Spawn Rates and Composition

General
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I’m going to try and rescue a side conversation that was off topic in a now-missing thread. I’m stating that because I’m about to quote some stuff without actual forum “quotes”.

I was always curious. Do planets get…worse over time. … But, do hot spots move, do they thin out? Get replaced with other things? I always wondered if if fresh planets were best.

So, we actually have some dev info on this.

So far as I can tell, the nodes do not move, but they do start regenning slower and slower the more you mine them.

The nodes actually do not move. The “per chunk” resource composition is set at the time of planet generation, and does not change. Before this was explained I did several experiments trying to re-create the spawn conditions for certain materials. This explanation saved me a ton of time :rofl:

The next bit led to some more experiments, which honestly I never pushed to any conclusion. But here it is:

When you harvest a resource, clearly, it’s going to trigger regen. Apparently, regeneration is done according to the chunk’s resource composition, and this leads to “thinning spawns”. I’ll do some searching in a minute because I don’t want to re-create a ton of text here.

In short, if you harvest a diamond, a flower may re-spawn in it’s place. Or some coal. By the same token if someone cleans up the ground cover - minerals can spawn back.

If you stop mining them for a while, they will fully regen over a couple of weeks back to the point they were at when they were fresh.

I’m not sure what does this, as I share this impression but it’s not something that I remember any reveal of. But it seems like if an area is left alone long enough, it sort of adjusts back to it’s original balance.

In any case, there’s nothing like “that new planet feeling” for sure :star_struck:

Have tested planet resource respawns thoroughly but that conversation would derail this thread even more.

Brother, this thread is for you… Please feel free.

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I can’t speak totally to all of this other than experience with my sovereigns and a few others I frequent.

I rotate mining on my sovereigns as I have 4-5 really awesome hot spots. I will mine one for everything I intend to use or sell… which is usually ores and gems, but the hoarder in me gives in usually and I include, tech parts, fossils, etc.

Between the hot spots if I rotate them properly and farm all 5 spots every week by the the time I roll back to the original starting hotspot everything has regenned to a point where I feel it is pretty much as the original. I can test this again, but it felt pretty close.

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Yes I think 4 days is generally enough.

I’m busy at home right now so not doing research but I’ll be back to that this evening.

EDIT:

If you want the area to return to something like it’s original composition, it’s best to take everything. Cherry-picking an area will actively result in less of your desired resource, over time.

I’m not sure how far that can go though. For instance, I’m not sure you could ever drive all of the diamonds out of a hotspot this way. There appear to be thresholds.

Also one time they had to re-build all the planets, and it was A-MAZE-INNNNNGGGGG :rofl:

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OK so here’s some stuff.

I want to clarify, since you used the word “node” earlier and I glossed over it with a comment about spawning locations and chunks. So technically, my earlier comment is incorrect. I’ll clarify.

If you use the term “node” to refer to a single resource (mineral/plant/boulder/etc…) associated with a given block, then yes, individual nodes will move over time.

The node will be replaced with a new node, in the same chunk. However it may be a different type of resource. So they move, but not “around the planet” or anything. It’s a very localized (2 plot X 2 plot) area.

I’m struggling to find a link to the dev explanation of this next part. I’ll keep digging but for to move the thread along, here’s a write-up I did on this a few months ago:

@Redlotus :

96 Hours should be plenty - they were doing 85 hours on Serp, and it was the only diamond planet at the time. Super busy and super mined out.

Still kicking around - I’d like to find the actual dev explanation for that spawning system.

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Sorry in advance for the length.

I won’t say that planets get “worse” but I will say that the resources drift and if not managed they drift badly more quickly. As far as if a fresh planet is best, I will say if you had a way to make an exact duplicate planet then yes, a fresh one would be best, but with the RNG involved if you have a currently great planet for what you want, then rolling a new one may not be better in the end.

Resource drift appears happen within the two groups, Embedded resources (ores, gems, fossils, etc) and Surface resources (plants and boulders, etc). From my experience and testing they do not seem to cross over but I may be wrong.

As mentioned above, if you cherry pick a certain resource over time, it will slowly go away or reduce in numbers as other things respawn from the same pool.

This is very evident from things like stardrops on glacier areas. If you just harvest the stardrops you will slowly get more and more weeping waxcaps / boulder chips on the surface. Additionally there will be some respawns of boulders inside caves depending on how deep.

Another area that this will be clear is on T1 mud flats for rosetta nox. A new planet will have a large amount of them on the mud flats, but after time clearing them repeatedly you will notice less reappear, especially around the edges (other things will have taken their place just off the mud flat, like rice or mushrooms, etc). You will also notice some “bald spots” in the middle of the mud flats, and from my testing if you dig down at those spots you will find a cave with a higher than usual number of boulders inside.

I have numbers around somewhere from my tests, will try to find them.

If you have access to a private sov that noone else messes with you can also test this by taking note of the amount of any particular resource (really easy with things like rosetta nox) and the other resources in that group then go clear just that one resource and wait for a full respawn. You will see that other resources have moved up in count while the one that you targeted will go down.

I know I have more to add, but thats it for now as this post is long enough =)

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Interesting tidbit. I’ve never tried to track this so thanks for pointing it out. The original explanation was, of course, a bit vague on some details.

If I ever get back to messing with this, I’ll keep it in mind. My last experiment in controlling spawn density was to plot out half a mountain, and clear everything from 0-8, and everything from 33 - 256.

In theory this would leave strictly the diamond alt to respawn eligible nodes for a farm/mine. I do know for sure that changing the layout with plots doesn’t affect the spawning criteria (per-chunk density specifically) for materials, which had their check at world generation.

I wasn’t really logging yet, changes “felt” negligible, and then I got to thinking about how plotting a resource removes it from the regen system. I had plotted the mountain and started excavating. Since harvesting a plotted resource isn’t going to trigger any regen anyways, I realized I was doing it wrong.

So, I unplotted everything. Waited a week. Started over.

This time I would clear the plots (thus harvesting a “wild” resource and hopefully triggering regen) and then plot them empty. Ideally this would lead to the spawn of a new resource, meeting valid criteria, in the unplotted portions of the chunk. I abandoned this after only getting a few chunks cleared, for some other issues. With no logging - I had no useful result or conclusion from it.

Based on what you’re saying though, I could have probably left the top of the mountain on - and mining for ores would likely not have caused it to turn into a field of flowers with a surface resource on every block - over time :clown_face:

IDK if I’ll ever get back to that, honestly. SO MUCH work, for a very minor point.

It would have been awesome though to create a diamond mine with the resource density of 0 - 256 packed into 9 - 32 altitude.

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As one comparison, since it was mentioned in the previous thread, here is the resource info from Hyrule from just after it spawned, and as of right now.

As of 12 Nov 2020

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image374×672 62.6 KB

Just now

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image390×681 27 KB

And just because nixbot can do it, here is the resource “change” for hyrule from birth compared to now

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You can quickly see that there are currently less diamond seams (-38,391) but more Iron, Titanium, and Medium Coal… which would indicate selective mining where the diamonds have slowly shifted to other embedded seams from people cherry picking mainly just the diamonds.

And looking at the surface resources… look at those extra basic boulders =)

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Loosely translated as “shooting themselves in the foot”.

This also for the folks that want to save a couple coin (dura) by not breaking the other seams they don’t have a use for. I mean if you actually dug to find the gems, why would you not spread that cost across multiple types of loot, and recover some directly in coin by selling the stuff you don’t want.

Hard to explain I guess, to someone that won’t harvest a 45c fossil because they “only want” 35 - 50c gems :rofl:

Also I didn’t know nixbot could do historical stuff, nice.

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Intersting. I already suspected this with mining for soft coal in the mountain near to me. First finding quite a lot but now finding fewer and fewer and having to go farther and deeper each time…

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Clear every type of seam and it will stay more consistent.

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I always suspected it to work like this but to me, the fastest way to find any gem is to mine everything around anyway… and much faster exp!

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Some people might like this, or want to see something similar for a particular sov, I think. The historical comparison.

I have no idea how much nixbot can currently do. Sadly I’m missing from discord for a while. But for those who might be interested, it lives in the TNT discord.

I’ve never honestly understood why someone with a 3x3 single hitting hammer would avoid loot.

In the beginning it was a little rougher. If you’re trying to mine up some basics with a single shot hammer I could see. How many of us chisel mined :crazy_face:

I’ve also known this (basically) for a pretty long time, though. I enjoy the more technical discussions and I know a lot of people sort of skim over them. And when I said basically, @Soju-VB whom I totally trust has cleared up something for me here.

I’m pretty sure this distinction wasn’t made in the earlier explanations I read, that explicitly the two types of resources are separate for purposes of chunk density. I spent some time trying to set up a test but as mentioned above, never really got anywhere.

Good Stuff.

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This has been my observation as well. You can mess up plant spawns by only cherry picking certain plants to harvest. The boulders can also be affected by this eventually if the planet has a large number of them. I’ve seen mud flats with enormous quantities of bean stalk boulders because people only harvest the plants on the public farms.

You can make a mine full of coal or ore if you only farm the gems, or vice versa.

I have not noticed that the mineable stuff and the harvestable stuff seem to overlap though.

The more mineable/harvestable the planet is, the easier it is to mess up the hotspots. I actually prefer that my sovereigns only have 1 or 2 major hotspots for harvesting/mining, because the resources don’t drift so much. It is really easy to shove all the oortion staffs into an undesirable spot on a planet that is almost entirely desert by only harvesting the areas that are easy to harvest on. Planets with only one or 2 major desert spots, though, tend not to drift as much. There seems to be lower limits on how much drift can occur. Same goes for gems/ores. If there is one major diamond or sapphire spot, and you only harvest that one spot, it will deplete it a bit, but nearly as much as if half the planet was capable of spawning diamonds or sapphires and everything migrated to those other spots. If stuff has no where to move to, it doesn’t deplete as much.

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In what range, I mean if I"m on the surface and boulders are spawning in a cave under the surface, how far down should I drill?

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Pretty sure it’s a “chunk” size for regen spawns but have not tested it fully

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Almost definitely per chunk. I’m not aware of any altitude checks, either.