Less random translocators and resource/ruin generation tweaking

[Galaxial]

Over my time playing Vintage Story I've repaired almost a dozen translocators. I remember the excitement of my first one, having a whole new area to explore with its own resources and terrain. Even if it didn't have something I needed, it was still nice to look around and investigate the foreign biomes, rocks, etc. Then came my second translocator, which brought me near a bauxite area, something useful for the cementation furnace I was going to build.

Then came the third, and the fourth, and the fifth... They weren't as intriguing. They brought me to seemingly random areas with nothing of interest around. The wonder of a translocator quickly shifted into disappointment, and the previous excitement was just gone. I'd spend the materials to repair a translocator, mark it on my map, and never go to it again after seeing that it isn't worth going through.

The problem is that translocators are completely random in their destination. Whether or not it brings you in even the general direction you want it to is up to RNG. That, and a lot of the resources you'll need across your playthrough are found within walking distance around you, so you won't really need to travel far for anything anyways. ( At least, such was the case for me. )

I have two proposals that would spice up world generation ( in my opinion ) and also provide more usefulness to translocators.

1. Congregated Generation
Currently, ruins, both above and below ground, as well as ores generally generate wherever as long as loose conditions apply. This is especially apparent with surface ruins, which are sprinkled around the world randomly, sometimes with more around them. Instead, I'd lower the generation of these, but make them generate in large clusters rarely. For example, you could find a ruin here and there, and one of them could point you in a specific direction. You explore said direction far and wide enough, and you find an entire valley of ruins the size of a town or city.

Or ores. Maybe you need chromite. You can find some around, but definitely not sustainably enough. However, look far enough ( and get lucky enough ) and you'll find a massive vein that'll satisfy your needs for a long time.

2. Smart Translocators
Instead of being completely random, the translocators "aim" for a point of interest, teleporting you to their vicinity. These POIs would be the "clusters" mentioned in the first proposal. This would encourage players to explore the area around a newly repaired translocator exit, because now it'd be guaranteed that there's something interesting around. Translocators could even aim towards story locations, allowing you to make a network of them straight to them.

This change could come with more expensive translocator repair to balance them.

TLDR: Ore and ruin generation made more scarce, but they rarely generate in large clusters. Translocators aim for these clusters or story locations so exploration would be encouraged and translocators' usefulness wouldn't be determined by RNG.

[Thorfinn]

More concentrated ore, not sure about that. It implies areas of less concentrated ore. Aren't there already a great plenty of parts of the map that are more or less worthless?

Maybe just change it so that for the low, low price of one TG (or maybe one of those Jonas parts) you can change its destination?

[MKMoose]

I like the idea broadly, though I would focus on some different design goals. The main thing I want to mention is that any towns and settlements will inevitably form at key points of interest, but those points of interest are part of the world and can't really be modified. By which I mean, a mining village might appear where people find an iron deposit, but an iron deposit shouldn't be generated just because the game decided that a mining village should be in the middle of an area where there's no iron otherwise.

So I would focus on some of these kinds of relationships, like large towns appearing predominantly near rivers and oceans, farm ruins in fertile fields, hunting lodges and logging sites generating in forests, mining villages appearing in areas rich in ore deposits - intuitive connections that the player could ideally make out by just taking a glance at the ruins.

Granted, most ruins are really old lore-wise, so I'm not sure that much would be left of them. Many would still end up as nondescript rubble, regardless of what they were used for before.

 

47 minutes ago, Galaxial said:

Currently [...] ores generally generate wherever as long as loose conditions apply.

That's highly dependent on what you mean by "loose conditions", but ore deposits can have pretty specific requirements, and they use ore maps. These ore maps could be utilized during structure generation to influence the frequency of certain types of ruins.

 

51 minutes ago, Galaxial said:

1. Congregated Generation

There is already a system which takes a couple small ruin structures and places them as small village-like clusters. I think it shouldn't be difficult to expand it to generate a greater variety of bigger village or town ruins and more spread-out buildings connected with roads or whatnot. That said, I wouldn't expect a significant level of detail from them outside of manually constructed story locations, unless they receive a similar level of effort to the in-development procedural dungeons. Might want to include a translocator building in some of these large structures, while at it.

[LadyWYT]

Perhaps instead of trying to change the wild translocators, simply give players the means to set up their own teleporters as a late game piece of tech. Then the players can just choose where they want to set up the teleports(provided they're willing to invest the resources), and thus ensures that the teleports are always useful. As for the wild translocators, they could be broken down into parts, repaired or not, which can then be used to build other contraptions.

1 hour ago, Galaxial said:

Or ores. Maybe you need chromite. You can find some around, but definitely not sustainably enough. However, look far enough ( and get lucky enough ) and you'll find a massive vein that'll satisfy your needs for a long time.

Yeah, I agree with @Thorfinn here. There are already several player complaints about iron ore(which fills this criteria) being too difficult to find, and it's also not unusual to run across chunks of map where the density search produces no results. I think the better option here is just allowing traders or other NPCs to sell some of these resources so that players have the option to buy it if they're not having any luck locating the resource or would otherwise rather trade for it.

[Galaxial]

I've probably gotten really lucky then, because a lot of the things I need are just a short walk away from home. Perhaps in my next world I won't get so lucky and will ironically complain about the lack of them in my vicinity.

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

Maybe just change it so that for the low, low price of one TG (or maybe one of those Jonas parts) you can change its destination?

This could be a better alternative solution, though I'd definitely give it a more expensive cost to "reroll" than one temporal gear. Farming enemies at the mantle is an incredibly efficient ( and surprisingly low-risk with the right setup ) way of getting said gears.

1 hour ago, MKMoose said:

I like the idea broadly, though I would focus on some different design goals. The main thing I want to mention is that any towns and settlements will inevitably form at key points of interest, but those points of interest are part of the world and can't really be modified. By which I mean, a mining village might appear where people find an iron deposit, but an iron deposit shouldn't be generated just because the game decided that a mining village should be in the middle of an area where there's no iron otherwise.

So I would focus on some of these kinds of relationships, like large towns appearing predominantly near rivers and oceans, farm ruins in fertile fields, hunting lodges and logging sites generating in forests, mining villages appearing in areas rich in ore deposits - intuitive connections that the player could ideally make out by just taking a glance at the ruins.

Granted, most ruins are really old lore-wise, so I'm not sure that much would be left of them. Many would still end up as nondescript rubble, regardless of what they were used for before.

Ruins providing clues and hints about the environment sounds like a great idea, I do like that very much. Environmental storytelling and cues are a technique of conveying information that I believe should be done more.

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

Perhaps instead of trying to change the wild translocators, simply give players the means to set up their own teleporters as a late game piece of tech. Then the players can just choose where they want to set up the teleports(provided they're willing to invest the resources), and thus ensures that the teleports are always useful.

I enjoy having to go down into the dangerous underground in order to find translocators, and having to build tunnels between different ones so I can get my elk through the network. Though we can already craft three different kinds of teleporting machines, so it'd make sense to be able to build a translocator too.

1 hour ago, LadyWYT said:

As for the wild translocators, they could be broken down into parts, repaired or not, which can then be used to build other contraptions.

Recycling Jonas tech has interesting potential. Maybe the Clockmaker could be more efficient in this, allowing them to specialize into Jonas tech?