Alternate Versions of Flooding

[rezecib]

So I like the idea of flooding. What I don't like is how sandbags deal with it. Right now you basically just patch up the puddles as soon as they spawn, assuming you're lucky enough that they don't spawn already grown, and you might have to hammer down and rebuild some structures in order to place some of the sandbags, if puddles spawn under parts of your base (the main reason I take issue with this being a thing is that structure placement has asymmetric placing distance, so for example you can place a chest very close to a science machine, but you can't place a science machine close to a chest-- so if you have to hammer down the science machine to sandbag that puddle, if you want to put it back there, you also have to hammer down anything that had a smaller placement radius around it).

So, as I said, I like flooding, and I want it to keep being a thing. However, I'd like to explore alternate versions of it with the idea that we (a) make it something players have more control over, and (b) make it so that the control takes a decent amount of work, or has some significant tradeoff; we don't want to trivialize the season. Here are some ideas:

• Constant Flooding: Instead of puddles just forming and growing, the flooding spawns at a constant rate over the season. To illustrate the difference, if two puddles are next to each other right now, and grow, they overlap; some of the growth becomes nothing (and if you sandbag them, they stop growing at all). In this case, every day of the season always spawns some number of flooded tiles; overlap doesn't matter. Flooded tiles would be more likely to appear next to existing ones, to give the appearance of growing puddles.
• Sandbag Walls: I think this is how sandbags are supposed to work, but they definitely don't seem to work well when used like this. With this change, sandbags would actually prevent water tiles from spawning near them. Because of puddle growth, or the adjacency mechanic in constant flooding, this would reduce the chance of water getting in your base. It would also work very nicely with other mechanical changes, like buckets.
• Buckets: Something that allows you to pick up a flood tile and relocate it. The bucket should be expensive to craft, and should fail if used merely to store the water (the water could spill out onto the nearest available tile or something). While in the player's inventory, it should hold the water though; spending an inventory slot on holding some water isn't a very favorable tradeoff, so doesn't need to be guarded against. Water couldn't be dumped on existing flooded tiles, so combined with constant flooding, this would keep flooding a pervasive threat, eating up more and more of your island over time, even if you do relocate it, and potentially forcing you to relocate it to other islands, provided they have any dry ground left.
• Flooding Hydra: (cut one head off, two more grow in its place) Add some mechanic for destroying flood tiles (e.g. a sponge; this could be crafted from a harvestable in the coral biome, that spawns with frequency similar to brain coral, for example); but, because we don't want this to just kill flooding outright, whenever you kill a flood tile, two more tiles spawn next to existing puddles on the island (or at the shore if there are none).
• Water pump: Functions like a flingomatic, and requires gears and probably some more expensive stuff. Sucks up nearby water and pumps it into the ocean. Requires fuel to keep going. This is really strong, so it needs something to counterbalance it-- perhaps a very small radius, and generally increased flooding, such that in short order everywhere not protected by the pump is flooded. Given how easy gears are to find now, gears could even be the fuel (they rust?).
• Sand fortification: Instead of sandbags being placed on tiles, they get placed on structures, guarding them from the effects of flooding. However, they degrade very quickly, and are more expensive (only one bag per recipe, maybe a more expensive recipe even), so you either have to pick and choose which structures you can afford to protect, or have to spend a lot of time maintaining their protection. In addition, it wouldn't "un-flood" a flooded structure (although perhaps there could be something else for that-- maybe the tropical fan?) I can see how from a developing perspective, this might seem like a bit of a challenge; that every structure would need a fortified version of its builds. However, that's not really the case. Most structures that are affected by flooding have fairly standard sizes, so it could probably be accomplished more simply by an invisible entity with several child entities that place around the borders of the structure on the ground (this ensures that they show up on the correct side of the structure's "billboard"). The invisible entity would control degradation of the children.

I'd definitely like to hear more ideas and other iterations of these. I'm sure many of them could be counterbalanced in better ways, at least.

[Clwnbaby]

For water pump I always imagined you having to lay down bamboo pipe everywhere for effectiveness.  Like it would be like a flingo except that it completely useless at first cause you have to make pipes into your base to suck up flooded tile and then an out flow pipe to pump the water to.  But then I realized thats WAY too complicated for Don't Starve and I think that some of what goes into the development of the DS games is a feeling of Keep it Simple Stupid. 

In all honesty this is the only season left in the game that provides ANY sort of challenge and its not much of one, so creating mechanics to deal with its annoyances would be nice but at my current state of the game I feel we should take out the last bit of challenge in the game.  That being said, of all the ideas mentioned the only idea that really has any merit is the bucket I feel.  It fits into the theme of Don't Starve in not being overly complicated.  Also it requires work and it isn't a quick and permanent fix.  Also for balance sake it just breaks after 10 uses

[Machine Reaper]

I think sandbags should function as walls cause one can attack them like walls on the other hand flooding is an out right a killing mechanic to structures and perhaps klei intended it that way but true flooding happens from shores where waters will get to land from the edges which seems more appropriate if one goes for sandbag walls, other wise the so called flood tiles random generation is lot more worse the having your base set on fire or get crumbled by deerclops...

[Machine Reaper]

oh and bucket is a good idea with constant flooding during each rain, bucket can be used to pick and throw water away but has limited uses and made from wood and bamboo/vine, water tiles can be cleared but will comeback after again when it rains...

[martinezxerxes]

I think it would be cool if flooding caused the sea level to rise. Starting from the edge of the islands and could be stopped with sand bags. But sand bags would have to be redesigned so you could stand on them and get to your boat from them. But you would have to find ways to live primarily from sea. And the dry season lower the sea level where you have more land, and land bridges to other islands. But I feel like it would be a tough mechanic to pull off. Just a thought. 

Plus if this worked you might could add a snorkel to get visibly submerged items in the flooding and go short distances while in water.

[VeryDead]

On the topic of Monsoon season, I somewhat have my own idea about how I would like to see flooding work. In my mind, it would keep the challenge, possibly increasing it, yet keep things fair. My concept goes a bit like this:

Puddles no longer randomly spawn on your island. Instead, the tides come in during the first rain of Monsoon. Once the tides leave, they leave puddles ALL across the border of the islands. From there, the rain would make the puddles creep further into the heart of the island until it's nearly all flooded / completely flooded. This method would stop you from cheesing Monsoon season by just dropping Sandbags on the puddles when they're one tile size, yet still keep it somewhat fair by getting rid of the random chance that a puddle spawns under a structure of yours. This would also encourage players to use Sandbags as actual walls to protect their base from getting flooded.

 

As for your ideas, Rezecib, they're all fantastic and I'm stupid jealous I didn't think of them. They're good, but perhaps a bit of tweaking would be useful in order to balance the ideas, notably the water pump. Perhaps make it so if it was to be dropped near an area, it would have to be dry land and would suck up puddles coming near it, so this way, players won't just slap it down right next to a puddle without flaw. Another little change would be perhaps combining the bucket and the water pump, so after the pump sucks up X amount of water, you'd need to empty the pump in order for it to continue functioning, so you could use the bucket to empty the excess water into the ocean.

[rezecib]

Another version of the bucket that could make sense is a basin + bucket combo. You have to build a basin, which is big and expensive (10 boards + 5 cut stone + 5 rope or something), and then the bucket can only be emptied into the basin. The bucket would have durability, so that while water is in it, it degrades rapidly (1-2 days of water-carrying, perhaps), and you empty it into the basin. The basin would fill up at 10 bucket loads or something, and would gradually empty over non-monsoon seasons.

[brummbar7]

They need to make sandbags work to enclose a dry area and prevent it from flooding.  The current use where they're more like a plug in a drain is stupid and highly counter-intuitive.     It should be simple:  when the game is thinking about starting a puddle on a spot, it checks for something like 8 tiles in all four directions.  If it finds a sandbag within 8-ish tiles in all 4 directions, it will cancel placement of that puddle.  In this way a player could enclose a 8x8 or whatever area with sandbags, and be guaranteed it stays dry.  This is intuitive - the sandbags function to keep the area enclosed dry - no puddles even start there.  The check should be simple to program.   Sandbag recipe can be adjusted as necessary for balance.   If the player wants more dry area they have to compartmentalize it.

If flooding has started already in a non-enclosed area, enclosing the area will stop the puddle from expanding.   Then, either buckets are used to remove the water, or the puddle just naturally shrinks and disappears if they don't want to bother programming a bucket.

I really have no idea why they made the mechanic the way it is.  It's so counter-intuitive, that for a game you're supposed to be able to learn by playing, not reading wikis, it's a genuine impediment to fun gameplay.

[justjasper]

I like the idea of bailing buckets. I mean, you have to put in the time/labour to de-flood an area, but it would be super useful.

[CammoAmmo]

Buckets sound great and so does Clwnbaby's pipe idea, but you're right that it might be too complicated. What I wish they would do is simply have something that restricts the very first 5 tile puddles from spawning under any machines, walls, or whatever. It can still expand under them from the next rain on, but that way your samdbags are actually useful and you don't need to completely move you base since that's absolutely tedious. Maybe the game already does this because I haven't played SW much, but I think that would be the easiest solution. So those who are prepared are rewarded and those who are not will soon lose their base the next time the puddles expand.

[PhelsarusBeel]

On 26.1.2016 at 4:18 PM, rezecib said:

Another version of the bucket that could make sense is a basin + bucket combo. You have to build a basin, which is big and expensive (10 boards + 5 cut stone + 5 rope or something), and then the bucket can only be emptied into the basin. The bucket would have durability, so that while water is in it, it degrades rapidly (1-2 days of water-carrying, perhaps), and you empty it into the basin. The basin would fill up at 10 bucket loads or something, and would gradually empty over non-monsoon seasons.

YOu know i think you might be onto something that can easily help to fix some problems in SW atm

What i mean is that with a basin and a bucket you could easily fix the OPnes of the Icemaker by only making it work with Water as fuel. This way the bucket and the Basin could work well in conjunction with the Icemaker since you suddenly can only really make Ice with it in 1 season instead of making ice whenever you feel like it and use it as cheap filler. Alongside this maybe even let puddles spawn from other rainsources so you can harvest Water for the Icemaker year round but during Monsoon season it's the easiest to do so at the risk of your Icemaker breaking down because of the flooding.

Also you could even add the option to swim/relax in the Basin as a small pool for Volcanic season to cool you down and maybe increase a bit of sanity while inside but for that it quickly fills the wetness meter.

So yeah i'm for the Bucket and basin idea makes Monsson more about managing the season rather then babysit your base with sandbags,

[Lacost]

What has to be tweaked right now:

1. Sandbags on puddle spawners hast to stop working.

2. Because of 1. Sandbags would be UP because puddles spawn randomly.

3. Because of 2. we need something to permanently erase puddles

--> Buckets.

 

However I still like the idea of towels. They have to be crafted by cloth and turn into wet towels after they sucked up a tile of water and to regenerate them you have to dry them on a drying rack which would be beneficial but tedious on a large scale.

 

My most prefered solution would be to add flash floods. They would temporarily flood your whole island and similar to wind will drift away items lying on the ground and characters walking in them. After the flash flood has drawn off it will leave random puddles behind but only in previously flooded areas. So if your base is walled off with sandbags no puddles can spawn inside of it.

 

I think there are many ideas and I hope Klei or Capy are choosing an interesting solution.

[Maxturra]

Well, in the latest update, flooring prevents puddles from spawning. They can still spawn outside and expand to the area with flooring, tough.

[Luponius]

On ‎26‎/‎01‎/‎2016 at 2:20 AM, VeryDead said:

Puddles no longer randomly spawn on your island. Instead, the tides come in during the first rain of Monsoon. Once the tides leave, they leave puddles ALL across the border of the islands. From there, the rain would make the puddles creep further into the heart of the island until it's nearly all flooded / completely flooded. This method would stop you from cheesing Monsoon season by just dropping Sandbags on the puddles when they're one tile size, yet still keep it somewhat fair by getting rid of the random chance that a puddle spawns under a structure of yours. This would also encourage players to use Sandbags as actual walls to protect their base from getting flooded.

 

Late to this topic since it was only recently linked to me but I fully endorse this idea, and like many others mentioned around.

Flooding doesn't usually start in the middle of the land, although it could add some puddles here and there, the main progression should come from the sea, with rapid creeping of water inland as rain happens, by around halfway through the season most unprotected areas should be flooded.

A water splashing animation would also be nice when moving in puddle areas to give feedback of why player is moving slow and getting wet.

And a simple bucket recipe of 2 boards, 4 rope and 2 twigs could be used to clean up one square of puddle, consuming 10% durability or so, which could ve combined with a water basin to clean or "launched" outside camp similar to the boat cannon (except only water comes out).

[NoQuitting]

Sandcastle Door - 1 Sandbag 20 sea shells

Allows us to completely close in our base with sandbags while still allowing an entrance.