World regeneration relies on new information exported by the world builder when generating a world, a distance field which encodes the distance to the surface of the world before things like trees are inserted.
As processes in the world at runtime cause changes to the world a distance ordered list of deltas is maintained to return the chunk back to its original state.
Chunks with regeneration required are visited stochastically to move the chunk back towards its original state weighted by things like last time the vicinity of the chunk (50m or so) was left vacant, or when the chunk was last modified.
But what would happen if you beaconed an entire mountain sideā¦ and then painstakingly removed EVERY SINGLE BLOCK, removing your beacon afterwards allowing the world regeneration to take over and return the mountainside to its original state?
ā¦
maybe something like this? (initial prototype of world regeneration, parameters not tweaked in any way yet)
Itās purely distance based, so if you imagined a large floating island up in the sky, that island would regenerate from the inside out.
Thereās not much difference then, between a floating island, and a large bulbous mountain that happens to be conected to the ground a little bit at the bottom ;p
It seems that way on the gif - you can see a few trees pop in at the end.
Really liking the look of this as well - obviously that is sped up for āmarketing purposesā ( ), how long do you envisage something that size taking to grow back?
If youād take a single block from a chunk in regular intervals, youād be able to prevent this chunk from regenerating.
So if there was a strategic location for example with dense ressources which already has been mined completely, youād be able to cut out this entire chunk and itās important ressources by doing so. Could be a problem and might fall into balancing.
A group of players will have to be very diligent and active for this to be a problem (in order to revisit every so often to mess with the chunk and to make sure theyāre covering 24 hours) . And at that point theyāre just ruining things for themselves because others can just wander off to a new area.
Thought so as well - but if you have a settlement near this locationā¦Youād be force to abandon it in order to settle somewhere else.
One thing I wonder about is, how water behaves with a regenerating world. I weād ever have water based generators or river based mills or something like this, regenerating world could alter the flow of a river and therefor, there might be no water in a settlement until a world has regenerated. Which would be unconvenient, but definietely interesting for a dynamic and adaptive way of playing the game.
Why? You could just warp/portal to a new area and laugh as whoever thought they were trolling you spends hours of effort messing with a chunk with no resources.
Hmm I wonder where the weaknesses of this concept areā¦
Would it be okay, if a player found some ressource places with rare material which respawns once a week? I think that would make it really worth to āsecureā area for material! Sounds interesting to me
On the other hand, everything you dig and donāt secure will vanish somewhen. Like the walkway to your hidden house inside a mountain that you just digged.
My understanding is that minerals are handled specially - during regeneration they get generated in new locations (re-seeded). So once you mine a vein, that hole might fill in with rock next time (and a vein will spawn or regenerate elsewhere)
