[1.0] Rainbeau's Mods (Backstories, Fishing, Romance, Terraforming, and More!)

[dburgdorf]

Last update: 12/05/2018

Have you ever noticed that RimWorld's planets all seem sort of the same? Or maybe you think they have too much land and not enough ocean? Or perhaps you've been bothered by the odd placement of certain biomes?

Well, your worries are over!

"Realistic Planets" allows you to create a wider variety of planets, and also "cleans up" the game's biome placement so that the planets you play on look more... realistic.

- Rainbeau Flambe (dburgdorf)

Steam Workshop Link

Dropbox Link

What It Does:

(1) Planet Creation.

The "Create World" page has been altered.

First, you can now select "coverage" anywhere from 5% to 100%, in 5% increments, instead of having to choose between just 30%, 50% and 100%.

Second, there's a new "sea level" slider, which determines the amount of ocean coverage your world will have. You can create anything from watery worlds with only a few small continents to barren rocks with no surface water at all.

The "rainfall" slider is now a relative rather than an absolute setting, as a planet's overall rainfall is influenced by its sea level. A "high" rainfall level on an arid planet, after all, will for obvious reasons be rather less than even a "low" rainfall level on a planet with extensive oceans.

Additionally, the "temperature" settings have been "stretched," so that cold planets are colder than in vanilla, and hot planets are hotter, by up to about 15 degrees C at the ends of the scale.

There's also now an "axial tilt" setting. Planets with higher axial tilts will have more extreme seasonal temperature shifts.  (However, at least for now, changes to axial tilt do not alter the game's base day/night cycle.)

The mod also adds a set of "world type" options from which you can select. These are simply shortcuts to sets of slider settings intended to allow you to quickly and easily create planets predominantly characterized by particular biomes.

Finally, the "reset" button at the bottom of the screen has been replaced with a "random planet" button, which will immediately generate a world with randomly-selected sea level, rainfall and temperature settings. (It will not, however, alter your selected coverage setting, as that can impact game performance.)

(2) Biomes.

"Realistic Planets" fixes a few oddities in biome placement, mostly involving arid shrublands and deserts. Arid shrublands are described as semi-arid regions that surround deserts, yet in vanilla, they're placed in areas that are warm enough, but not rainy enough, to be rainforests. And deserts... well, in the vanilla game, any tile that's not rainy enough to be forest and not cold enough to be tundra, becomes desert.

The mod limits deserts to areas where the combination of temperature and rainfall makes deserts likely to actually exist, and moves arid shrublands to regions of the globe surrounding those newly-limited deserts.

To fill in the gaps created by those changes, as well as to add a bit more variety, "Realistic Planets" adds several new biomes:

- Grasslands, as the name suggests, are areas where the vegetation is dominated by grasses and shrubs. The soil is fertile, but there is little protection from the elements.

- Steppes are high-altitude grassland regions. A steppe may be semi-desert or covered with grass or shrubs or both, depending on the season and latitude.

- Savannas are mixed woodland/grassland ecosystems typically found between rainforests and deserts. Though savannas are more forested than grasslands, their trees are still spaced widely enough that sufficient light reaches the ground to support an unbroken layer of grasses. Despite the abundance of plants, the soil is mostly dry, and a wide variety of animals roam the area searching for food and water.

- Temperate deserts are cooler but often even drier than subtropical deserts. Vegetation is sparse, and the ground is typically more rocky than sandy.

- Oases are vibrant, isolated bits of life and color. In even the harshest of deserts, after all, groundwater occasionally manages to make it to the surface, and where it does, life blooms. Plants grow around small ponds, and animals gather in search of water and shade.

- Permafrost exists on the border between tundra and ice sheets. The ground is permanently frozen, and much of it is covered in ice, but the ice is at most a few meters, rather than kilometers, thick. There is little vegetation beyond scrub brush, and few animals. (Yes, this is the same as the biome from my "Permafrost" mod. "Realistic Planets" doesn't include that mod's water freezing mechanic, but the mods can be used together, if you want your lakes and rivers to freeze in cold weather.)

If you're interested in the nitpicky details of how biomes are placed, the "Biome Grids" files in the mod's "About" folder provide graphs showing biome placement by overall temperature and rainfall for both the vanilla game and the modded game.

(3) Faction Settlements.

The mod also allows you to have the placement of faction settlements take racial temperature preferences into consideration and/or to have each faction's settlements "grouped" to simulate actual nations. (These options will be automatically disabled if you're also using "Faction Control," in order to avoid conflicts.)

Compatibility:

"Realistic Planets" can safely be added to a game in progress, but trying to remove it from a game will likely make the game unplayable. (Adding the mod to a game in progress will not, of course, alter any existing planet maps.)

I've tried to make sure that this mod works with other mods that also alter planet generation. I have specifically confirmed that "Realistic Planets" is compatible with "More Random Seeds," "My Little Planet" and "Prepare Landing," though you'll want to turn off the latter's "precise world generation percentage" option to avoid meaningless but annoying error messages.

"Realistic Planets" should also be compatible with other mods that add new biomes. If you happen to notice that a biome added by another mod seems a bit "out of place" as a side effect of the changes this mod makes to vanilla biome placements, let me know, and I'll be happy to see about adding a patch to deal with the problem. On a related note, if you're using "Terra Core" or "Advanced Biomes," both of which add a savanna biome, or "Nature's Pretty Sweet," which adds both a grassland and a savanna biome, you'll find that the biomes from those mods replace the similar ones from this mod. This is deliberate, as those mods' versions of the biomes add features that this mod doesn't make available.

Finally, plants and animals added by other mods will have a chance to show up in this mod's new biomes. However, since all I've done is specify that if modded animals or plants are defined to show up in vanilla biome "X," they should also have a chance to show up in new biome "Y," there may be oddities. So again, if you notice things that seem a bit out of place -- specific modded animals or plants showing up in biomes where they don't logically belong, or not showing up in biomes where they ought to be found -- let me know, and I'll see about fixing the issue.

Credits:

The mod utilizes Pardeike's "Harmony Patch Library." (No additional download is required, as the library is included with the mod.)

The basic idea for the mod came from Steam user "Captain Lurmey," who was complaining to me one night about how he felt that RimWorld planets didn't look much like real planets.

[Canute]

Unrealistic planet mod?
Ice pole at the aquator,Tropical biome at the north pole because some ancient device create it.
Nah, i don't realy want it. :-) Just wanted to comment it and maye you can made modoption for unrealistic ones.

[dburgdorf]

Unrealistic planet mod?

That's an interesting idea, but honestly, I'd be more inclined to look into unrealistic biomes (for variety's sake) than simple unrealistic biome rearrangements.

[Dr_Zhivago]

So I've got some issues popping up with the new "Realistic Planets" mod. One is from using the mod "Prepare Landing", and the other comes from using "Nature's Pretty Sweet"(NPS), in conjunction with "Realistic Planets".

Prepare Landing:
Upon selection of your game difficulty two errors appear in the log:

[PrepareLanding] [postfix] StitchedPagesPostFix /!\ Error !!!! Required page not found /!\
Verse...
[PrepareLanding] [postfix] StitchedPagesPostFix; Missing page type: RimWorld.Page_CreateWorldParams
Verse...
Error Log Share Link

Nature's Pretty Sweet:
Upon starting on an "Ice-Covered world", the log spits these three out:

RandomElementByWeight with totalWeight=0 - use TryRandomElementByWeight.
Verse...
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object
at (wrapper dynamic-method)...
System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: Argument is out of range.
Parameter name: index...
Error Log Share Link

Then once the colonists have landed the log goes nuts with repeating errors. I believe what's happening here is that NPS thinks the selected world tile is a "Savannah", for example, and instead the tile is "Ice Sheet". Then NPS freaks out because it can't handle the climate change. When I selected other world-types, say "Jungle planet" or "RimWorld default", I encountered no noticeable issues with NPS.

[dburgdorf]

So I've got some issues popping up with the new "Realistic Planets" mod....

The first one is simple. You just need to disable the "precise world generation percentage" option in the options settings for "Prepare Landing." ("Realistic Planets" gives you essentially the same functionality, anyway.) This will prevent "Prepare Landing" from trying to access a page that no longer exists and throwing up error messages as a result.

As to the second....

I can make a note to look into it, but at first glance, I'm honestly inclined to assume it's just an NPS bug that has nothing to do with my mod. There's nothing I can see in the error log to suggest a link to "Realistic Planets," and there's really no way that NPS can "assume" that a tile is any biome other than what it is.

And literally all the "world type" presets do is set the world generation sliders to certain values. So there's no functional difference whatsoever between selecting an ice planet or a desert planet or a jungle planet or whatever.

[Dr_Zhivago]

As to the second....

Cool. Thanks for the info. I don't know why it throws out so many errors with that world-type specifically, but I don't mind. I was testing and choosing random worlds, stumbled upon it. Don't plan to play on that world-type anyway.

[JT]

I've finally deigned to break compatibility with my current saves and given Realistic Planets a shot and wow, it's pretty awesome!  I wish I could get it to work reasonably with Miscellaneous MapGenerator Urban, though.  They "work" together, but it always produces urbworlds where every temperate forest and temperate swamp tile is covered in urban ruins.  (At first I thought it was a feature.  But when every world turns out as an urbworld, it becomes clear it wasn't. ;-)) If there could be a fix for that from either of the two parties, that would be amazing, but I imagine it'll be impossible.

There was another mod that allowed us to specify global rainfall and temperature modifiers on a scenario-by-scenario basis, but it was so esoteric and had such a clunky, underdocumented interface based on manipulating points on a curve (with no labeled axes or units for what putting those points on the curve even meant) that all I could ever produce were worlds like Mercury or worlds like Neptune, with no happy medium.

Definitely keeping Realistic Planets in, and I think Miscellaneous (unfortunately) is the one that'll lose in my load order.


I'll part with a joke I thought up and amused myself with a couple days ago, to be read firmly tongue-in-cheek:

I'm sorry, Rational Romance.  I strayed.  I was drawn to her personality quirks... I'm even shallow enough to admit, her flexible curves and her features.  Where you were so discrete and set in your ways, she promised variety and distinctiveness.  I thought she was more stable, too.  So I caved.  I gave Psychology a try.  But I was wrong.  She was inflexible.  By very nature of being so different, so affirmed of her own rectitude, she had only one way of doing things: her way.  I am so, so sorry.  Your imperfections are what make you perfect.  You always surprised me, always had something spontaneous and interesting to offer, whereas Psychology always made me feel the same in the end.  Sometimes, she even bored me.  I thought she'd be healthier for me, but all she did is make me realise how much I missed you.  I know you might not want to take me back, Rational Romance, but I... I need you.  I screwed up.  I'm no champion, no white knight.  I'm a terrible person.  If you won't take me back, that's fine.  But I'll always be here for you.  And if you find it in your heart to forgive me, I'll do everything I can to change and make it work.

[dburgdorf]

I wish I could get [Realistic Planets] to work reasonably with Miscellaneous MapGenerator Urban, though.

You're not the first to report the problem, and it *should* actually be a pretty simple fix. I haven't actually looked closely at "Urban" yet, but my assumption is that the problem is simply due to the changes I've made to vanilla biome generation "throwing off" that mod's built-in assumptions of where urban biomes should be placed, and so long as that actually turns out to be the case, the solution should be a simple matter of replacing that mod's biome placement code with biome placement code designed to work in the altered worlds. 

I'm sorry, Rational Romance.  I strayed....

That is hilarious. 

[dburgdorf]

Realistic Planets has been updated:

- Biome placement now takes seasonal temperature variation into consideration instead of looking only at average temperature. This should prevent forest or grassland biomes showing up in tiles with growing periods of 0 days.

- Undid a change to vanilla ice sheet placement which prevented ice sheets from appearing where rainfall was extremely low. So cold planets, even if very dry, will once again have ice caps.

- Replaced the previous alteration of vanilla temperature ranges, which did little beyond making the equatorial regions of cold planets colder, with a more extensive "stretching" of the scale, so cold planets are colder at all latitudes than vanilla cold planets, and hot planets are hotter.

- Added patches so that "Misc. MapGen Xtension 'Urban Biome'" biomes generate correctly on this mod's planets.

- Added patches to allow "FishIndustry" fish to be caught in this mod's new biomes.

- Renamed the "ocean size" slider as "sea level," which makes more sense.

[dburgdorf]

Realistic Planets has been updated again:

- Added an option to allow adjustment of the planet's axial tilt.

- If you're using this mod in conjunction with "My Little Planet," world size will now be correctly saved with the game data, so planets will no longer revert to standard RimWorld size when a game is reloaded.

[dburgdorf]

... And it's updated again, to fix a stunningly stupid typo that was causing most ocean tiles to be replaced by sea ice.

[dburgdorf]

Realistic Planets has been updated. Again. Yes, I've been kind of obsessing over it this past week.

- Added options to have the placement of faction settlements take racial temperature preferences into consideration and/or to have each faction's settlements "grouped" to simulate actual nations. (These options are automatically disabled if "Faction Control" is also in use.)

[Hexwall]

Are fishing spots still incompatible with Nature is pretty sweet's ice?

[dburgdorf]

Are fishing spots still incompatible with Nature is pretty sweet's ice?

I'll try to get to that this weekend. It should be a pretty quick and simple fix, but as I said above, I've been kind of obsessing on "Realistic Planets" this past week or two. 

[dburgdorf]

Realistic Planets has been updated... again.

- Fixed a bug that resulted in faction settlement generation being aborted if a faction added by a mod generated without a leader.

=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=

NOW....

My plan is to actually leave this one alone for a while, and get a few overdue updates to *other* mods taken care of this weekend....