Weekly Dev Update: 2016 May 13th - World Regeneration, Emotes, Extra GUI and more

There is only base regeneration and resource regeneration (ores/gems/other things embedded in rocks), different ‘types’ of blocks that are in the base regeneration cannot be split apart, so the base natural resources of the world will always remain the same.

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By default - I would expect this to be a natural experience. More remote areas will simply seem to be more bountiful, and heavily mined areas will seem to be more barren.

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That said - given that the server does know how it’s regenerate resources we could consider including a feature (craftable item or ability) that would allow players to see some of this information. Something to think about in the future. Maybe it’s a skill for a Master Miner?

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Depends on the system used. I am going to assume that you guys will respawn materials in “clusters” of varying sizes. There are two ways i have seen the system be lorefriend and intuitive and then one system which would work would would be quite frustrating

The two systems which works well makes them either Findable or Trackable

Findable is what trove and portal knight uses. Quite simply it means that with the clusters there is always atleast one side which faces into free air. The rest of the cluster might be hidden but when people see that one item they know there are more and they know where to dig. This would mean when people walk through caves and there are no gems peaking out it would be obvious that the place was empty and if it was everywhere that it was bountiful

The second system is trackable which uses a device or gadget. I saw this is landmark where the materials were hidden deeper into the air and not always had one peaking out. The device would beep at different speeds varying on how close you were to a gem or metal source, when it was beeping rapidly you knew there was something in the area and you could dig for it. This would mean that if they go through a cave and it never beeps its empty and if it always beeps its bountiful

The last system is a lot more problematic in my eyes. that would be no gadget and no system that forces atleast one to face the air. this would be PURE randomly placed gems, which would also mean underground. if that was the case then a cave that is bountiful could appear empty because all of the gems are under the surface and it would cause a great deal of confusion and annoyance since it basically says “dig anywhere and hope you are lucky”

So as long as you include one of the two first systems you wouldnt need a ui warning but if you use the third there would need to be some sort of UI warning.

I like the third system. Where things are findable both facing air and surrounded by rock. Like minecraft and I think like how the current system kinda is.

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If we look at an entire mountain range with a cave system and say that the regeneration is purely random. We assume that roughly 20% of the entire thing is facing into the air. That would mean that the majority of materials would be UNFINDABLE other than pure guessing and luck. and that the small minority which IS facing the air would have high chance of respawning within the mountain outside of sight. Meaning you will reach points where no materials are in plain sight anymore and you would have to “hope” to find something by digging. It is a potential system but it would mean that people would have to go around and digging everything up like madmen. Would you like to spend 2 hours digging a mountain without finding any useable materials? Some people would. Personally i find it to be the less attractive system by far.

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This kind gives the answer I was after, so I take it that the rate at which resources respawn can increase or decrease, but not to stop, just slow down to very slow respawn rate, when there is overflow of certain resource.

Now this rises my interest when you say this, am I wrong to assume global means the resource pool of all the worlds combined or just single worlds pool of resources in general?

Perhaps there could be some sort of interface that could tell if the worlds’ resources are plentiful or scarce, perhaps even separately for each resource type.(could be a skill for miner?)

This could make the 3. option more viable while make the resource hunt a bit more challenging than the options 1 and 2 would make it.

Option two is literally what you just suggested. some sort of tool or way to tell if there are materials nearby.

Personally i quite enjoyed ESO in that aspect. every collectable profession thing was always in the open. but they were very small and very easy to miss unless you were looking closely for them. but you could get a skill which would highlight them with a bright border making it alot easier to find. would indeed be cool to have something like it in B<

I meant it like you’d only get an idea if there is or isn’t materials in the world not a tool that would tell when your close to a material vien.
You’d still have to go out there and find then by digging around, so it would give you an idea if you even want to bother to go look for the resources or not.

Hope this clears my idea a bit.

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From what I think I’ve understood from James’ posts, resource regen is smart enough to prefer loading in minerals in a certain way. You should do like 80% respawn with air, 20% not. Or whatever.

Also, digging through base material will hopefully be offset by the miner specialization, so it’s not nearly as cumbersome…

Regen runs per world (and is configurable per world) but I imagine we’d do economy balancing at a global level.

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So while world regeneration handles resource distribution automatically per world, you can manually adjust resource distribution on global level to balance it out across the board.

Though people are probably more concerned about overflow of rare resources, do you think you are going to do more balancing on the common materials, as in decreasing their spawn rate because people are going for the more rarer resources and that would increase the common material spawn rate on regeneration(if I’ve understood right how the system works)? Or is your crafting system going to utilize the most common resources on top tier too, to balance out this kind of influx?

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The crafting system is designed to make everything be valuable. Clearly something are more common than others. But nothing will be useless. We’ll hopefully learn a lot about how the resources scale and get used when we release the next big crafting update.

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I recommended that topic for your survey - if you aim for more ideas or have some questions answered, would be a good option. Community is maybe not investing that much time in ideas as you, but at least you get in some diverse thoughts.

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