Boidster

I do. When planning and careful behavior is not possible, FAFO should be the rule. Sorry about your 4x4 at the bottom of the canyon bro. Better start digging it out...sun's goin' down. We take full advantage of the Bag of Holding nature of 7D2D's inventory system, but if they made motorized vehicles non-storable in any container, including other vehicles, I'd murmur "well played, pimps, well played" and adjust accordingly.

Sorry, what I meant was that all of my own little modlets in Nexus start with "Boid's", so there is "Boid's Pour One Out" and "Boid's Infinite Horde" and so on. If you search for just "Boid's" I would think Nexus would show you all of them.

Yep! Lake bed is at 71 or something like that. Cities set at 60. Surprised there isn't a "not on water" exclusion built in, but hey the tool has some not-really-that-difficult ways to work around it, so I will do that. Custom cities map and custom splat map were always in my future for this project anyhow...

Just search for "Boid's" in Nexus and you'll find them. Mostly they are tiny modlets (small XML changes) created in response to someone on this forum asking for a particular behavior change. I don't know if any of them really qualify as "more real life like". Maybe "Boid's Pour One Out" kinda does.

Is this expected behavior in the current version? I have a heightmap and a water map and no other custom maps/overlays. I did not expect a POI in the lake. If the log window is to be believed, cities are generated before water. Maybe it's out of order? Or maybe the rule is just "if you do a water map, you gotta do a cities map too".

Yes, it works that way, however take a look at my big fat BUT ...not all mods work that way. Any mods which only change XML* will be automatically downloaded to your friends' machines**. Some of the more advanced mods add assets to the game (like new zombie types or new POIs) and often these will need to be downloaded separately. The description of the mod should explain how it will work in a server/client game. For example, I run a handful of mods of my own design, plus Creature Pack (new zombies, NPCs, and weird critters) and CompoPack (new POIs). My co-op playing partner had to download Creature Pack and CompoPack himself, but all my little modlets downloaded automatically. *or the 'localization.txt' file **what actually happens is the modified XML gets downloaded to their machines, not really the mods themselves

Well, you will have to register an account if you want to download mods. You can use a throwaway Gmail account if you don't want to use your real e-mail (I do this all the time, though not on NexusMods). As far as "safe" goes, you can be pretty certain that Nexus itself is a safe website (unless it gets hacked some day, but that applies to any website). It's been around for years and it has tens of thousands of mods for all sorts of games. It is a legitimate source for game mods. The safety of any particular mod might be a little bit less certain, but if a mod has a bunch of downloads then it's going to be safe. Players would scream at Nexus if they left a "bad" mod up on their system. I mean "safe" as in "no viruses or other malware". A mod might mess up your game, of course, but this also is very rare.

Definitely check out Nexus Mods.

Okay good. If you want to make a change to one of your KingGen inputs (the Cities map for example), then click it to make it visible: For ease of editing, maybe you want to also show your heightmap: So I don't want that southern purple area in my Cities map, and I delete it: Then I turn off the heightmap so it's only the Cities layer visible again: File -> Export... -> PNG and then load it into KingGen and re-generate the world to see if I like it. If not, repeat the steps to adjust the Cities layer again.

Sourceforge is just a tool, like github or Google docs. Yeah, people with bad intentions can upload stuff there, but generally it's used by open-source coders trying to do useful work. As long as you trust the source of the Sourceforge link (which I definitely think you can in this case), then the download will be fine. Of course have your antivirus give it a once-over, if it doesn't do it automatically during download.

Try KingGen. It's under active development. I'm using it for my first-ever attempt at a fully custom map (hand-placed cities and whatnot), but it will do advanced RWG just like Nitrogen did.

What program are you using? Are those each layers, or separate image files? I'm not entirely clear on what you're asking, sorry, but I'm willing to try to help once I understand.

I'm no expert, but these two questions maybe I can give some help on. 1. You really ought to be using GIMP (or a similar graphics program) and keep all of your maps in layers. If you're doing a full custom map, maybe you'd have these layers in roughly this order top to bottom: Cities layer Biomes layer Water layer Heightmap layer All black layer All white layer Then you just ensure that only the layer you want to export is visible when making your PNG. Need to change your cities layout? Make the cities layer and maybe all-black or all-white visible (for easier visibility while editing), do your edits, then turn off all layers except Cities and export it as PNG and re-generate your world. When I'm working on my map I have multiple copies of each layer because when I try a new thing I want to keep the original layer in case I goof up (though GIMP does have an excellent multiple-step undo feature). 2. Resizing should work fine in most cases. I work on an image in GIMP that is 1024x1024 and then resize to 8192x8192 after export. Working on the full 8K image would take quite a bit more memory and processing would slow to a crawl on my mid-potato PC.

Hmm...to be honest I am still running 19.3. I guess they added a new pregen map in 19.4 or later? The only ones my game came with are Navezgane and PREGEN01-03. In any case, that is a random name. You could also make a new RWG world and through sheer luck end up with "South Mufiko County" again. I got pretty close just typing random characters: IIRC the game has three lists: 1) [South, North, East, West, Old, New, <null>] 2) [bunch of fake place names like Mufibi, Voluya, Kawawi, and so on - lots of them] 3) [Valley, Mountains, County, Territory] Based on your seed, it picks one from each column. The 2nd list is large enough that there are millions of possibilities.

I don't think we loot these often enough early game. But we also have a handful of preferred POIs to take over in the early game so most of our building is more of the wood spike variety. If you have a ton of cobblestone rocks and a cobblestone block is your immediate goal, I can see how starting with flagstone makes sense. And with the construction pallets as you say even a hand-built base could be cobblestone pretty easily in the early game. I will reconsider my definition of normalcy.

There are three ways you might encounter zombie dogs: 1) Random biome spawns (see spawning.xml) 2) Certain POIs have sleeper zombie dogs and if you cross the POI boundary they might wake up 3) Wandering hordes at the following gamestages: 4, 12 (wolves, not dogs), 20, 34, 38, 41 (wolves), and any of those gamestages +50, +100, +150, etc. Encountering a dog wandering horde on day 2 is pretty likely since that's probably about the time you hit GS4. If you are on >100% XP then your GS will rise more quickly and you'll hit those wandering hordes more quickly. They don't spawn "more often than wandering ones", they are just one type of wandering horde. See gamestages.xml, search for the following section: <spawner name="WanderingHorde"> <!-- These will wrap around at 50. --> <!-- Will probably have to undo that later. Rev 19924 /19944 --> <gamestage stage="01"><spawn group="wanderingHordeStageGS1" num="05" maxAlive="30" duration="09"/></gamestage> <gamestage stage="02"><spawn group="wanderingHordeStageGS2" num="10" maxAlive="30" duration="09"/></gamestage> <gamestage stage="03"><spawn group="wanderingHordeStageGS5" num="06" maxAlive="30" duration="09"/></gamestage> <gamestage stage="04"><spawn group="ZombieDogGroup" num="04" maxAlive="30" duration="09"/></gamestage> <gamestage stage="05"><spawn group="FwanderingHordeStageGS1" num="09" maxAlive="30" duration="09"/></gamestage> <gamestage stage="06"><spawn group="FwanderingHordeStageGS2" num="07" maxAlive="30" duration="09"/></gamestage> <gamestage stage="07"><spawn group="FwanderingHordeStageGS4" num="08" maxAlive="30" duration="09"/></gamestage> Edit to add: "South Mufiko County" is just a random name given to your seed value. I might enter a completely different seed (and end up with a completely different RWG world of course), but still the game will call it "South Mufiko County". Your dog problems should occur on any map.

So this would be post-generation, using the world editor to put the prefabs where I need them?

I wasn't necessarily suggesting brick as an upgrade step. I meant a player crafting/base building progression step. But currently it has fewer HP than cobblestone so there is no reason to ever craft brick except for aesthetics. Or maybe you really like waiting at the forge? It might be nice if brick had HP between cobble and cement so there could be incentive to cook some up for your outer base wall or whatever, prior to natural game progression allowing you to bulk craft cement. Flagstone is also a rarely-used block for us. If we're going for cobblestone, we're not going to go through flagstone to get there. We'll upgrade wood directly to cobble like normal people.

Yep, I did pretty much what you described and with similar results. I have abandoned the really steep mountain rivers, opting instead for a couple of lakes. But the long river that flows through the valley I have decided to try to chop into 3 chunks and then cut their channels into the heightmap (and adjust the water level accordingly) using local minimum terrain height as a guide. So for example broadly speaking the northeast section of river might have a minimum riverbed height (from the IRL heightmap) of 45. The central section might have a minimum of 38, and the southern section might have a minimum of 30. IRL the river flows smoothly down a gently sloping valley. Due to the crappy 7D2D water engine, though, I can't do "smoothly flowing" down the valley so the portions of the river will be set up like this: River Zone Riverbed (heightmap) Water Level (water map) North 42 44 Central 35 37 South 27 29 What I expect is that each section will have steeper sides where the local heightmap was higher, but at least a 1m high river bank near the minimum original terrain height. At the transitions between the zones, there will be a (likely ugly) waterfall effect, but it ought to not be as bad as the ugliness I had when I tried to do an end-to-end sloping river. This will be more like having three 2000m long flat rivers, joined at ugly but relatively small transition points. Maybe I can get cute with pixel-level heightmap editing and actually make it look like a waterfall. 🙂

Fair enough. It is currently the central premise of the game. I will edit accordingly.

With the caveat that I'm only just getting started trying to model an IRL location, could be completely wrong, and your life may be in danger if you follow anything I say... I don't think the custom water map works quite like that. In my testing (attempting to put water into heightmapped IRL riverbeds and lakebeds, including mountain streams), the custom water map appears to override the global map water level. That is, if you add a custom water map into the mix, the 43 level that you entered is simply ignored. The only places water will show up on your map are places which have non RGB(0,0,0) grey colors. And but so, if you want your riverbeds to be dry, but also to have water elsewhere on the map, you have a couple of options I think (please read the caveat above again, and put on a helmet before proceeding): 1) Make sure your dry riverbeds are higher in elevation than places where you want water, then just use the global water level (43 perhaps) to fill in the lower-lying water areas and the higher-elevation dry beds will remain dry. 2) Create a custom water map which paints out all of the water you want. Every non-dry lake and river must be painted in non-(0,0,0) colors appropriate for the local elevation. For example in my own world I might have a mountain lakebed at elevation 180, and the rim of the lake is elevation 190. If I paint that area (does not need to be precise - just cover the surface area of the lake) with (188,188,188), then water level in that area will be 188, filling the lake to within 2m of the rim. My map has a few large rivers and a couple of lakes. I'm having to hand-paint all of them since they are all at different elevations. Hope that helps. Assuming I'm not 100% wrong! Edit to add: below is my work-in-progress water map (on a white background; the white would not be exported to png). It all looks black here, but actually it is copied out of the original heightmap of the IRL location. If I were to try to use this, the water levels would be precisely at surface-level in the areas shown. The work-in-progress is me "sinking" the heightmap in just these areas by a couple/few meters, then sinking the watermap by 1m to put the water just below the rim of the river/lake. The overall point is that water will only show up in these areas. No matter what I put into the KG global water level. At least that's been my experience in testing so far.

FWIW, I just opened a 19.3 POI editor session and checked this option: Here's what popped into view (this is 'business_burnt_01'): The "Rotate" button does what you'd exoect - the black arrow rotates around the blue cube.

I agree brick could use some balancing. Removing it from the game - replacing it with cobblestone or whathaveyou - would drastically affect the aesthetic. Brick and brick facades are everywhere IRL, especially in older areas of towns. Cobblestone as a building material is almost nonexistent. Facades and some old (or replica) roads only for the most part. But cobble in game has its place as an easy-to-make step on the path to concrete. It'd be nice if brick was a sensible next step. We've never used it in our games. Always go from cobble to cement.

Aside from the good arguments on all sides about how "good" or "bad" it is, IMO calling it a "mechanic" kind of undersells its importance. It is literally the central idea of the game(1). It's right there in the name! If they removed the 7-day (adjustable) horde, they'd really need to call it something else. It'd be like removing goats from Goat Simulator. (1) At least it is now; see replies below for How It Used To Be

We eat any non-recipe food as we forage through POIs. At our current gamestage, though, it's kind of silly because we have like 40 Sham Chowder and another 40 Spaghetti or Chili Dogs or other high-value foods back at base. For just two of us. We could just eat that and still never run out. I always carry 10 Sham Chowder with me, but I'm cracking open Cat Fud cans like caviar. Old habits die hard.