JoeDaFrogman

its possible via image magic. If you check the links I posted above to Dan's github(very long one where I quote Red Eagle and one other person about HOW I generate map seeds BEFORE the one where I posted a large montage), one of the output files he generates in the shell scripts is a contours file that looks like this: I don't know how its done specifically, but the information is in drawContour.sh. From what I can tell, it appears to use imagemagick's convert to extract the data from the dmt.raw to a temp file named dmt.png(done in drawMap.sh) and then drawConrtour.sh converts that the the contour you see below.

TBH, where I think this might be really cool would be to make the tops of some of the mountains snow area if they are high enough to simulate generally how biomes tend to work in real life.

The drone helps you by carrying stuff and HEALING you if you placed in the appropriate healing items in her inventory. There is no "attack" mode, that was an initial concept discussed a year ago but was taken off the table 4+ months ago and discussed in detail by the devs on the dev streams and I assume in the dev diary thread.

I likely will, but probably not for 2-3 weeks at least. I am still looking for that golden forest seed for myself. Keep in mind this is well over 2 weeks worth of runs to get down to the 39 you see here. Granted, 6k runs would take about 1/3rd of the total time(perhaps 1/2) but that's still a while and I won't be starting that for at least a few weeks. So, you can sit around and wait while not playing the game.... or you can play an 8k seed(or pick a seed from someone else that is 6k)

Ok, are you ready for some goodies? I have run somewhere close to 500 randomly generated seed names and have about 40 seeds. These are all fairly high rating using the rating criteria ranging from 15k to 80k. NOTE: while not required, if you use one of these seeds in a YT video, I would appreciate a shoutout. Generation settings: Version: A20 b238 Size: 8192 Towns: Many Wilderness POI: Default Rivers: Default Craters: Default Cracks: Default Lakes: Default Plains: 8 Hills: 3 (EDIT: had this set to TWO by accident, it has always supposed to have been THREE) Mountains: 1 The below link contains the montage of thumbnails as seen the in the bottom image named 8192.png Each map in high resolution(8192x 8192) so you can zoom in quite close and see image previews of each POI in it's position(assuming generation remains constant!) a thumbs folder which contains the same thumbnail used to make the montage image below https://drive.google.com/open?id=13oyZ-MSKVc_GyT5GRp2LMHnx9Kfmfej4&authuser=joe.frazier.jr%40gmail.com&usp=drive_fs EVENTUALLY, perhaps later next week if I get busy, there will be another link with a spreadsheet for each of these seeds showing tons of seed specific details: Seed name Seed World name (ie, West Cojuja County or something like that) Best base location coordinates Counts for each grouping of specials within default range of best base location(1km at this point) POI per biome percentage POI per landmass percentage The below image is broken down into 4 groupings IN ORDER of the column they are in(lower in the image is BETTER for each column): Total of all prefabs on the map. This includes EVERYTHING the fun pimps refers to as a prefab, so that includes various filler pieces such as road intersections, etc # of traders(all 13 except for one seed) UNIQUE prefabs Rate. This number is representative of the number of unique good prefabs near the best base location(within 1km). The higher, the more unique high quality prefabs are near the best base location. And a montage of all thumbnails, including a circled best base location radius. Ok, I have edited the google drive location. There are now 79 images on the montage and all 79 high res images and thumbnails. If you like a forest base with close(ish) access to desert and snow, then AstronomicBoozes is an exceedingly good seed rating-wise.

go check the mod forum in one of the sub forums... someone recently made a video in A20 of how to change the biome AFTER world generation. So some POI's might be in the wrong place, but is that a big deal? Its extremely easy if you can pick the correct color out of 4 options and paint. I am sure there is a way to edit BEFORE world generation, but I have not looked that closely as I don't care that much. Not sure I read you correctly, but the only things affecting the biomes shape/volume/area is the seed name and size. The other things on generation screen with all the sliders an None/Few/Default/Many will affect the placement of the various "tiles"(such as hills, mountains, lakes, etc) as well as cities WITHIN the seed. If want a specific biome distribution, see my comment I JUST made above and go "paint" your own after the fact by checking the mods sub forum.

Ok, then you must not have generated many or are just very unlucky or have some bad settings. As you can easily see in my above montage of seeds there is a pretty darn good mix of seeds with various POI's in various biomes, I don't see that many there there is an overwhelming majority of POI's in the forest biome(and nothing close to 90% as you noted. I ACTUALLY have the exact count of POI's per biome(as well as the exact ratio of POI to map volume) for each of the above montages, but don't yet have my reader to provide the calculations at a glance(working on the code now amount other things) However, if you look at AponeuroticBroadcastings, the majority of the POI's are in the desert, with a decent number in the snow, then forest, finally wasteland and you can EASILY see that to be true. Nm, screw it, im gonna open and look it up: Even looking at the montage above the one I would guess with the most POI's in the forest, AnticipantEditor has just shy of 53%. There. That does not look anywhere NEAR your 90% claim does it? In fact, if you want, give me the generation settings of a few of the seeds you claim have such high percentage of forest POI spawn rations and I will run them and give them the exact numbers because I call BS. In addition, I posted in the A20 dev stream last week about what appeared to be a LACK of many seeds with forest POI counts based on a few hundred runs JUST in case it as a bug introduced as I and another guy running many dozens of seeds are not really seeing a ton of high forest POI counts(for the ones which meet our rating threshold and are "kept" around for further analysis.)

You would need to mod the world gen. I don't know how but check in the mods forum. With taht said, one or two in the posts above have a high ratio of snow+desert+wasteland vs forest. There are more than 1 that have less than 25%(eyeballing it) forest coverage(and I have NEVER seen a single seed out of over 3000 in A19 and about 600 in A20 experimental with within 15% of your 90% ratio.... the highest I have documented proof of is somewhere around 75% forest.) EDIT: that number should be around 37% of the total land mass being forest is the highest I have seen A19. The 75ish % number was for the ratio of POI's within each biome.

Don't forget, taht's JUST within the 1km radius. Eventually, I/we will also add to the report(likely via a third color and a counter/colored counter) how many of those POI's are in the world as well as within the radius. It's jut coming along slow becasue you know playing and stuff

Dan changed the rating system to swap a few "top15" POI's for other POI's so the ratings changed a bit. In this case, the rating went up by about 1.5k The suggested base location is still in the exact same spot though. Note, you don't have to be slavishly devoted to taht specific spot, it's a good guideline for things "near by" for the definition of near by being 1k radius. Dan also made some changes to the formatting but here is what at least I got within the radius: I have some small doubts that if you generate the seed(or I do a second time) that the results above would ALWAYS be 100% the same. I have had 1 time where they differed, but several times where they were exactly the same and I had Dan verify on the same seed as I did last night and we both had the same values so<shrug> In that one instance, the map generated the same biomes, city and block type locations within, but the exact POI differed in a few spots. It WAS between slightly different builds though so perhaps that was it...

Ok, I got rid of ALL of my copies of seeds prior to stable, just in case. Let me make a run and get back to you. Hopefully, it will be exactly the same or closely similar.

@Red Eagle LXIX Ok, steel yourselves, this is going to be a very long reply. The first question you have to ask is "what makes a good seed?" If someone posted 2,3,10 seeds in a single comment how would you "KNOW" objectively which is the best seed and which is the worst? The answer is you just can't unless your answer is "this one looks pretty" and that's ok as every data point is always subjective. My thought process is to remove at least SOME of the subjectivity and inject some objectivity, ie things you can put a concrete measurement to. Lets look at A19 seeds for example to start with. Say I were to somehow(pretend with me here) have the EXACT same image file for the same seed name/size with the same cities in the same locations everything was exactly the same except one difference. Both have largish cites centralized near 0,0 and coincidentally this is roughly near where you chose to put your living base. From the picture you could not tell one from the other. Now if I add in the FACT that for picture 1, 4 of the tier 5's were in one of those two cities(and thus very close by to you) but for the picture 2 NONE of the tier 5's were in those two cities and you had to travel 3.5 k to any of the tier 5's AND those 4 tier 5's were all in opposite corners of the map(and thus in different biomes from each other). So out of those two seeds, which would be preferable? I suspect that for the vast majority of people, unless they REALLY enjoy the exploration element of the game(and there as some who do!), that picture 1 would be the seed the would prefer to have. Now, being that there is always some subjectivity, the goal is to try to reduce that as much as possible(I will admit, this this moves the subjectively back into the hands of the program author!). I am working the @dcsobral, who has written and refined over a few alpha's a set of tools to generate worlds in a mostly automated way. He has evolved this quite a bit until A20. At this point, he has a working rating for each seed based on (and this is a super high level overview as I do not know all of the variables): For a given list of POI's(traders, tier 3, tier 4, tier 5's, etc) locate and rank each POI(currently each POI has the same ranking, possibly changing in a future version!) and find the one spot on the entire map in radius(currently 1km from a central point) with the highest rating of unique POIs with the rating criteria(ie, regular houses with nothing in them count for nothing.) We are currently generating random worlds automatically using this technique and throwing away any that don't meet an arbitrary cut off, while saving the remaining into a zip file of the world plus some extras. We are finding that given a roughly 12-13 hour run of 100 seeds(8k) will produce about 12 or so that are above that cut off. This then gives us something to look over both objectively by reviewing the number(and which ones) of tier 4's or tier 5's, etc are within that 1km from the best base location and then a subjective assessment of "does the map look pretty, where is the best base location, etc". For me, I won't hold out of hand for someone else a best base location in the wasteland, but "I" won't use that seed. How does this all work? It uses the windows subsystem for linux as currently many of the "programs" are shell scripts. Dan(and I to some extend) are working on converting these to use Python with an ultimate goal to possibly make a Python based GUI that can be run from a windows machine. Note that there are some other third party programs required as well AND most importantly, you cant be using that computer while you are running the scripts. In any event, once the scripts are completed the world generation, there are some other scripts that can then help you analyze some of the data that is saved for each world and rank them according to each other. Now, in A19, we did NOT have a rating, but I did Perl script to take all the seeds and analyze and it spit out something like the below. I then simply sorted by the top15 POI's(this is an arbitrary list Dan and a number of others determined were the most desirable POI's) based on unique count. Note that this was the results of somewhere near 3000 seeds generated that took a bit over a month of my computer doing nothing for long stretch's at a time: This program no longer works in A20 due to the file format changes the world gen put into place, so I am taking this opportunity to port the logic to python(which I am learning) as well as to add in the rating and a few other goodies such as the best base location coordinates, etc. My first attempt at this was just the information from column J and to the left and with Dan's help we eventually added the biome percentages since for some people that's important information to know. I am extremely happy that Dan now has the rating system, as again it removes even MORE subjectivity and mainly as that means I don't have to write it (lol). One of the thoughts he had recently was to possibly add a "forest rating" as well as the overall rating, again where the rating is "find the one point with the highest rating within radius of X". If he does add, this would then bring back some subjectively to the system as how would you sort those on a spreadsheet with two data points? Our goal is not to say "here is THE best seed" but to help narrow down to a curated list of some good seeds so someone does have to wade through COMPLETELY subjective "here is a good seed". We both belong to a YTer's community so a big part of our goal is to help support that community with some "good" seeds. For reference, I have a person I play with on occasion and toward the end of A19, she said "we are starting a new world", She told me she got the seed from a video some random person made and when she told me the seed, I looked it up and found it was on I had created! I watched the video and two of the 15 on the list were ones I had created, so I was quite proud/happy/smug(not really sure what I should have felt). If you are VERY technical, especially with some linux knowledge, then his code is located here: https://github.com/dcsobral/seedGen. Ill be honest, set up is a PITA. And the less you know about linux the worse it would be and not advisable to use. the processing tools can create a high res image with the idea base location pin pointed on a copy of the map, as well a thumbnail, and there is even a script to make montages like this one using the low rez thumbnails(though you do have to be a bit careful with TOO many images or the total file size gets too large): I am sure there are plenty of things I missed but if you are interested in more details, PM me (Red, I know you already did, just reply) and I can send you a discord link if you feel up to joining(again it's a YT'ers discord but we do discuss the seeds in there as we create them). I am quite keen to take that very top seed name and see just how good it is via Dan's rating system. I don't have any hard numbers for 6k seeds, so am not sure bad or well it would compare, but the image grouping of cities in the top right quadrant is particularly promising.

That's not really going to help immensely. Making all plains does not create super cities, though semi rarely you will have two that will "merge" (ie, two traders within one mega city). Your best option though is to turn down the mountains and hills somewhat as they are placed first and from my experiments only a small portion of hills/mountains will be excised (ie, cut out) to make room for city tiles, so once it goes past that you end up getting less city. If you want to see the settings I have used on 600+ seeds so far, look back at my previous posts in this thread(only the mort recent one is still a valid seed)

I have generated well over 600+ worlds in the past 2 weeks. You are doing something wrong. Open a dedicated thread with you exact steps(leave nothing out) and we can get you sorted.

Cant as on mobile, but if you look at my post above this world was made with the same settings as that one was

I know random world gen is and should be random, however since b231/b233 came out I have generated a high number of worlds and it "FEELS" like a change has been made to the forest city spawning in what I would consider a negative way. I am using non default settings in an attempt to get larger/more cities using the logic that mountains and hills will interrupt to spread cities out. To limit my expectations, I know that there can't be a "whole map city", that is NOT what I am expecting, hoping, or looking for. Base on my results, 13 is the most cities that can be generated on a single map and those by necessity must be spread out somewhat. Settings for all maps: Size: 8192Towns: ManyWilderness POI: DefaultRivers: DefaultCraters: DefaultCracks: DefaultLakes: DefaultPlains: 8Hills: 2Mountains: 1Random: 0 These are some of the most egregious examples. I have found a very small proportion of forest biome with decent city size/groupings, but they are few and far between, especially compared to b213. It almost seems like the latest update moved the city grouping biome preference away from the forests. My concern is what appears to be a much smaller number of forest biome city groupings in the latest update. If nothing changed that would make this be the case, then I will just keep generating more maps. Sample size is roughly 200+ worlds in both b213 as well as b231/b233. SavoyardDrumfishes TamedAgglutinogen AmusiveAir

That's the best you're likely to get without going and learning how to mod the world generator yourself. Same generation settings as my above posts. SavoyardDrumfishes

What was the seed you used and what were each setting(size, towns, plains, etc)

Seed: SnowiestDrowners Version: A20 b233 Name: East Vexuu Valley Size: 8192 Towns: Many Wilderness POI: Default Rivers: Default Craters: Default Cracks: Default Lakes: Default Plains: 8 Hills: 2 Mountains: 1 Random: 0 Rating: 22034 Best Base Location: 2227, 1312 Within 1km radius of best base location(details in the black screenshot from a terminal): Red = missing Green = at least 1(possibly more) Pros: Almost every single Downtown location(within radius) high ratio of stores(within radius) high ratio of top15(within radius) over half of tier5's(within radius) decent ratio of tier3s.(within radius) Large wasteland city a little over 1.2 km from best base location. Cons: lots of Industrials missing.(within radius) moderate amount of tier4s.(within radius) A fairly high number of spawn points far and VERY far from best base location Fairly large distance to other Cities Large Distance to Desert https://imgur.com/a/Z1s7uHB See below.. I am probably going to hit that world up

I don't, I deleted them all. TBH, I am not 100% sure the worlds I created in b231 are the same as b233. I am just guessing that that new patch was to fix some performance issues since they came shortly apart. Now, if you don't mind a Desert, Snow, or Wasteland base, I have few seeds with high ratings I could post, but was hoping to get some more decent forest city groupings before I posted any as even these are about half of the best rating I got in b213

No, NONE of the seeds created prior to this weeks release of b231 would be the same. The mixer changed. Someone mentioned a way you can download a previous experimental version if you so dare download a program from unknown sources, and if so you can do that and use the b213 version to generate the above seed using the settings I listed. TBH, I have been quite underwhelmed with the latest version of the RWG's results. I have a few over 150 runs (compared to about 250 under b213), and so far I am finding a significant drop in multi large city groupings in the forest biome(as this one was). Now, I admit, the entire point is "random" but it seems to me like the rivers have drastically reduced the number of available city location "spawns" and forced them to be quite a bit more spread out. With that said, there are a few high value POI city groupings per radius in either Wasteland, Snow, or Desert biomes in my results, but still seems quite a bit less populated overall in terms of groupings of cities in the forest.

So, what's the difference between these two red blocks? Both are made of steel. If you compare the amount of materials comprising each of the two, I can guarantee that the bars will contain less volume, but have 4x the HP. You can shoot through both. The one on the left I can hit the zombies with a melee weapon and their gadget arms can hit me if I stay to close, but the one on the right I neither I nor zombie can hit each other. So again, what is the point of this change. I can pretty much ensure in the real world the bars would be easer to destroy vs the solid block. For that matter, I could still effectively poke a spear or a knife/machete out between the bars, but can't do so in the game.

They seem to be all small snakes. I suspect you won't get anything more than that, and if somehow you do, it will likely drastically cut down on your city sizes

Generate the file on the CLIENT using the settings specified, and then upload from your host computer to the server. Also note that EVERY seed created prior to 2 days ago were on an old version and are no longer the same "seed"(meaning they will be completely different than posted.

So, I think I answered this question in a different post by accident. Bottom line, your assessment of what constitutes a good seed in this post seems to be entirely subject Ely instead of objective in an entirely valid complaint. I and another guy are using a series of programs to generate seeds and rate them according to a specific criteria that: Finds high value POI's with X radius of traders by unique count(1 km) . Said High Value pois that add to the rating will be in screen shot below. Red = missing, Green = at least one(possibly more than one, but currently that's not part of the rating criteria. The Rating system is being tweaked and won't be final until A20 is fully out and no new changes to the Mixer is expected. Bottom line, you are going to be waiting a VERY, long time with that strict a criteria(possibly forever). If you want something that specific, you either need to make it yourself or have someone build a world for you. For reference, I have used scripts to generate around 3k worlds since A19 started and your ask is like asking to be hit by lightning. Of that 3k+ seeds of the same size(8k) I had found exactly thirteen with SIX tier 5 POI's somewhere on the world... Now you ask for not only them to be in the world but close AND in snow or wasteland biome and the significantly reduces your odds a great deal. I will repeat, if you want a world with specific characteristics, you will need to try KingGen and hope or more likely build it yourself. Granted, it's too early to tell about how A20 will shack out but things look much better, but not THAT good. However, if you can bend, then you get much more flexibility. Here is one option: Seed: SolomonicColorimeters Version: A20 b231 Towns: Many Wilderness POIs: Default Rivers: Default Craters: Default Cracks: Default Lakes: Default Plains: 8 Hills: 3 Mountains: 1 Random: 0 Of the tier 5's apartment_brick_6_flr, factory_lg_01, and hospital_01 are missing, while Dishong Tower is outside the base radius but somewhere on the map(2 IIRC) Best Base location: Snow biome as marked(green circle inside radius https://imgur.com/a/s7xJI9h The white line at hte very bottom is the overall rating followed by the best base location x/y and finally the radius of the base rating criteria (1000 meters)