Oceans vs Story Locations

[Zippy Wonderdust]

I don't mean to trigger anyone's trauma flashbacks from old gaming experiences, but I was wondering about the current state of the whole "story locations vs oceans" situation. Y'see, I really like the Rivers mod. It makes the landscape so much more interesting, but to get any rivers to generate you need oceans for them to flow to, which means having a map with a significant percentage of ocean coverage.  Personally, I'm fine with that. I think the sailboat in 1.20 is a great addition, and I'm a patient person; I don't mind if it takes 20 or so IRL minutes to to cross some big "boring" water. It's all part of the adventure for me.

What I *do* mind is starting a survival world and playing for dozens of hours with my friends only to discover that a key story location (such as the resonance archive or one of the newly added locations) has spawned on the ocean floor, or outside the map bounds, or is otherwise all glitched up and unplayable.

So here's my question: Does anyone know whether the story locations in 1.20 spawn reliably and in a playable state if the world has been generated with oceans?

(Oh, and before anyone points it out, I am totally fine if translocators teleport you to "dead end" locations beneath the sea floor. I think that actually adds a little spice to things!)

[Lodeclaw]

I haven't tested it myself but I've yet to see any reports about the story locations spawning in a way that makes them unplayable.

[Zippy Wonderdust]

12 minutes ago, Lodey said:

I haven't tested it myself but I've yet to see any reports about the story locations spawning in a way that makes them unplayable.

That squares with my own research. The only reports of problems that I have found all seem to date back to the 1.17/1.18 days.

Still, it would be nice if someone more knowledgeable than I could point at a change-log note or a blog posting by the devs confirming "yes, we added code that avoids this problem".

[LadyWYT]

1 hour ago, Zippy Wonderdust said:

What I *do* mind is starting a survival world and playing for dozens of hours with my friends only to discover that a key story location (such as the resonance archive or one of the newly added locations) has spawned on the ocean floor, or outside the map bounds, or is otherwise all glitched up and unplayable.

So here's my question: Does anyone know whether the story locations in 1.20 spawn reliably and in a playable state if the world has been generated with oceans?

Hmmm, now this I am not sure. My best guess is that the location would generate on the land that is closest to the general spawn parameters of the location. However, I could also see it generating in the middle of the ocean, though at the surface and not the ocean floor. I think the new locations are supposed to spawn automatically now, and spawning via command should only be needed if something playermade is blocking the spot, so the best way to test whether or not the world is still playable is probably to make a backup and then visit the first location. If you can visit the first location without issue, then the other locations will probably be fine as well. I would expect any problems to arise rather quickly.

The one thing I'd be more concerned about is the travel time via boat. The sailboat is the same as the player's walking speed, so it will easily double what the travel times would otherwise be if you were traveling over land.

As a side note on the map bounds...I think all the locations should fit within a 40k radius of spawn, approximately.

[Teh Pizza Lady]

1 hour ago, Zippy Wonderdust said:

What I *do* mind is starting a survival world and playing for dozens of hours with my friends only to discover that a key story location (such as the resonance archive or one of the newly added locations) has spawned on the ocean floor, or outside the map bounds, or is otherwise all glitched up and unplayable.

the story locations have spawning rules. Location 1, for example, has to spawn near mountains for reasons that will become obvious once you get there. I'm sure the other locations have similar rules that govern their spawns so they aren't messed up and unplayable.

[Zippy Wonderdust]

42 minutes ago, LadyWYT said:

Hmmm, now this I am not sure. My best guess is that the location would generate on the land that is closest to the general spawn parameters of the location. However, I could also see it generating in the middle of the ocean, though at the surface and not the ocean floor. I think the new locations are supposed to spawn automatically now, and spawning via command should only be needed if something playermade is blocking the spot, so the best way to test whether or not the world is still playable is probably to make a backup and then visit the first location. If you can visit the first location without issue, then the other locations will probably be fine as well. I would expect any problems to arise rather quickly.

The one thing I'd be more concerned about is the travel time via boat. The sailboat is the same as the player's walking speed, so it will easily double what the travel times would otherwise be if you were traveling over land.

As a side note on the map bounds...I think all the locations should fit within a 40k radius of spawn, approximately.

Thanks for the input on spawning mechanics in VS.  That's stuff I didn't know. I think, however, you are possibly mistaking my intentions. I'm not trying to upgrade a current world; I'm starting a new one.  Dropping into creative mode and scoping out all the locations in advance would be a bit anticlimactic for me, as I'd actually like to participate in and enjoy the adventure.

[Zippy Wonderdust]

52 minutes ago, traugdor said:

the story locations have spawning rules. Location 1, for example, has to spawn near mountains for reasons that will become obvious once you get there. I'm sure the other locations have similar rules that govern their spawns so they aren't messed up and unplayable.

I just did a search through the devlog news forum and found the following in the 1.18.0-rc2 notes...

Feature: 2nd ocean system rewrite.

    Added saltwater where oceans appear. Crops on farmland die when exposed to saltwater.
    More configurability - more control over land/ocean ratios.
    Fixes main story event spawning underwater

...so I guess I'll just have to trust that all of the major story locations spawn properly 1.20.

Wish me luck in my adventures in my Vintage Story Riverworld!

[Joseph Goulakos]

They do not.. I just almost sailed off of my world trying to get to the Forlorn Tower.  I switched to creative mode, flew over to where it SHOULD be.. and nothing is there. just void.

[Thorfinn]

Welcome to the forums, @Joseph Goulakos.

@Zippy Wonderdust that was my only real concern. Like @traugdor says, they require certain landforms. Finding mountains within a few thousand blocks of pretty much anywhere is guaranteed in regular mapgen, but as you crank down landcover, I'd expect to find a point at which those landforms do not exist within range. I suspect you will find the same true of the new scaling factor -- instead of looking for such a region in a 5k by 3k area, if you used even a 50% scaling, that's now a quarter the area to find it in. I have no idea what the algo does if it fails to find such, but @Joseph Goulakos is reporting that it fails.

Caveat emptor.

Edited January 25, 2025 by Thorfinn

[Zippy Wonderdust]

12 hours ago, Joseph Goulakos said:

They do not.. I just almost sailed off of my world trying to get to the Forlorn Tower.  I switched to creative mode, flew over to where it SHOULD be.. and nothing is there. just void.

Well that is... disappointing.  Were there any messages in the games log files?  Anything to the effect of "unable to create story location X"?

Edit to add: What are your mapgen settings? In particular, what are your "landcover" and "landcover scale" settings? Mine are set to 80% and 400% respectively.

Edited January 25, 2025 by Zippy Wonderdust

[Zippy Wonderdust]

3 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Welcome to the forums, @Joseph Goulakos.

@Zippy Wonderdust that was my only real concern. Like @traugdor says, they require certain landforms. Finding mountains within a few thousand blocks of pretty much anywhere is guaranteed in regular mapgen, but as you crank down landcover, I'd expect to find a point at which those landforms do not exist within range. I suspect you will find the same true of the new scaling factor -- instead of looking for such a region in a 5k by 3k area, if you used even a 50% scaling, that's now a quarter the area to find it in. I have no idea what the algo does if it fails to find such, but @Joseph Goulakos is reporting that it fails.

Caveat emptor.

If that's true then it implies that the more ocean you have (the lower the "landcover" and possibly also the higher the "landcover scale") the higher you should set the "story structures distance scaling" to, which should widen the algorithm's search distance for suitable landforms . I've currently got mine set to 80% and 400%; maybe I should increase my story structures distance scaling to 200%, which is 4 times the search area, to compensate.

Darn it. I wish I knew more about the inner workings of the VS mapgen algorithm...

[Thorfinn]

I don't know how landcover scale of 400% affects things. If it quadruples ocean sizes, too, that might cause trouble. Do you know if the oceans scale?

I also don't know anything about uplift wrt story locations. Will it just spawn the RA sticking way up out of the landscape if mountains have been halved, or will it skip placing it entirely if it can't find a suitable location? Or maybe it keeps expanding out until it finds something?

Or maybe the fix for spawning underwater was to override the seed-based mapgen for the story locations?

Way too many unanswered questions. Post back when you find out what happens with your settings.

[Gorfinhofin]

I'm pretty sure the story locations spawn the appropriate terrain around them. Both the Resonance Archive and the third new story location were found in fairly isolated mountains in my world. They're still quite seamlessly integrated into the rest of the world, but looking at the map, they do stand out as something that wasn't naturally generated.

2 hours ago, Zippy Wonderdust said:

If that's true then it implies that the more ocean you have (the lower the "landcover" and possibly also the higher the "landcover scale") the higher you should set the "story structures distance scaling" to, which should widen the algorithm's search distance for suitable landforms . I've currently got mine set to 80% and 400%; maybe I should increase my story structures distance scaling to 200%, which is 4 times the search area, to compensate.

Darn it. I wish I knew more about the inner workings of the VS mapgen algorithm...

"Story Structures Distance Scaling" is how far away the story locations are placed, not any kind of "search distance". Changing it to a lower value would mean more area for them to spawn in, if anything.

[Thorfinn]

23 minutes ago, Gorfinhofin said:

"Story Structures Distance Scaling" is how far away the story locations are placed, not any kind of "search distance". Changing it to a lower value would mean more area for them to spawn in, if anything.

The default for the chapter 2 stuff is 12k-15k east. Say you used a 33% scale. Does that mean it's now 4k-5k away, that is, did it scale both min and max distance, or is it now 4k-7k, or maybe 2k-5k, retaining the original range but scaling the min or max distance? If the latter, then that should work fine, regardless of whether story location mapgen overrides default mapgen. Should be easy to tell -- turn uplift all the way down and see if the RA sticks out like a sore thumb.

[Zippy Wonderdust]

3 hours ago, Gorfinhofin said:

I'm pretty sure the story locations spawn the appropriate terrain around them. Both the Resonance Archive and the third new story location were found in fairly isolated mountains in my world. They're still quite seamlessly integrated into the rest of the world, but looking at the map, they do stand out as something that wasn't naturally generated.

"Story Structures Distance Scaling" is how far away the story locations are placed, not any kind of "search distance". Changing it to a lower value would mean more area for them to spawn in, if anything.

I have no knowledge of how the VS map generation engine works, but based on some of the errors I've seen in the logs, I wouldn't be surprised if it uses some kind of "staged" map generation, where it does a computationally lightweight high level pass to determine ocean vs land tiles and very basic geography such as the amount of uplift for a tile. It could then leave the more detailed generation for a later pass that would only occur when a player occupies that region.  That way the game could pick an arbitrary point on the map, quickly determine if it has the desired qualities (high elevation vs low, hot vs cold, humid vs dry), then recursively "search" outward from there until it either finds a suitable tile or perhaps times out. I have no idea if that is what actually happens, but it's certainly what I'd do! 

I also suppose it could do a bit of both; search for a suitable land type within a given radius and, if the search comes up empty, modify the map generation to create it.  The newest version of VS (1.20.x) does that for the player's spawn location when 0,~,0 is in the middle of water it generates an island for the player to spawn on.

This needs more testing...

[Zippy Wonderdust]

...and more testing was done.

Scratch my earlier musings as absolutely wrong.  I made a world with 90% ocean cover and used the various letters and maps to locate the resonance archive and two other locations (trying to avoid spoilers).  Each location spawned on an island that had very obviously been generated just for them; each island was roughly circular and was approximately 1000 blocks in radius.

On the bright side, they *did* all spawn correctly in what I would consider some pretty non-optimal circumstances, which makes me wonder what went wrong for @Joseph Goulakos...

[Joseph Goulakos]

On 1/25/2025 at 1:36 PM, Zippy Wonderdust said:

Well that is... disappointing.  Were there any messages in the games log files?  Anything to the effect of "unable to create story location X"?

Edit to add: What are your mapgen settings? In particular, what are your "landcover" and "landcover scale" settings? Mine are set to 80% and 400% respectively.

as it turns out.. it seems my savegame failed probably because it was a game created a week before the update.  I did end up just starting a new world, which was unfortunate, but that's ok.  my landcover and scale values were not crazy... i think 50% and 100%.  Not exactly sure if that played a role, but maybe.

[KO Teknik]

1.20.4 stable avec ces paramètres :

Edited February 25, 2025 by KO Teknik

[Zane Mordien]

On 1/25/2025 at 8:54 PM, Zippy Wonderdust said:

 I wouldn't be surprised if it uses some kind of "staged" map generation, where it does a computationally lightweight high level pass to determine ocean vs land tiles and very basic geography such as the amount of uplift for a tile. It could then leave the more detailed generation for a later pass that would only occur when a player occupies that region.  

You can change the world gen settings and it will change from land to ocean in an abrupt drop do I don't think it preloads anything to do with terrain. 

 

Like you said in the next post, I like how the story points are these islands in ocean worlds. My RA in one world was completely exposed in the ocean with no land anywhere.  It was weird looking but very easy to find when I got to the X.

Edited February 26, 2025 by Zane Mordien