmperorPingu]

Oh yeh, maybe a sextant as well? But I don't know how that works

[LadyWYT]

Navigating via stars at night would be cool, although I'm not sure that any of the constellations would be ones that we're familiar with, due to the whole...world-rearranging catastrophe and all. I'm not sure what the code behind it would be though, in regards to hemispheres and seasonal changes.

44 minutes ago, EmperorPingu said:

Would be great to have some other aspects of navigation implemented for immersion. Any suggestions?

Compass/lodestone/sunstone. The sunstone could be used in overcast/stormy weather to get a bearing on the sun's location, and used to navigate from there. It'd also give another use for quartz. Lodestone/compass are pretty interchangeable; they could reliably point the way north regardless of weather. The only thing that might affect them is large deposits of iron nearby. I'd expect a compass to be acquired later in the game, given its utility.

Of course, one flaw I see with these methods--the minimap pretty much renders them obsolete, outside of doing it for funsies. If you're playing without the minimap though, these navigation methods become a lot more useful.

[EmperorPingu]

I love those ideas! The old fashioned way of making a compass was using a magnet to magnetise a bit of metal (like an iron nail/needle), having that float on paper/thin-bark on water and using that to find one's direction. I wouldn't have thought about the sunstone thing (I literally just learned something)! Magnets should totally be a thing anyway - if you can get one spinning inside a wrap of copper coil you can generate DC electricity :d

 

[Thorfinn]

Loving it. You can pretty easily get cardinal directions, as you can watch which horizon is devouring the stars  but it would be fun to shoot your latitude. I play without map or coordinates, so the best I can do currently is dead reckoning (at my settings, a nerdpole can only be seen from about 400 blocks) and noticing what lives there. I do not believe the night sky currently reflects a spherical world, even the massively compressed world of VS. IRL, 100km is about 1 degree, in VS, it's the distance from pole to equator. You should be able to read a few thousand blocks in VS from the stars, even without any instruments. And that might be in the cards. There's been a lot of effort put into the night sky.

I've been trying to come up with a good way to do maps. I'm not an artist, so that doesn't appeal to me. The standard of the age of exploration, line drawings showing distance estimates and landmarks with latitude shootings every clear night, merged with your other line traces at a map table, that's kind of where I'm thinking. But I would like to be able to include landmarks in the distance I have not actually visited, too.

[Maelstrom]

14 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

Navigating via stars at night would be cool, although I'm not sure that any of the constellations would be ones that we're familiar with, due to the whole...world-rearranging catastrophe and all.

First - the pre-catastrophe world wasn't earth.  BUT it would have had it's own constellations.

Second - All that is needed is some brighter stars to serve as whatever constellations the devs decide to create.  We players will then figure out how to use them for navigation at night.  The tricky part would be procession during the year, which would make nigh time navigation a bit harder, but add an element of realism.

[IronOre]

I thought it was Earth but an alternate version of it?  Either way after the catastrophe maybe the world was sucked through a worm-hole, captured by a different star, and either pulled in a new moon that was smaller (the moon and sun look about the same diameter as seen from Earth) or the original moon came with it but shifted out to a smaller orbit to appear smaller (and ended up orbiting in the ecliptic plane to greatly increase the frequency of annular eclipses).  This would explain why the stars in our new location in space would look entirely different, but for navigation I wish they made some more prominent constellations with brighter stars to stand out from the fainter background which is very busy.  At the very least for navigation I'd like a clear north and south polar star (maybe a red star for north and a blue one for south).

The most recent update had a plan to tilt the stars appropriately for the latitude of the viewer and to have them shift around over the yearly cycle.  The shift worked although it is going the opposite way they do on Earth, but that could be explained by a retrograde orbit relative to the direction the planet spins (again a possible effect from entering a new orbit).  Stars working for the correct latitude is not working according to plan yet as far as I can tell.  Once they get that fixed you really will be able to navigate by the stars per the OP. 

It will still not tell you exactly where you are in the world since it will render the same for the repeated latitude bands and if you lose track you won't know which one you are in.  I usually set my worlds to avoid this by trying to spawn near the equator with a world size and polar distance that makes sure both poles end up on the map without too much more beyond that, but since the actual latitude of spawn is randomized I can't get it exact.  It would be nice if they added a world generation option where you could set your polar distance, world size to match in both directions, and check a box that just put the equator exactly in the middle.  Then once the star field rotation is corrected you'd have a single set of latitudes to always know where you are in the world relative to north/south with a simple measurement of the celestial pole altitude or the angle of the rising/setting stars.

[KoviBat]

Custom constellations with their own meanings would be cool. The navigational constellations would probably need their own handbook page, but would we want the stories and lore behind those constellations to be in the handbook as well, or maybe something you have to find, like Tapestries or Lore Books? There is also the question of how you navigate during temporal storms, since you can't really see the sky. Or regular storms, but that is an obstacle with a real-life precedent.

[Tom Cantine]

This is something I've been working on, as a player, for some time now. I built a sort of observatory, and spent long cold nights tracking the movement of stars and marking their progress by chiseling colored inlays into the glass observation dome. Prior to the most recent update, I determined that the stars moved around  a point (the south celestial pole) approximately 17.5 degrees above the southern horizon. Oddly, this did not seem to change with latitude or the seasons, and it was quite a different ecliptic from the one I got by tracking the sun's path across the sky.

After the update, the stars are supposed to move more in accordance with the latitude and seasons, and I'm working on making new measurements to confirm this and nail down the important details and principles. Identifying a North Star or South Star would be one goal. This means I'm also going to need to travel more to make observations from different latitudes. It's kind of a big undertaking and, from a gaming perspective, means I'm not going to run out of stuff to do for a long time.

As for sundials, that's already been a possibility for a long time, and in fact the principle forms the basis for my next observatory design, because tracking the sun's position on a glass dome is inaccurate at the best of times, and often impossible due to cloud cover, but I've noticed that even on cloudy or overcast days objects cast pretty sharp shadows on the ground, so I can use that to establish the sun's position with much greater precision and in more weather conditions. 

I would appreciate some gadget like a sextant, but it's already possible to make a crude one. What you do is you chisel a piece of glass with inlaid calibrations of coloured glass, and you place it on a hay bale and observe the target star through the glass from a fixed position, and take note of where the star is in relation to the glass calibrations. This is a miniature portable version of the astronomical dome idea. 

 

As for cartography, yes please. I'd LOVE a way to put maps on parchment.

[IronOre]

50 minutes ago, Tom Cantine said:

I built a sort of observatory

That is amazing and dedicated work you did to make your observations!  I also made many in-depth observations since I've started playing.  The movement of the sun on the horizon and its changing rise/set angle per latitude were one of the main reasons I was attracted to Vintage Story as I always wanted to play in a world where I could track time in the sky like the ancients.  Archaeoastronomy is my scientific specialty.  I even arrange my stats window to cover the date and the time.  I set up horizon marker posts and watch shadows as well.  I mark the sun on the meridian to see when I get to mid-day and it always keeps me oriented.  I love the glass dome ideas, but I'm playing only in the stone age for now, so I have to keep things very primitive.  Sadly even chiseling needs metal tools for some reason.  I track the days by keeping a pile of stones in a reed chest with items representing winter, spring, summer, and fall.  When the sun is setting due west at one of the equinoxes I start the count and transfer one stone from the pile toward the next section until they are all moved, them I'm at the solstice, repeat to the next equinox and the other solstice and then move back to the starting equinox.

I too noticed the stars didn't change with latitude when I first started playing and the moon phases were very confusing since it wasn't illuminated by where it was positioned in relation tot he sun and always followed the exact same path in the sky instead of shifting along the ecliptic like the sun.  When the release notes for the most recent update came out I was super excited and the moon changes are a great improvement.  The stars now progress over the year (in the opposite direction as on Earth, but hey, maybe this planet is in a retrograde orbit) but although the update was planning to have the stars change appropriately to the change in latitude, it did not work, so hopefully that can get fixed.

Here is a link to a post where I detailed what seems to be the current issue with the stars:

 

[Tom Cantine]

That's pretty cool. Have you considered building a henge or something along those lines? You don't need metal for that. And you can get decent precision by building it big enough.

My first observatory was tiny, just 5x5 with the observation point in the center. I actually had to do some measurements on my seraph to find the minimum width I could pass through, so as to make the observation chair narrow enough to ensure a constant viewing position. But with the outer edge of the glass dome being only 40 voxels away from the observation point, there wasn't a lot of precision. The next dome was 9x9, which is much better, but still introduces some artifacts when chiseling.

The instrument I'm planning now is called the Solar Occlusion Instrument, and it's meant to measure two things. First, I want to get the visual diameter of the sun. So the plan is to have a somewhat distant vertical slit (maybe 10m?), and to time exactly how long the sun itself is visible passing behind it. This time will give me a fraction of 24 hours, and be easily convertible to degrees of arc.

Second, I want to test the hypothesis that despite its wide visible disk, the sun acts as a point source of light. I've noticed shadows seem to remain sharply defined no matter how far away from the object they are cast; there is no penumbra. So for this experiment a second slit will be set up a good distance from the first, such that light can only pass through both at a very precise angle. I will then time how long the sun casts light on the surface under/behind the second slit.

Kinda neat how these experiments mirror those in the real world, where bigger and bigger baselines/apertures are need for finer and finer precision. Which is why I think a henge kind of structure would be so effective.

[IronOre]

9 hours ago, Tom Cantine said:

Have you considered building a henge or something along those lines?

Yes I do plan to build one, but I'd rather use actual stone than cobble stone which is all I have access to right now, so in the meantime I put up logs as wooden posts.  I also plan to build a passage tomb oriented on the winter solstice sunrise or somesuch.  Your observations and instruments sound amazing.  You should add some screenshots.