Question for DEVs: geyser type randomness and frustration

[Khullag]

Hi DEVs and duplicants,

Can we talk a little bit about geyser randomness? I know this topic was brought up few times but I still wanted to try to bring DEVs attention to this because I'm just frustrated.

Currently the only geysers that will be 100% present on your map are steam vents and natural gas geysers (correct me if i'm wrong). Everything else is random and now we have multiple types of geysers to appear on the map which is cool right? Wrong... So in total I have 462 hours played in ONI. Most of this time I played AFTER all these cool new types of geysers were introduced. 30+ colonies each 150-300 cycles average (~600 top one). Around 10-11 geysers per map as far as I noticed. And guess what? NO POLLUTED WATER GEYSER for all this time and different colonies. BUT 7 water geysers on 1 map (steam, hot steam, water - all types combined), 5 CO2 geysers on 1 map, 5 Polluted oxygen geysers on 1 map. 4 Hydrogen vents on 1 map. Usually I explore all the map around cycle 150-200 and dig all the geysers. And I was looking for this FREAKING polluted water geyser to make some fun resource processing loops and stuff but NOPE.

I already see the comment "Why don't you use DEBUG mode to check all the geysers and re-run the map generation or just use the SEED from some forum topic?". And the answer is: for me the name of the game still isn't "DEBUG mode included". I want to play as regular player would and as far as I noticed here on the forum everyone is obsessed with the DEBUG mode - building some stuff which is impossible to build or manage to get working properly WITHOUT the cheat mode.

WHY do I need to use cheats to play as I want or try some strategy (which I won't be able to try coz when I reach cycle e.g. 250 and explore the map - there's no type of geyser or whatever which is needed for it). WHY only 2 types of geysers are enforced to appear and not all of them (1 CO2, 1 Water, 1 Polluted water, 1 Hydro, 1 Volcano, 1 Metal and etc.) and after 1 of each type all the rest are random addition. You can't use ANY of geysers 100% of the time because of dormancy - so what are you afraid of? Are you not forcing geyser types because it will make all playthroughs the same? Please open your eyes - half of the forum is rolling world gen with debug or just using seeds and playing SAME world over and over. Is this the expirience you want for players when you leave early access and finally release the game? DEBUG mode simulator? I hope not.

PS: if the post is too heated - i'm sorry. I'm frustrated as hell after my last playthrough when I explored the whole map again and yep - no polluted water geyser once again...

PPS: DEVs please hear cry of my soul and do smth with geyser type RNG

[bountygiver]

the random geysers is so you will adapt your bases based on what geysers you discover, so if you want to play with a particular geysers, you have to resort to what you called "cheats" (fixed seed, save game editor, debug mode). Just swallow your pride if you want to have some fun instead of challenge, this has been true for sandbox-like games for a long time already.

[Khullag]

4 minutes ago, bountygiver said:

the random geysers is so you will adapt your bases based on what geysers you discover, so if you want to play with a particular geysers, you have to resort to what you called "cheats" (fixed seed, save game editor, debug mode). Just swallow your pride if you want to have some fun instead of challenge, this has been true for sandbox-like games for a long time already.

then why have 100% rate for water and natural gas? without them it would be such a challenge

my main point is that complete RNG is bullpoop. it has to be controlled RNG to avoid ridiculous scenarios with 5-7 geysers of 1 type and none of others

[bountygiver]

because everything needs water? most other geysers are pretty much optional and it's hard to produce water from other renewables.

metal/filtration from the sky

ingenous rock can be made by cooking regolith

CO2 is byproduct of a lot of things and its geysers suck anyways -> can create oil

dirt comes from cooking slime which comes from puft from PO2, which is made from Pwater which is from water

hydrogen is from water

o2 is from algae/water (algae from slime and backtrack to water source as well)

NG from ph2o/oil, both also backtrack all the way to water

so without water source a lot of stuffs cannot be renewed because they are all "made" from water, the only problem is the lack of guarantee chlorine, causing it to be the only possible element to not be renewable if you fail to roll its geysers, everything else don't matter if you get a geyser or not.

[Khullag]

9 minutes ago, bountygiver said:

because everything needs water? most other geysers are pretty much optional and it's hard to produce water from other renewables.

metal/filtration from the sky

ingenous rock can be made by cooking regolith

CO2 is byproduct of a lot of things and its geysers suck anyways -> can create oil

dirt comes from cooking slime which comes from puft from PO2, which is made from Pwater which is from water

hydrogen is from water

o2 is from algae/water (algae from slime and backtrack to water source as well)

NG from ph2o/oil, both also backtrack all the way to water

so without water source a lot of stuffs cannot be renewed because they are all "made" from water, the only problem is the lack of guarantee chlorine, causing it to be the only possible element to not be renewable if you fail to roll its geysers, everything else don't matter if you get a geyser or not.

"and it's hard to produce water from other renewables" i'm confused - is it about challenge or here we make an exception? CO2 -> Oil or directly Oil to petroleum to petroleum gens = polluted water -> clean water. Nat gas gens -> polluted water -> clean water. Algae distillers -> polluted water -> clean water. All is doable (these are the ways I've used). So if it's doable why enforcing these types of geysers and not enforcing the others? 

[ShadowOfALegend]

13 minutes ago, Khullag said:

"and it's hard to produce water from other renewables" i'm confused - is it about challenge or here we make an exception? CO2 -> Oil or directly Oil to petroleum to petroleum gens = polluted water -> clean water. Nat gas gens -> polluted water -> clean water. Algae distillers -> polluted water -> clean water. All is doable (these are the ways I've used). So if it's doable why enforcing these types of geysers and not enforcing the others? 

I love the challenge of adapting to what I have in my current seed

[Khullag]

i understand the adapting point. can the geyser RNG be at least smarter that it doesn't spawn 5 geysers of same type and by this blocking other types from appearing? e.g. we have 1 forced clean water, 1 forced nat gas, 1 forced oil well. + 5 co2 geysers = 8 geysers. and in total we have like 10. so 2 more geysers to spawn. and guess what? they will be polluted oxygen vents. i'm trying to build clean and stable systems, which takes time and basically late game after exploring the world you see these spawned geysers i mentioned above and what's your reaction? joy?

[avc15]

I'd like a chance to prospect our home asteroid without like, examining the map, before launching the expedition.

A real colony project would absolutely prospect which asteroid to land on and what site to start at, so it'd be easy to keep in "character"

If there's a build you want to try it's absolutely mind-imploding to finish exploring your map, only to discover you can't do that build. Sandbox mode, kinda lame. Debug mode, ultra lame. Mah immersionz

[SlowMaybe]

The world gen decides where it can fit a generic geyser.

The generic geyser decides what type of geyser it is based on its position coordinates.

[Khullag]

1 minute ago, SlowMaybe said:

The world gen decides where it can fit a generic geyser.

The generic geyser decides what type of geyser it is based on its position coordinates.

yeaah but it doesn't correlate at all with enforcing geyser types...

[WanderingKid]

2 minutes ago, Khullag said:

i'm trying to build clean and stable systems, which takes time and basically late game after exploring the world you see these spawned geysers i mentioned above and what's your reaction? joy?

This will come back to the conversation at some point of early vs. late game and what it means to different people, but what exactly is a clean and stable system to you?  There's enough PH2O on most source maps that you could sieve it to and use every drop of it in your sewage systems and electrolizers for a few hundred cycles before you even touched the outputs of your petro and NG generators, and that's for a large dupe population.

The single H2O Geyser and single NGG are really 'leg ups', not something that's a permanent expectation.  Yes, you can use them to baseline your eventual 'finished' base, but Oil creates so much power at this point that as long as you can control the CO2 output you don't NEED to build a few dozen Nat Gas Generators.  The geyser near the starting biome is just a jump start to keep you from burning some cycles to get near the oil.

In most of my games I typically just cap all geysers I see until around cycle 200+, then see who's interesting.  At that point I'm looking for reasons to do something new to my base, as it's already pretty much sustainable unless I've screwed up something horribly.

I can understand the frustration of using the geysers as a tool to exploit for your long term game, but how long is long term to you?  6 cycles is one hour of play time at standard speed.  That means 600 cycles is 100 hours for a single base, not including pausing.  I've never even cared if there was a geyser on the map before that long, they're just toys to play with.  Add to the new toys, like molten slicksters, and your power center can pretty much provide you 1/3 or more of your air alone.  Add that to 2 or 3 puft ranches going full bore on a bunch of containers of slime so they're over pressuring themselves, and you can have almost all your air via deodorizers alone, and now that water is just for the plumbing.

I guess it comes down to is what are you expecting the geysers to do in your game that you can't get done in ways that you can ignore the RNG?

[Khullag]

2 minutes ago, WanderingKid said:

This will come back to the conversation at some point of early vs. late game and what it means to different people, but what exactly is a clean and stable system to you? 

for me clean means resource consumption is as low as possible and system setup is mostly automated (fully if possible). stable means systems are using only infinite resources (such as geysers and now space biom materials) and resource consumption is lower or equal than resource production (basically meaning i'm trying to create whole base an automated infinity )

[Soulwind]

The randomness can admittedly be frustrating at times.  Other times, it can be hilariously twisted.  

I ran into a map not too long ago (before Cosmic changed the world seeds) that had not 1, not 2, but 6 Natural Gas Geysers.

Of course, it pretty much also lacked anything else; a CO2 and a very poor Hot Steam (if I remember right).  The NGGs 

though were interesting to deal with....tons of power with that base.

[SlowMaybe]

20 minutes ago, Khullag said:

yeaah but it doesn't correlate at all with enforcing geyser types...

The unburied geysers are different in that they are basically separate poi

I'm just illustrating how the world gen derives its randomness. The world gen is actually blind to the type of generic geyser.

Generic geysers are something new on top of the open geysers that was there a long time ago. Its output rate is also statistically bugged.

[Khullag]

Just now, SlowMaybe said:

The unburied geysers are different in that they are basically separate poi

I'm just illustrating how the world gen derives its randomness. The world gen is actually blind to the type of generic geyser.

Generic geysers are something new on top of the open geysers that was there a long time ago. Its output rate is also statistically bugged.

The world gen is actually blind to the type of generic geyser. - it's not blind for natural gas geyser + steam vent + oil well. at least one of each is 100% on the map.

[SlowMaybe]

9 minutes ago, Khullag said:

The world gen is actually blind to the type of generic geyser. - it's not blind for natural gas geyser + steam vent + oil well. at least one of each is 100% on the map.

Spoiler

    geysers_a:
      - poi_jungle_geyser_steam 
    geysers_b:
      - poi_jungle_geyser_methane
      - poi_jungle_geyser_chlorine
      ...
      
  featureTemplates:
    feature_geyser_generic: 2

 

This is caustics biome descriptor

Spoiler

    geysers_a:
      - poi_swamp_geyser_steam
    geysers_b:
      - poi_swamp_geyser_methane
	,,,

  featureTemplates:
    feature_geyser_generic: 2

 

Swamp's

feature_geyser_generic are the geysers you have to dig up

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

There should be up to(≤) 12 Geysers and 3 Oil Reservoirs in a map. Because there are 18 kinds of geysers (not included Oil Reservoirs), it's impossible to have all kinds of geyser in a single default map.

• Swamp Biome: 1 Cool Steam Vent + 1 Chlorine Gas Vent/Natural Gas Geyser + 2 random geysers (Randomly selected from 18 kinds of geysers, buried).
• Caustic Biome: 1 Cool Steam Vent + 1 Natural Gas Geyser + 2 random geysers (Randomly selected from 18 kinds of geysers, buried).
• Frozen Biome: 2 random geysers (Randomly selected from 18 kinds of geysers, buried).
• Oil Biome: 3 Oil Reservoirs + 2 random geysers (Randomly selected from 18 kinds of geysers, buried).  

Guaranteed Cool Steam Vent is necessary.

1 hour ago, Khullag said:

CO2 -> Oil or directly Oil to petroleum to petroleum gens = polluted water -> clean water. Nat gas gens -> polluted water -> clean water. Algae distillers -> polluted water -> clean water.

These way are difficult and can only produce a little water. Maybe you can produce enough water without geyser, but newbie can't.

 

Natural Gas Geyser is not necessary for me. But its number is less than it used to be. I still remember how player screamed when they found there were no two guaranteed natural gas geyser in a map.
 

[XEVEN]

I tend to agree. The game is much slower paced since occupational upgrade, and I'm not about to play multiple 100 plus cycle games just to find out all my geysers are duds. For now I am totally devmode scumming any new maps before I play them.

Another annoyance is their placement too close to the starting biome, limiting the height or width of your base. That and the indestructible map gen.

[FIXBUGFIXBUGFIX]

17 minutes ago, XEVEN said:

Another annoyance is their placement too close to the starting biome, limiting the height or width of your base. That and the indestructible map gen.

Well, many of my friend hope geysers can be as close to start biome as possible, so they won't spend too much time to find them.

[Skrivener]

@Khullag I'm inclined to think this is a balance issue that will be tweaked by the devs in due course, but I understand and have shared your frustration at times. If you're really keen on making sure you have a particular geyser type but don't want to hit debug mode then for now I would check out the seed posting threads people have started, or post your own thread asking for someone to surprise you with seeds meeting X criteria. People seem pretty obliging.

[merkofoz]

The randomness is awesome. Finding a 50g/s 50% 500c active hydrogen vent isnt. Its not even worth the time to dig it out!

In the 5-10 maps I've played through since Ranching Mk2, I've only seen a single volcano with <30s/10000s activity.

[PhailRaptor]

5 hours ago, XEVEN said:

Another annoyance is their placement too close to the starting biome, limiting the height or width of your base. That and the indestructible map gen.

Having a Steam or Water Geyser close is actually massive boon.  No need to go hunting for one, or to perform any large scale liquid reclamation projects in the Swamp to collect enough to run your first Electrolyzer(s).  For other types of Geyser....  yeah, not so helpful.  Having a CO2 vent right next to your Kitchen might sound helpful, but it's really not.

I'm all for Ruins being able to be Deconstructed.  The simple fact is that some of them are 100% useless.  Like the Swamp one that appears to be part of a lunchroom, with the fancy table and chairs, that is always flooded with P-H2O.  Or the Caustic one with the 2 Computer Desks -- the 3 Shinebugs might be useful, but that's literally it.  Kind of like the Gravitas Recruitment Office we now have on the surface.  It's freaking huge, but it doesn't "do" anything.

[BlueLance]

8 hours ago, Khullag said:

then why have 100% rate for water and natural gas? without them it would be such a challenge

my main point is that complete RNG is bullpoop. it has to be controlled RNG to avoid ridiculous scenarios with 5-7 geysers of 1 type and none of others

Well, currently the game is in alpha and to help people reach late game etc easier we have some guaranteed resources. Chances are during full release this will either change or be reduced. 

I personally removed ruins from the world gen for the same reason, hate them.

[SamLogan]

9 hours ago, Khullag said:

then why have 100% rate for water and natural gas? without them it would be such a challenge

I play since the alpha version and before we didn't have geyser and we manage to survive as long as now.

[Carnis]

10 hours ago, Khullag said:

Hi DEVs and duplicants,

..anger..

What build are you planning to test?

Why cant toi run your water geyser into lavatories and not sieve The output? Or use The literally tons of pW spawned at worldgen.