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Thoughts on Oceans, Seas, Rivers, and Waterways


Stroam

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On 7/1/2022 at 5:35 PM, Kazeoni said:

how far have you read back the thread before commenting?

I've read it all at some point but answered the most recent ones only as I had little time.

On 7/1/2022 at 5:35 PM, Kazeoni said:

By the too deep part I meant on the hypothetical oceans we were discussing the possibilities and challenges of. Of course there is no such thing in the current worldgen. Though I stumbled upon a 30+ block deep massive lake recently. But I play with 512 worldheight instead of the standard 256, so a 10-15 block depth of the current generation's 'seas' sounds about right. And Primitive Survival's raft is more than sufficent to cross them.

That's one lake out of how many? I've seen occasional deep lakes too, even with default height, but the vast majority of bodies of water in my experiences were shallow enough for players to be able to replace the ground with dry feet.

On 7/1/2022 at 5:35 PM, Kazeoni said:

And the crux of the issue is multi-block ships are a whislist item on the roadmap by the developers. But having anything larger than a rowboat with small cargo is meaningless fluff and a vaste of development effort if we don't have actual oceans needing multiple days to cross. But who would want to just sail ahead monotonously for IRL hours? That's the specific case for where I threw in the fast-travel idea, specifically large end-game ships to cross several kilometers of just water. I wanna play Magellan or build my own East India Company. Accurately using up food for days of journey for the seraphs but not burdening the player IRL with hours of straigh ahead serves the exploration and immersion aspects of the game way better than restricting water sizes to irrealistic sizes for seas, just so people won't get bored trying to cross them at least in my eyes.

Still not a fan of the fast travel, way better imo would be being able to set a course, correct the course and be able to play on board the ship for the duration of the travel, similar to how some players prepare stuff to do so they can just stay indoors over winter. And for the question who would just sail freely over the oceans, there have been several big games with such a mechanic over the last years (including a Legend of Zelda title and an Assassins Creed title), I'd say the player base for such isn't particularly small, I mean just look at the submarine war simulators, which often even have little more than navigation and warfare over the ships instruments, maybe it's possible to set a rejoin point on board and players can either travel on the ship or logout on the ship and when logging in will join on board, possibly at their intended destination, possibly somewhere they never intended to go to (though in single player one would always end where one wanted to go, as there are no players interfering with the course). It's a similar question to who would mine monotonously for hours, just ask the technical players who played MC since inDev, partially mining perimeters, down to bedrock (or even including breaking bedrock) and with a radius of 12-16 chunks, without TNT, beacons and enchantments. If you want to play Magellan, than You'd need that "boring" just sail straight ahead for immersion. For playing an East India Company though I'd recommend some business simulator, as the people who made the profits didn't really go to sea much. Additionally if there are dangers and possible treasures that can be found on the way, finding them after an hour of relatively monotonous travel makes them more exciting.

And I'm saying that while hoping to get big multiblock airships at some point too, for which the mechanics basically would be the same.

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  • 4 weeks later...

This is one of those things I'm really looking forward to if implemented - I love the element of sea travel, ports, and preparing for a voyage. The way I would do it is fairly simply. Bodies of waters can be one of five designations - lake, river, harbor, sea, or ocean. A map would generate with an outline of continents. Bodies of water between two arms of a continent or enfolded by a continent could be seas, with milder weather but still the risky storms and other events - kind of similar to a continental shelf. Once you got out to a point where land was a certain distance away in every direction, you would get to the ocean, which would be much more dangerous with large destructive storms and eldritch horrors in the deeps. When it came to the outline of the continent, this wouldn't just be a line where the land stopped. There would be smaller, sheltered bodies of water cut into the coastline - these would be harbors. Some would have rivers flowing into them, and rivers would be navigable a certain distance up their length. Other rivers would flow into the sea through deltas or large estuaries. There could be both freshwater lakes along the course of rivers and saltwater lakes which inland rivers emptied into - these would be a huge source of salt. All three of these water bodies inside the continental boundary would be safe - ships placed there would be not be damaged by the storms that you'd find on the ocean or seas. This is where you'd build your ports, and in the early game when resources on your continent or island were still abundant you'd stick to these bodies of water, in smaller ships like dugout canoes, rafts, or smaller sailing ships. Ships big enough to sail on the sea would be gated behind tech advancement, with ships capable of sailing across the open ocean being most difficult to build. I definitely think that ship building should be done like the Minecraft mod smallships does it - you can make a set number of premade ship types which each have different features - health/durability, storage, maneuverability, top speed. You can then cosmetically customize these with sails, flags, or figureheads. I think that the idea of a built structure becoming mobile is cool, but from what I understand it's a nightmare when it comes to coding things like hitboxes and collision.

I think that focusing immediately on crossing the ocean is thinking about it the wrong way. Seafaring didn't start with crossing the ocean, it started as a way to transport goods. In rivers or lakes, and then in enclosed, calm seas like the Mediterranean. As time went on ships sailed in places like the English Channel or the Baltic Sea, going down the coast from city to city, without ever really focusing on conquering the vast ocean to the west. The original point to ships was to travel quickly and to transport a large quantity of goods with ease. That could easily be the initial point in Vintage Story as well. You could load up a ship and sail across the harbor to build a new base, and then use your ship to transport items between them. You could sail up a river until you reached waterfalls or rapids looking for minerals. If you established a base on the coast far away, maybe a seafaring ship could get you back and forth faster, and carrying more cargo, than you walking could. You'd build up the spawn continent, exhausting resources, prospecting for ore, etc. What originally sent the Europeans to exploring over the oceans in earnest was a crisis - the loss of Constantinople to a rival power threatened the primary land trade route to the east, so they started looking for alternate paths. The same dynamic could play out in old worlds - the spawn continent gets into some sort of resource crisis and needs to expand. You could also create new resources which are geographically locked to create a need to travel if you want to find them. They aren't necessary, but provide bonuses - spices for food, rare gems for jewelry, ingredients for brewing if a system like that is implemented, rare woods and stones for carving, tea. You could even introduce a plant that functions like grapes and produces fruit with a value which reflects something immutable like local climate and basement rock layer - something that's not planted on fertile farmland, but in sand, gravel, or clay.

When it comes to continents, maybe start with a certain 'section' size that can be customized. Roll a dice for each side with a certain chance - 25%, 30%, 45%, that the next 'section' will be ocean or a continuation of the continent. Do the same for the surrounding sections to each continent section. Once you have a continent surrounded by seas, roll for the edges of the sea blocks as to whether the next section will be sea/ocean or the next continent - 40% it's ocean, 60% it's continent. Let these percentages be customizable when creating a world - higher percentages for continent rolls to generate sea makes smaller continents, smaller percentages for sea block rolls to create continents creates larger oceans. Generate the continent boundary to encompass a certain amount of land in the border sections - that's also customizable and would effect continent/sea size. In the 'pole' strips, you could have frozen seasonal landbridges that make north-south travel a bit more difficult. It also creates new incentives to build a base somewhere - before, it was just proximity to resources or centralized location. With water offering expedited transport of both you and your items, then building a base at an intersection of important waterways becomes very important. It gives you a reason to keep playing, and on multiplayer servers you could end up with a real economy with trade routes if geo-locked resources were implemented well.

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Mountains, rivers, oceans, and the natural terrain with them.
Just imagining all of them makes me a little excited.

If a raft or boat is added, I would like it to be able to accommodate more than one person.
And I would like it to be able to carry animals that have been tamed and moved around.
It is not like Minecraft, where you pull them along on a string and they move across the ocean.
It would be nice to have a customizable way to carry more than just a boat. If it's on land, it's a cart.

As for reasons to explore, it would be nice to simply go looking for something that is not in the immediate area, but it might also be interesting to unravel the mysteries of the Vintage Story world.
Like why there are only merchants in this world, and why there are no survivors out there.
But I think it is up to the player to find out.

What I personally think would be interesting to implement would be forced displacement due to disasters.
You have to leave your familiar land, the buildings you have worked so hard to build, and the fields that have bountiful crops.
A volcano erupts and the land becomes uninhabitable, so they have to move. They have to move to the north where it is cooler because the temperature keeps rising due to abnormal weather and it is too hot. Conversely, if the temperature keeps dropping and it is too cold to grow crops, even animals die, so they have to move to the south where it is a little warmer.

Even if it were implemented, I would like to see it be able to be turned off and on in the settings, and I would like to see the frequency of that turned down considerably.

Well, easy to say, maybe difficult to do.🤣

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I didn't actually realize that there were no rivers until I wanted to specifically find one. Sure I can make one, but it's alot of work, and usually the water gets weird. But early settlers would really only build on an ocean coast line or along a river. I think the thing that kind of bothers me is the random bridge ruins that start nowhere near a need for it and end nowhere near a need for it. 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'm really into realism, so my views on bodies of water.

  • Actual moving rivers, going up them shouldn't be possible.
  • Different types of waters, such as salt, fresh, and brackish.
  • Different animals and plants based on different water types.
  • Add rafts and boats, ocean with waves would be great.
  • For sails, would prefer a system similar to Scum the game, where you go side to side in order to go against the wind rather than paddling like in Valheim.
  • Boats need to be able to support multiple people.
  • Need a thirst system where we can't drink brackish or salt water, requiring us to store water in order to travel across oceans.
Edited by Trenix
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  • 7 months later...
  • 1 month later...

The difficulty is that land generation in VS is based on noise, rather than geology models. This means the terrain produced is more unpredictable and doesn't have the patterns you find in nature that lead to natural and predictable terrain which would allow for easy river mapping.

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