More variety in world generation

[Guille6785]

Worldgen in DST is extremely strict; the only truly "random" things in world generation essentially boil down to the shape and size of your world (could either be a big loop or have lots of branches even on default settings), the location of biomes (although this is only random to an extent as I'll mention later), set pieces (which there aren't too many of note, it's basically just reed trap which megabasers might want and dev graveyard/tallfort/boons for quick resources) and the optional biomes (triple mactusk and killer bee biome which everyone loves, 2nd deciduous which everybody hates, spider quarry which wendy and webber mains love, 2nd pig village in a forest, bee biome with a meteor field everyone seems to ignore or hate, rockyland, and 2 different pond biomes which I bet you didn't even know were considered biomes).

And if you want some examples of how strict and organized worldgen is, and how many things aren't actually random:
-Have you ever noticed how the swamp, dragonfly desert and moonstone forest are very commonly located after the pig king but never come before it? The game essentially picks from a "pool" of biomes to decide which connect to which and it makes worlds feel monotonous and predictable at times
-Forests have to meet really specific conditions considering it's a wilderness game, you can literally tell "what forest" you're in seconds after stepping inside one
*One of two guaranteed forests contains a patch of mandrakes (which players tend to think can spawn anywhere in the world) inside a small grassland, and it also contains a small savanna with a guaranteed beefalo herd
*The other guaranteed forest will contain a single mactusk camp and the moonstone mixed with grassland
*A third forest can generate which contains a pig village that's almost always connected via the cobblestone road to pig king; this forest also contains a small swamp that some people erroneously mistake for a proper second swamp biome
*A smaller forest with lumpy evergreens is part of the spider quarry biome (which by the way is a separate biome from rockyland and not a variation of it)
-Triple mactusk is a biome and not a set piece; it's an oddly specific combination of a small rockyland and a small grassland encased within a large savanna with no beefalo herds
-Pig villages don't generate naturally like a new player might expect, there's always one at pig king and another one in the optional pig village forest
-The starter biome is always a mix of grassland and forest turf with a small savanna with some rabbit holes
-The only place where beefalo herds can spawn other than the small savanna inside the mandrake forest is the "main savanna" which will always have a smaller area with forest turf
-Cave entrances, touch stones, moose spawners and wormholes can only spawn within certain biomes (most notably, none of the aforementioned can spawn inside the oasis desert), a set amount of them spawn in the world, and you can't get two in the same biome (except for the quadruple moose nests)
-The dragonfly desert will always include a small savanna with rabbit holes

Naturally after you play the game for a while you start feeling like every world is pretty much the same save for the minor variations I mentioned at the beginning of the post, which is a shame in a game where randomly generated worlds are a huge part of the premise.

It's also interesting to go back and see how many of the things I mentioned have been present since reign of giants or even vanilla DS; although while I feel like current DST worldgen makes it nigh impossible for a world to "stand out", some quirks in worldgen in those previous versions of the game actually helped make worlds feel more unique. Back then you could get small islands only accessible via wormholes, you could get 3 to 5 pairs of wormholes in any combination of biomes (even 2 or more wormholes in the same biome), you could get 1 or 2 deserts, etc.

Another thing that stands out to me from DS is how seamless the connections between biomes are:
Compare RoG to DST, notice how separated the biomes in DST are by rivers; I'm not sure if this has only been the case since RoT, but the old way biomes were connected made the world feel far more natural as the biomes weren't as obviously delimited.

So with all that explained, here's some changes I think could let worlds feel much more distinct from each other and provide a genuinely fresh experience every time you create a new save:
-"Additional" biomes akin to 2nd deciduous. Could be a 2nd swamp, a 2nd beefalo savanna, a 2nd mosaic, etc. Maybe even smaller versions of these biomes spread throughout the world
-Get rid of the extremely strict conditions that biomes use to decide what they will be connected to; allow any combination of biomes to be linked
-Same with wormholes, touch stones and cave entrances; let them spawn in any biome and allow multiple in the same biome
-More pairs of wormholes
-Bring back small islands from DS, I feel like they'd be a welcome addition now that we have boats
-Tone down how much the biomes are separated by rivers to let them lead to each other more naturally (could be a setting similar to land branch and loop). At the moment there is no way to change this
-Randomly generating "points of interest", not quite like set pieces. Could be extra pig villages in random biomes, as well as areas with high density of spider dens, beefalo herds, mandrake patches, lots of grass tufts or berry bushes, mactusk camps, evil flowers, graveyards, etc.
-I think a lot of concepts could be borrowed from adventure mode. There could be different "layouts" of pig villages, random forests not linked to any particular landmark, "chess biomes", bridges, protected landmarks and such
 

This is all under the assumption that if these changes were added, they'd also add the option in world settings to use the old worldgen (like we have for classic DS biomes, though nobody seems to use that setting lol), I understand this might be a legitimate concern for a lot of people because it might make it annoying to rush early game goals since you wouldn't be able to identify landmarks as easily.

Hopefully more than one person will support what I'm saying

[HowlVoid]

I also wish I could re-shape the world to some extent like getting rid of useless holes (and maybe rivers)  in the world.

Also, when are we going to have a way to bring back all non-renewable resources. It wouldn't affect the difficulty of the game at all, its just annoying. There is one catcoon left in my world and I don't ever use them for food, I mean don't buzzards respawn infinitely? Their respawn point is out of reach too. 

[Theon]

I love the fact that it had no replies, maybe the poll is already a answer

[Echsrick]

 i just leave this here

[Hornete]

I enjoy the patterns worlds have with certain biomes linking with certain other biomes, so I oppose the idea of biomes being able to generate beside any other biome in the game. But I do want variety.

I really hope we'll get some classic ds-like setpieces for the ocean soon, we don't really have any setpieces out there :(

[Guille6785]

7 minutes ago, Dr.Medic said:

 i just leave this here

I wasn't talking about resource variety, that just swaps out exisiting items for others

[Echsrick]

Just now, Guille6785 said:

I wasn't talking about resource variety, that just swaps out exisiting items for others

well there still part of this world or not?

[Guille6785]

14 minutes ago, Hornete said:

I enjoy the patterns worlds have with certain biomes linking with certain other biomes, so I oppose the idea of biomes being able to generate beside any other biome in the game.

maybe it could be a setting

[W0l0l0]

I can see an argument for not having too much variety, in fear of really bad and unpredictable worlds, but at least some additional diversity, and generation options that can do that would be really welcome. I'd like to add a minimum wormhole pair distance, or a restriction for them to only generate in different biomes. Also with tentapillars. In fact, some wormhole generation options would be really cool actually. 

[Gourmand]

The game is a decade old. The Constant mainland has remained static and flat to look at. Take the savannah biome, it's just grass tufts, rabbit holes and beefalo. Otherwise, 99% of the biome has flat yellpw turf. Same goes for every biome except maybe the swamp and deciduous which have at least some interesting things going for it. I would 100% pay for a new starting island in the form of DLC, if that's what it takes to overhaul or ideally give us an entire new set of biomes to play with.

59 minutes ago, HowlVoid said:

I also wish I could re-shape the world to some extent like getting rid of useless holes (and maybe rivers)  in the world.

Also, when are we going to have a way to bring back all non-renewable resources. It wouldn't affect the difficulty of the game at all, its just annoying. There is one catcoon left in my world and I don't ever use them for food, I mean don't buzzards respawn infinitely? Their respawn point is out of reach too. 

I was hoping to get a terraforming tool in RoT, a new magic pitchfork maybe. 

[FreyaMaluk]

yes to the yes...

new world gen options will def provide special challenges and interesting runs to have fun with.

the varied the better!

[Captain_Rage]

Even seasonal variety is welcome. It feels a bit silly and monotone that no natural rain ever occurs in the summer. If the weather would be a bit more varied things would probably be more fun and the Rainometer could even serve a purpose.

[sudoku]

Id love to see new setpeices added, theres so much they could do.

[Szczuku]

On top of some of the stuff op said I'll also add that Klei should add more variants of plants and structures.

More sprites for boulders, grass, trees, seeds. More 'cousin' resources like juicy berries. Make them spawn naturally with original resources. Seriously getting a twigy trees world is such a pain.

[WoodieMain45684]

I like the idea of more variety in worldgen, but like hornet, I think that there should also be some degree of order with what Task generates where. More optional tasks like the miniature biomes you suggested would be a good start, I would even recommend more biome mixups like a rocky swamp or a deciduous biome that has a beefalo enclosure.

A thing to note about this is that it most likely wouldn't require too much effort to add these tasks.... as we have multiple rooms which already make up the building blocks of what we would like to see in tasks that are similar to previous versions.

[Cowboy Maxwell]

I'm gonna stop you right there. Now what you said is true (speaking to OP poster), I've noticed a difference that happens on a rare occasion when I'm playing Webber specifically. Lunar biomes will sometimes randomly spawn close enough to build a single boat bridge to hop over to. Just a small archipelago of three islands that you can connect to each other by a single boat. But this only happens when I play as Webber. And it is with default settings on. It only started after the rework though. 

[Guille6785]

1 minute ago, pikamuse said:

I'm gonna stop you right there. Now what you said is true (speaking to OP poster), I've noticed a difference that happens on a rare occasion when I'm playing Webber specifically. Lunar biomes will sometimes randomly spawn close enough to build a single boat bridge to hop over to. Just a small archipelago of three islands that you can connect to each other by a single boat. But this only happens when I play as Webber. And it is with default settings on. It only started after the rework though. 

the world is generated before you select your character so that makes no sense, you've probably just been playing mostly webber since the rework launched hence you think there's a correlation

[Cowboy Maxwell]

Just now, Guille6785 said:

the world is generated before you select your character so that makes no sense, you've probably just been playing mostly webber since the rework launched hence you think there's a correlation

Before actually. I'm a Webber main. But it's still a rare occurrence that shows that other biomes than the norm get generated.

[Friendly Grass]

I wonder what limitations klei has in the code for these kinds of world gen implementations.

[goblinball]

I don’t think making worlds more random or complex will make exploring more enjoyable, it will still be just “run around until you found all the important things” and making worlds more varied will lead to more objectively worse/better worlds, which is annoying because world gen is important, and you can’t just hold a button until you get a good world seed like you can in isaac or something, you have to explore the world before realizing if it’s good/bad, which takes a while. I do think some more complexities in world gen that are either constant in all worlds or are too small to be significant would be nice, but making worlds more RNG-based is asking for trouble without much payoff.

[Guille6785]

1 hour ago, goblinball said:

I don’t think making worlds more random or complex will make exploring more enjoyable, it will still be just “run around until you found all the important things” and making worlds more varied will lead to more objectively worse/better worlds, which is annoying because world gen is important, and you can’t just hold a button until you get a good world seed like you can in isaac or something, you have to explore the world before realizing if it’s good/bad, which takes a while. I do think some more complexities in world gen that are either constant in all worlds or are too small to be significant would be nice, but making worlds more RNG-based is asking for trouble without much payoff.

I'm not asking for important landmarks to be shoved into random corners of the map, I'm saying the current worldgen is insanely monotonous and every world I play feels the same

[GetNerfedOn]

adding on to this spawning in different biomes than the regular biome could be a thing too i guess

[Guille6785]

4 minutes ago, GetNerfedOn said:

adding on to this spawning in different biomes than the regular biome could be a thing too i guess

I'm fine with the starter biome being the way it is because it's necessary for players to have important resources within reach, idk what to change here without it being a net negative

[Cheggf]

My biggest issue with worldgen is the Mactusks. It is so boring for them to always be 1 near the moonstone and always either have no more or three that are kind of near eachother but not really along a road. Look at this cool thing from DSA:

Three right next to eachother. A difficult challenge that you're (probably) well rewarded for overcoming. And it looks so cool, like they're actually working together. I'm not sure if that only generates in Adventure Mode or not (I've only seen it there personally) but it doesn't matter.

The Mactusk generation in DST is so boring. There's never any sole Mactusks in unexpected places, never any Mactusks together, never any amount of Mactusks in the world except for exactly 1 or exactly 4. The Mactusk generation is also a bit of an issue for servers that aren't longstanding such as Klei Official and the start of private server. If there's 1 Mactusk then even assuming he is perfectly farmed all winter (which is boring) then there's going to be on average about 2 or 3 canes and about 1 or 2 tams on a server with possibly 8 or more players. But if the world has a triple tusk then the entire server will probably have both a cane and a tam even without perfectly farming him just because you have 4x as many Mactusks to kill. The jump is so big that many players will use a map revealing mod to see if there's triple tusk on the world and try to regenerate it if it doesn't have it, which is a bit obnoxious.

I'm not saying to put 15 Mactusks in every world so those items are super easy to get, but the jump of accessibility of those items depending on whether or not triple tusk generated is massive. Just allowing worlds to generate with 2 or 3 would be a lot better, and I think a lot more interesting.

[Waynel]

12 minutes ago, Cheggf said:

My biggest issue with worldgen is the Mactusks. It is so boring for them to always be 1 near the moonstone and always either have no more or three that are kind of near eachother but not really along a road. Look at this cool thing from DSA

The mctusk village is my favorite setpiece in the don't starve franchise. Too bad i only encounter it in the King of Winter chapter of adventure mode. It's definitely a more challenging and entertaining way of acquiring cane and tamo.

 

I'd love to see some more variety when it comes to village setpieces. For instance, you can find this type of bunny village with cobblestone in dst caves :

 

but you will not find the pig counterpart unless you happen to roam around the first island in the Two Worlds chapter of adventure mode :

 

This might surprise you but i stumbled on this swamp entrance even though i wasn't playing adventure but survival mode with the "A quicker start in a harsher world" option enabled. I wish there was a chance to find that in dst survival as well.

 

It's true that old islands had some special vibe

but with the introduction of boats and lunar island, it just seems obsolete.