Buying information from traders

[Josh the Just]

Since traders move around (when we're not looking), it makes sense that they would know the area. I would pay some gears to find out where something is, even if it's pretty vague.

"Bauxite, you say? Those orange rocks? I think I saw some quite a ways away to the north."

"Lookin' for a treasure hunter, eh? Old Jeff's wagon can generally be found a moderate distance to the southwest." 

I've found 15 traders (keeping my bronze pickaxe with me) and I'm about to give up on ever trying the dungeon. There needs to be some way to counteract players with terrible luck.

[Thorfinn]

Welcome to the forums, @Josh the Just

Thing is, those things are not known until they are generated by the player. One could create a mod whereby it would generate chunks around the trader and once it found bauxite, pruned all those chunks (maybe, anyway -- I'm not sure there's a way to avoid all that being added to your map), but it's not Old Jeff until you meet him. You can demonstrate that by regenning the chunk you are in.

Speaking of which, that might be the easiest (though a bit cheesy) way to fix your situation -- talk to the merchant, and if its not a treasure hunter, regen the chunk until it is.

[EDIT]

DOH! Rather than make you look it up, the command is

/wgen regen 1

You probably don't even have to leave the wagon. Just talk to the stupid artisan, type it in, talk to the new trader, and repeat until Old Jeff shows up.

[EDIT2]

Thinking about it a bit, maybe the most reasonable answer is just to add the dialog you are talking about to other traders. Either all of them, or a couple more, or maybe at gen, give each a chance of having such a map.

Edited March 7, 2025 by Thorfinn

[AzraelWalker]

I will throw my vote in behind this idea - Specifically the bit about traders pointing you to other traders.

At the moment the only way to find the story location is to either randomly stumble upon a trader, or randomly stumble on the location of the PoI itself both of which are like finding a needle in a haystack.

Edited March 7, 2025 by AzraelWalker

[Zane Mordien]

I like that idea. It costs money so it wouldn't be a free pass. It could generate the treasure hunter trader the same way as the archives.

I also wish the traders made more sense to the game in general. I like the multiple trader outposts you find from time to time. It seems more immersive than a trader sitting on top of a mountain or in the middle of a forest by themselves. I'm sure changing the traders is in the plan somewhere. 

[Thorfinn]

Yes, but how? Those are things that under the current worldgen, are not knowable. The only sense in which he could tell you about bauxite is if you have already generated that terrain, but you just had not noticed it yet, whether because the new map doesn't make the color so obvious, or you don't use a map or whatever.. Otherwise, he can only "know" as much about the world as you do.

Same with traders. They don't exist at all, in any sense, until you generate that chunk.  And they are not seed dependent, meaning if you generate that chunk, then it gets pruned, he will most likely not come back as the same trader.

With the traders, it's at least something the trader could pretend to have advance knowledge. He picks a random direction, the game sets a variable, and the next trader you find in vaguely that direction has to be that. Rock layers are not so simple because they are seed-based. The seed does not change just because you paid a few gears. And if it did, the transition in worldgen would stick out like a sore thumb.

[Steel General]

It seems plausible that the largest-scale world features, such as rock strata, could be generated quickly (without display) and without requiring much else to be generated - ores and caves could be left out. That said, it is not a problem of limited scope - the world would have to generate in all directions until an answer is found, and that could become unreasonable even at the most basic generation. I'm not sure if a mod could do partial generation anyway.

Eventually, though, the world generation is going to have to change in a very similar way: you can't automatically generate realistic rivers until you know at least where the continent's divide is. Largest-scale features will have to be notionally generated long before procedure fills in the details. When this time comes might as well plan for the panoply of features that will thus be enabled, such as getting rumors of distant rocks' color.

[Thorfinn]

Truth. You would only need surface layer, because that's the rock he would have seen on the surface. It's much more challenging to come up with a way of seeing outcrops of lower strata, though. Most of the time, I find the specific rocks  I want in cliffs or caves or mineshafts in search of deep ore. And, of course, he's not mining or caving, and even pseudocode to tell whether he could have seen a given outcrop is non-trivial. It would basically require generating the chunk, then testing every node to see if it is touching an air block, and then verifying that block has an unobstructed view of at least one air block immediately above a surface block.

But a Monte Carlo of, say, 100 blocks in a 5000 radius would probably be  a fair way to do it.

Edited March 9, 2025 by Thorfinn

[eMander]

I can think of a way of doing it, though it may require significant edits to world generation:

Beyond world generation radius, also generate a list of coordinates within a much greater radius of the player. Each of these coordinate sets will correspond to a surface deposit of some material. A coordinate set will have metadata associated with it, such as material type and rough amount. The world generator will then use these coordinates and their data to determine what to place in a given location.

Of note is that this would still all be decided by the world seed: The seed would determine both preliminary coordinates of resources, as well as actual generation. But the computation of the world would be split into two stages, so that some of the data becomes available early, without the hefty computation expense. This would allow for traders to be able to give players information about distant locations without the associated computation issues.

Whether the potentially significant overhaul of the world gen algorithm would be worth it is a different question, but I do think it can be done.