room_params and maybe ground_params

[SymKensaki]

I think much in the same way as the room_tags table within a task, you should be able to designate a list of room changes based on task or background tile values of rooms within that task, and then all of those get applied to every (applicable, in the case of ground-sensitive changes) room in the task.

That way you could have your mod be like "Hey, I want this to be the wasps version of Speak to the king", so you could just addtaskpreinit in a 

room_params = {

contents = {

countprefabs = {

["wasphive"] = function() return math.random(3)+3 end

}}}

(This would probably have to be laid out differently, but it gets the idea across)

That way you don't have to create or edit an ensemble of new rooms or a whole new task just because you want to influence a given task, especially if you want to be able to set up a table of tasks to choose from in order to determine which is the one being influenced in a consistent way.  The ground type option would be there for if you want to set up certain rules, so like maybe wasps are abundant on grass and deciduous grass, but less abundant in forests, and almost a non-presence in deserts and swamps.

Furthermore, going back to my previous post about onsave and onload, this table could also be used to feed some prefabdata to rooms in a task to influence them based on some changes that might be being applied because of your other room or ground params changes.  So say you've got waspy Speak to the king--well, maybe the pigs can't handle it, so the king is gone and all of the houses in the whole biome don't have spawners because the pigs were pushed out or killed by the wasp invasion that happened before we the players arrived.  At that point you have the corpse of a pig kingdom without actually changing PigKingdom's room entry or having to create a new pighouse definition at all, and are free to just addtaskpreinit a PigKingdom in somewhere else as needed to represent perhaps an exodus.

 

In my own work, my hacked in interceptors also let me designate by room and to create an omit list of major rooms to ignore blanket changes because they already have too much going on (or are too strong to be overcome).  These would also be worth consideration if large protected resources or set pieces want to be included, but at a base level I think just room_params and ground_params would add some interesting versatility.