@James, @Steggs101, or @lucadeltodecso - There has obviously been a lot of discussion around regeneration concerns in the forum lately. People are throwing around requests and really having some challenges. Unfortunately there isn’t enough understanding on how the actual dynamics work inside the game.
Maybe you all could help a bit and provide some transparency on the exact rules (or what you want to share) around regeneration so everyone is up to speed with how the current game works versus older versions. Maybe a simple Q/A to speed up your response?
Regen happens about everyone 8-13 hours (not sure if ever confirmed) if no one was within 8 plots? If so can we cut down the 8 plots to maybe 4 or so? Does it need to even be a farther number? Can it just be a plot must be touched or will that cause too much server load?
Regen happens through portals if someone looks through it? If so, can we just turn that off. That would help a lot in regen issues. I know you load the other planet and create a server connection so does that mess up the ability to remove regen due to the load?
Regen happens in two ways - land versus resources? I know for gems (ores too?) that if too many people are getting them then gems will auto regen no matter what outside of the regen timer. Can we confirm that?
– If point 3 is true, is there any way to make the rest of the resources sitting on land auto regen outside of the timer or does that already happen based on demand?
–If for point 3 land and certain resources are linked together, can we delink that and make it more like gems? (assuming I had the correct info on that).
I think this wipe has brought up a variety of issues around regeneration that do need to at least be considered. We are definitely in a higher demand and exploration cycle than was is expected to be normal game play. But, I think a bit more details from your side will help us curtail and clarify our side on what seems like just being a bad situation. The game might have a design in place that really will minimize the issues we currently see over time or maybe there are a few tweaks we can do to help.
There are issues with the system and the balance of regeneration, and we’ve been trying to come up with a solution for a while. I believe Luca and I have come up with a plan to adjust the system to work better, and I am currently playing with the values to try to check that this new approach would work. Once I’ve convinced myself, I will outline it here and see what you think.
We’ve been looking at the world regeneration system and balance. The headline is that we’re looking to have regeneration start quicker and more consistently, but then take longer to happen overall.
Some details:
We’ll reduce the distance at which a chunk is considered “visited” to much smaller, and reduce the time to a matter of seconds. This means that whilst regeneration won’t happen very near to a player it will happen a short distance away and pretty quickly after they have left an area. This will help ensure areas around towns are regenerated.
We’ll reduce the time after an edit that regeneration will start to a flat four hours, this is hopefully quick enough to ensure that regeneration gets going promptly, but won’t see someone blocked by having their mineshaft regenerate while they’re underground.
We’ll make regeneration happen more steadily over a longer period of time, so that over minutes and hours small numbers of blocks at a time will be regenerated, and large changes will steadily return to the start state over many days.
Seems like a good compromise. Ensures single block changes like resources come back quickly to ensure that they can be harvested by new players and doesn’t undo massive changes too quickly so players still impact the world temporarily.
Inadvertantly this will also help drastically with the single holes going down to slate issues since one of those blocks will likely Regen quickly preventing most deadly falls.
Item 1 - This sounds good to me. . should help except for the most visited areas and I am not sure there is not much that can be done about that.
Item 2 - I like the reduction in time. Even if someone is caught in a mineshaft due to the area being sealed behind them, they can use Sanctum to be able to get out, so they are not trapped even if they have used all their tools.
Item 3 - It will be interesting to see this. Here is what I interpret what you said. I modify 10 blocks in a chunk. When they regen, they do so at a rate per block so (making up time per block to be 2 seconds) they take 20 seconds to regenerate. If I modify 2000 blocks (in a single chunk) they take (again making up the time per block) it will take 4000 seconds or 1.1 hours to regen. My question is, does the regen stop if in the middle someone visits and it resets the timer?
I guess I’m still not clear on how regeneration Happens, and how distinct it is for different object types.
Are blocks, recourses within blocks, and resource objects (e.g. plants and stalagmites) all regenerated the same way?
I know blocks are of a fixed type, but may or may not host a resource (e.g. iron). The resource objects seem to be random, but spawn within certain areas with variable frequency.
Would a large mine shaft allow blocks to regenerate behind it? Would the regenerated blocks have new resources? Would a cave that the shaft attached to regenerate stalagmites?
When you say longer can you give us an idea of how long it would theoretical take. I want to monitor an area that was badly damaged. Need some idea of how long it should take to see if the rebalance was effective.
Thank you for the details @olliepurkiss and making changes to the regen process. I’m happy to see you all jumped on this as fast as possible. I think it will help a lot. I’m sure people will test some things and give feedback.
As others have mentioned I think it would help the community as a whole if we understood how this change is related to resource regeneration. There seems to be a pretty grey area in understanding terrain regen versus resource regen. If people would know at what levels they are linked or not linked it would help a lot in cutting down the noise on resource regen forum threads.
Also, I would wonder if you all turned off the linking of that timer for regen through portals or not. I think it is important that we cut that link since it really can affect many areas especially around hubs or multiple portal locations.
As it stands, resources can only be inserted once s chunk is fully regenerated (and happens as soon as that is the case) [as usual, ignoring any plotted areas, those dont need to regenerate]
To reiterate what Luca and James said – regeneration is based on a chunk, which is a column of 16 blocks by 16 blocks and the full height of the world. The regeneration described is for the standard blocks, but not “resources”, which are all the seams, the boulders, the fungi and the plants. The “resources” all regenerate (in one go currently) as soon as a chunk has regenerated all the standard blocks. The types and positions of resources in the chunk are randomised based on how many of a given resource there are in the world and various other conditions (altitude, block types etc.).
So the resource regeneration is a separate process to the base regeneration, but is completely dependent on it. So when there are areas with no resources it is normally because of the base regeneration not finishing. So these changes will hopefully make the regeneration of the world feel and look better, so if a huge castle gets unbeaconed it will decay over many days in a satisfying way, as well keep resources stocked because chunks aren’t blocked from being regenerated by players moving near to them each day.
In terms of time taken to decay, this is the proposed balance:
10 block changes will take 2.5 hours.
100 block changes will take 24 hours.
1,000 block changes will take 114 hours.
10,000 block changes will take 131 hours.
20,000 block changes will take 138 hours.
30,000 block changes will take 145 hours.
50,000 block changes will take 158 hours.
Bear in mind that is per a chunk, which has 65,536 blocks in it, so the chances of getting to the higher numbers is very low. When I looked at existing builds the highest number of block changes I saw was 1,500 per chunk and for most builds it was much lower than that.
I am feeling confused and want to make sure I understand:
If I go to a chunk and remove 100 gleam. After 4 hours (the new time) with no one entering the chunk the gleam will regenerate over a period of 24 hours.
If I go to a chunk and chisel the rocks 3 deep over a 10 x 10 area, I will have affected 300 blocks. So after 4 hours of no one crossing the chunk, the regen will take between 24 and 114 hours. And if anyone crosses the chunk then it will restart the 4 hour clock and then start the regen.
If I go to a chunk and remove all the desert sword. After 4 hours if no other blocks were removed, the desert sword is regenerated based on the amount across the planet but immediately.
If I build with 500 blocks on a chunk and allow my beacon to expire. After 4 hours, the regenerations starts and will take between 24 and 114 hours. If someone enters the chunk, it will stop regenerating, wait 4 hours and start again.
Assuming I made the correct interpretation, I am not sure this really addresses some of the issues in particular with chiseling and other gathering activities that are close to an active build. If they are not now regenerating due to the 13 hours of activity are they really going to be clear for the proposed over 24 hours it will take now (4 hours plus the time for the blocks)?
I do see where the slow regeneration of a build could be interesting. But is that worth the other issues people seem to be having not being addressed? Currently If I find a remote spot to gather gleam, clay, or another block, I can return the next day and expect it to have regened. Based on the proposal, it is likely that it will take 28 hours (4 + 24) or more to regenerate. When I find a good spot for clay (to make brick), I normally pull a few thousand blocks of dirt out. It takes a lot of clay to make compact clay to make brick. In the old universe I cleared an area of about 8 plots down 4-5 blocks. Assuming only half of my digging was on one chunk, I removed (16x8x4) 512 blocks. So this will take maybe 48 hours now to regenerate. I was probably better off under the old regeneration time.
I use compacted soil for fuel.
I mine at least 3000 per run.
Last week i made one run every 2 days.
With this change I would be literally mining out entire middle sized islands.
Generally every resource run for blocks is at least this or more blocks. Trees, rock… You name it.
Strip mining diamonds would be even harder, cause this is destroying thousands of blocks…
Oh wow no wonder resources are so hard to find, its the last thing to regenerate!
I understand why it needs to be the last thing, but the problem still persists if someone walking by resets the regen.
I think it should only pause the regen.
Not sure if i just dont understand the changes, but it sounds like regen is just getting extended
since one of those blocks will likely Regen quickly preventing most deadly falls.