Is the world generation too vast and spread out?

[AIpine]

World Generation, landform scale, maps, diversity


I play with the standard 550ish or an even longer viewdistance and I would really prefer If i was able to see more landmarks and different landforms on the horizon.
Having to travel far to see a change in scenery is sapping some of my joy of exploring. A more compact, faster changing map is more interesting to me. Even with the smaller polar distance settings it's a massive undertaking to travel to a latitude that's different enough in temp.
Also, I like the immersion of having to remember landmarks to navigate and finding your way even without a map. That's why I turned the map of and later installed a cartography mod with a compass and maps I can't use straight away.
But with the vanilla worldgen this into a real survival challenge.

As a new player I'm still figuring out how to modify the game to my preferences but I really don't like default map generation
Vintage Story is going for a much different worldfeel than TOBG but I can't imagine I'm in the minority for wanting a more arcade-y and less realistically scaled world generation as a preset of options.

What's your take on this?

Edited yesterday at 12:20 PM by AIpine

[Broccoli Clock]

Quite the opposite for me, the fact the world is huge is the pull, and if I had to guess I think you probably are in "a minority" who want an arcadey and less realistic world. Those sorts of player found their home in Minecraft.

The world gen is pretty damned configurable, either directly or via mods, so it shouldn't be hard to find/generate the sort of terrain/size you want.

[Rezerkity and stuff]

I think it'd be nice if there was a world gen option for biome 'size' so to speak. But overall I like that things are spread out, it makes travel worth it, and it makes building forward bases and pathways worth it. The distance between resources adds purpose to the things you do in the game, as opposed to just being convenient and easy to get done. I do always turn story distance down to 25% though, because a multiple day hike for something that'll probably kill me isn't very fun.

[dakko]

Using the customization option for "Patchy" climate will give a diversity of biomes.

[williams_482]

There'a also a mod called Farseer which renders distant terrain features as low res blue shapes off on the horizon. It's pretty realistic, and quite effective for giving you grand vistas and a peek at distant mountains. 

It't not yet updated for 1.22, but once it is I strongly recommend giving it a go. 

[MKMoose]

4 hours ago, AIpine said:

I think this screenshot is a good example of where a terrain feature in the game just doesn't make any sense. It's too large and too repetitive, and doesn't even have a good real-life analogue. I genuinely don't know what this is supposed to represent, and the closest I can think of is either a marsh or prairie potholes, but it's just not even close to anything, mainly due to excessive vertical terrain variation and way too small scale. I would take a completely flat grassland with a lake in the middle over whatever this is, and it would at least be easier to traverse.

 

4 hours ago, AIpine said:

I play with the standard 550ish or an even longer viewdistance and I would really prefer If i was able to see more landmarks and different landforms on the horizon.
Having to travel far to see a change in scenery is sapping some of my joy of exploring. A more compact, faster changing map is more interesting to me. Even with the smaller polar distance settings it's a massive undertaking to travel to a latitude that's different enough in temp.
Also, I like the immersion of having to remember landmarks to navigate and finding your way even without a map. That's why I turned the map of and later installed a cartography mod with a compass and maps I can't use straight away.
But with the vanilla worldgen this into a real survival challenge.

My thought is to an extent the opposite - many areas of the VS world feel too small to me. While I wouldn't want to necessarily call for plain realism here because improper application of it can easily end up unfun, the VS world is already really, really small-scale compared to the real world, while also missing many details from the real world which would arguably help it greatly, including more natural altitude variation and large-scale highlands and mountains.

This could also alleviate some of your issues regarding navigation despite increasing the scale of some elements of the world, because instead of navigating based on distinct, smaller landmarks, you could still navigate along large landforms, even those that stretch across a dozen kilometers or more. Just as a quick example, "travel until you see a mountain range and continue through the montane plains while keeping a swamp to your right".

While I don't think making any of these even close to to-scale is a good idea, I think there is a lot of real places to be inspired from, instead of making "realistic" devolve into "boring". I also don't want realistic scale, but I think everybody can agree that realistic features would naturally improve the game a lot.

 

Of course, in the case of mountains, we probably wouldn't want any massive ranges like these Alps (on the left/top), but something more like these mountains in the Southern Carpathians (right/bottom) could make a lot more sense than anything we currently have in the game. Both images taken from Google Maps, about 50 km or so in height. The Southern Carpathian ones in that image are roughly 1400 m in height from the base at 600 m, so even scaling those down 20x to easily fit within the default height limit would leave you with a ~2 km long range - normally you won't get even close to that in-game, and you're more likely to find a massive potato, 250 m in diameter, in the middle of flatlands.

 

Flat areas are a bit more difficult to improve, because a lot of them are inherently large, expansive and samey like this savanna in Tanzania (left/top), but I think there's still a lot we could do with some mosaics and other ways to break up the landscape like in this other savanna in Angola (middle) with mixed woodlands, grasslands, shrubbery and barren riverbanks in varied proportions, or these deserts of Saudi Arabia (right/bottom) eroded by wind and water. All three images about 10 km in height.

  

 

Overall, I think there's a lot that could be improved about world generation while remaining "inspired by the natural processes of the real world", as the VS home page puts it, with logical regionality, large-scale features like drainage basins and tectonics, improved noise algorithms, climate condition and world parameter interaction, smoother layer transitions, smoother slopes, vegetation mosaics and paths, and a whole lot of stuff like that. World generation is a serious undertaking that a person could feasibly spend their life perfecting, so I wouldn't expect the devs to just keep working on it forever, but I think there's few things that would benefit the game more in the long term.

Edited yesterday at 05:01 PM by MKMoose

[Lollard]

I'll agree that this hilly wetland you see so frequently is the terrain generation's biggest flaw, it could be phased out entirely and the game would be better off for it.

[dakko]

4 hours ago, Lollard said:

I'll agree that this hilly wetland you see so frequently is the terrain generation's biggest flaw, it could be phased out entirely and the game would be better off for it.

I'm curious, because I have not experienced this type of terrain but you see it frequently. Do you tend to change any particular worldgen settings during customization? (until recently I've been using default settings)

[Guy Kibler]

Some aspects of it are too spread out, some aspects are too compact. Those hilly wetlands Lollard mentioned are good example of something too compact. Actual wetlands (I live in Maryland which is known for its marshes and wetlands) are typically much flatter, so having hills of that size makes it feel squished together. I've also had the experience where they can make up a significant amount of terrain (without changing worldgen settings).

Currently I play with a few worldgen mods, but I'd love to play the game without them, or either way have it improve significantly. I always set land cover to between 40% and 70%, regardless of mods. It feels super excessive at 97.5%. Since rivers are presumably coming in a future update, I'd imagine (and hope) that'd be an overall world generation update. The worldgen by default right now just seems too variable, especially in heigh in areas that should be flatter.

Edited 19 hours ago by Guy Kibler

[LadyWYT]

Personally, I think in some cases the land features aren't nearly big enough, mainly for areas like plains and plateaus. Once in a while, I want to feel like I'm in Kansas, or certain parts of Texas, and a plateau feels pretty underwhelming when it only covers a couple hundred blocks or so. Mountains feel okay to me(though they could stand to have a peakier variant), since a videogame mountain is pretty underwhelming if you can't climb to the top and actually survey the land surrounding.

10 hours ago, AIpine said:

I play with the standard 550ish or an even longer viewdistance and I would really prefer If i was able to see more landmarks and different landforms on the horizon.
Having to travel far to see a change in scenery is sapping some of my joy of exploring. A more compact, faster changing map is more interesting to me. Even with the smaller polar distance settings it's a massive undertaking to travel to a latitude that's different enough in temp.

Have you tried lowering the Landform Scale setting, or perhaps changing Climate Distribution to Patchy rather than the default Realistic? Lowering the landform scale should mean that land features are smaller, with more being able to fit within an area, while changing the climate distribution to patchy will yield a biome style more similar to Minecraft.

[Lollard]

28 minutes ago, dakko said:

I'm curious, because I have not experienced this type of terrain but you see it frequently. Do you tend to change any particular worldgen settings during customization? (until recently I've been using default settings)

Really? On default unmodded worldgen I saw it quite often. Maybe it wasn't that frequent, but stuck out for being so unpleasant.

[dakko]

3 hours ago, Lollard said:

Really? On default unmodded worldgen I saw it quite often. Maybe it wasn't that frequent, but stuck out for being so unpleasant.

Now that I think about it, I probably travel less than most players. Maybe that's the difference.

[Tabbot95]

needs DF-esque cavern controls for things like "average cave density";

 

Spoiler

 

things that hurt worldgen more are those things that are tech-tree related and 'missing' as alternates/substitutes. (Lye/soap as a substitute for lime is one such thing)..

 

In addition there are some issues I have with general long navigation, the big journey by elk feels very very clunky, though part of this is that singleplayer isn't the focus of balance for the first chapter of the story.

[Pascaloubicou]

I would love to have 1 to 1 scale world generation for biomes and stuff. Look good to me !