Problems with disease and caves

[Telendrassil]

Hi everyone,

 

Recently, I've gotten into doing more spelunking and have been playing mostly underground. However, I've noticed that in some games, the caves seem very barren and there is no grass to be found everywhere. At first, I figured that this was a world generation bug, but I've noticed it over the course of multiple games. I didn't really know what to make of it until I entered a cave on day 2 and found a single diseased grass patch in an otherwise barren cave.

 

Now, what I suspect is happening is that one patch of grass spawns diseased (or gets diseased early on--not exactly sure how this works mechanistically) and then the disease sweeps through the entire cave, killing all the grass everywhere. This is a really serious problem, as it not only renders the caves much less survivable, but also makes them much less interesting to explore (as you get large swaths of just turf with nothing growing on them in places).

 

Please do something about disease in the caves. Either decrease the rate at which it occurs or decrease its infectivity. Or take it out entirely; I think it's kind of a poor game mechanic, as all it really does is destroy resources for players.

[WildWesternWilson]

As a whole, 'Disease' is currently a very… beta mechanic. Out of everything in the game, I feel it's the one that needs some fine tuning, as it always seems to happen too quickly. I'm not even sure if there is a counter yet, I just dig up the plant turf in hope that that does something.

[Faintly Macabre]

The disease mechanic is still often not well understood because there hasn't been a lot of talk about it. It's not something that "spreads." What's happening is the variant resources system allows only one of two types of resources to exist outside special circumstances: if you see diseased grass tufts, it means that grass gekkos are the current dominant grass resources, and so any grass tufts not planted on savanna turf die.

Unfortunately, at the moment grass gekkos don't seem to spawn in caves (at least, I've never seen any), so the only place grass grows is in specific spots. But... I don't remember grass tufts being terribly abundant in the caves in single player anyway. The only time I ever saw much of them was in the little rooms with forest-y stuff planted on mud turf, which are all but gone in DST's caves for some unrelated reason.

[Telendrassil]

So, what you're saying is that the variant spawning options have been put in place for the caves (as with the surface) but the potential variant items have not yet been added to caves? That's absolutely absurd. How could the devs not have noticed a huge oversight like that?

 

With regard to your last point, I haven't actually gone spelunking in single player, so I can't speak to the resource distribution there, but in "normal" resource cave maps, saplings and grass tufts are quite common in the biomes around the cave entrances (I'm not sure of the exact name). Pretty much every entrance has 3-6 tufts around it and at least a few saplings. Additionally, there are large "antechamber" like sections in close proximity which often contain a lot more tufts and saplings. Of course, as I mentioned, these areas are quite barren and useless on the "alternate" world resource settings.

 

On a side note, this "no variant resource spawn" problem is not limited to grass tufts. I played on a map today which had tons of grass tufts but absolutely no saplings. I assume this is because twiggy trees have not yet been implemented in caves. Bleh.

[Faintly Macabre]

I know there are supposed to be some there; I'm just saying I've never seen enough of them lying around to convince me not to bring a stack of each from the surface anyway. Which I guess is why I never thought to question it until now. Come to think of it, my current caves world is completely devoid of both saplings and grass (outside of those savanna spots for the latter). Oddly enough, the one variant I know is working in the caves is the juicy berry bushes. Not sure if trees will petrify down there or not.

[228]

I can confirm this, I had to bring grass from surface (as well as savanna turf), as there was completely no grass at all (even near bunny villages). I think these resource variants should be turned off by default in cave worlds.