For PeterA & Co.

[UnionGaming]

My idea was that on world generation, it generates the normal overworld island, which is generally all connected up, and a second, maybe third (ruins) island, that has only caves biomes, effectively making the cave and overworld right by each other, but just out of sight. The sinkhole functions as a wormhole to these islands, with the correct textures, and prefabs of course. (Something like, OnUse CaveEntrance goto CaveRope. I know approximately no lua and no prefabs.) But enemies there could not pass back through, except batilisks. At dusk the batilisks from the cave empty out to the overworld, instead of more spawning (I figured this is easier to do, but also easier to manage, which is BAD). There would be two types of each cave turf, but when dug default to the light one in overworld, and the darkness one in caves (Stupid, but works)

The light one follows the day cycle, and would be used to simulate daylight cracks. Earthquakes could be replaced by meteors (See Minable Gems mod), and in Winter, drop Icicles/Different Glaciers. The abyss is probably impossible in this way, but what do I know? The non-light turf has a tag in the prefab.lua such as Inst:AddTag("dark"), which makes it so it is always dark above this, and does not follow the rules of the clock.

Going through this "wormhole" could also disable your clock, and separate chat to the island you're currently on, and vice versa. Extended Map Generation, for example, spawns the biomes on the overworld "island", but the simple fix would surely be to move them away, make the turf dark above, and connect with new cave entrances. The inventory items of the dug up turfs would switch on leaving the cave, but when dug Prefab 1 (daylight affected ground) it switches to Prefab 2 (dark ground) in caves, but when you leave the cave, Prefab 2 in your inventory, switches to Prefab 1, to be placed in overworld. It therefore switches back when you go back in. However, for the multiplayer aspect, a boss in the caves could be a new con, to prevent multiple players going in and tanking spiders so it can only hit one of them at a time, making their lethalness, absolutely irrelevant, as 6 players could take 1 hit each, rather than one player taking six.

 

Horrible idea most likely but just a suggestion!

 

EDIT: Ancient Altars should be unbreakable, as they can not be replaced, and thulecite should be craftable to make up for multiple players using it. (1 moonrock + 2 gold = 1 thulecite for example)

[PeterA]

Thanks for posting your thoughts on how you think we could implement caves!

[nome]

Definitely not a horrible idea! Sadly the reason it's not that way in DST is the same reason it's not that way in DS - loading all the textures for everything as part of one world would drastically raise the minimum specifications required to run a client (as things stand right now anyway). The client currently needs to say "I'm switching from overworld mode to caves mode" because it can't hold all the assets needed for both at once.  

 

Side benefit to having caves on separate servers though is that if you're on a multi-core machine you can actually utilize those other cores and get more players / more world on your machine.

 

Thanks for your passion for DST! I'll leave it for designers to comment on your design ideas (if they can find the time, they're super busy right now!), I just write code and make snarky comments.

[Kzisor]

I just write code and make snarky comments.

 

So like every other programmer in the world?

 

Note: This seems to come off as rude, but it was meant as a joke. Every programmer I've known only writes code and snarky comments; otherwise they aren't a programmer they are a designer.

[nome]

I did not take it as rude, so no worries.

[UnionGaming]

My thoughts were that all the islands would be smaller than normal caves/worlds.