Potential worldgen bug (5 steam geysers in very close proximity to spawn)

[theapolaustic1]

Album of pictures here: http://imgur.com/a/imJd2

I picked out this landing location because of the stats I saw on the world map (which conveniently I had snipped to show someone over skype), the seed for the world map i used is "Succession Success!" (used the same map as I had for the succession thread on the stories board).

I thought when I picked it that it was good, and upon landing, it seems like I was right. But after finding the steam vent you see circled in the second picture... I'm starting to doubt that it was supposed to be this good. The piece of silver circled in that picture is from the original landing, it's been there all game. So I didn't have to move my stuff to start here, nothing... Just, surrounded by steam geysers, right off the bat.

Given how powerful steam geysers are because of the utility of geothermal generators, I'm not sure if this is intended from a balance perspective. Did I just luck out, or did the new worldgen system mess up something?

Version 0.6.532.

[coolflash]

I'm not sure if you would call that close by. It seems pretty far off from where the first steam power plant was built.

In the ideal game, you would have to make a difficult choice as to which steam vent you want to build your base nearby, because it will be difficult to protect all the vents far off from base, from raiders etc. unless you have the resources and turret defenses to defend them all.

I have seen some seeds where 2 or 3 vents were near the mountain edge, but I have always chosen one to settle by as getting all of them is too difficult (atleast for me, to maintain i.e.)

[theapolaustic1]

I'm not sure if you would call that close by. It seems pretty far off from where the first steam power plant was built.

The first steam power plant isn't what I'm using as my center, though. The point I landed at is marked by the circled silver by the trade beacon in the first proper picture. So I've got the geyser I built on right there immediately (literally had my first geothermal plant before the twelfth hour of the first day), the one I found in the mountain while building rooms, and then the third one that I was already digging to link to on the other side... And it's only been 3 months in game, I've encountered 3 raiders come total (on randy, though obviously that doesn't impact the worldgen, it does suggest something may be wrong that I'm playing on randy and have as many geothermals as I've seen raiders).

The two to the east are admittedly a bit far out for me to build to, but even then, they're not actually that far away, they're just far from where I chose to set up. If I'd built closer to where that debris stockpile is in the third pic, I'd have three geysers all within 50 tiles of my colony.

It's also worth noting that these seem to be the only steam geysers on the map, even though it's a relatively large (250x250) one, the northern 2/3rds of the map seem completely empty, and searching the save file for any other occurrences of the SteamGeyser class yielded this:

Code Select Expand

<thing Class="SteamGeyser">
<def>SteamGeyser</def>
<id>SteamGeyser37047</id>
<pos>(124, 0, 76)</pos>
</thing>
<thing Class="SteamGeyser">
<def>SteamGeyser</def>
<id>SteamGeyser37048</id>
<pos>(54, 0, 93)</pos>
</thing>
<thing Class="SteamGeyser">
<def>SteamGeyser</def>
<id>SteamGeyser37049</id>
<pos>(235, 0, 145)</pos>
</thing>
<thing Class="SteamGeyser">
<def>SteamGeyser</def>
<id>SteamGeyser37050</id>
<pos>(169, 0, 99)</pos>
</thing>
<thing Class="SteamGeyser">
<def>SteamGeyser</def>
<id>SteamGeyser37051</id>
<pos>(228, 0, 96)</pos>
</thing>

Which I mean... Reading the numbers for position sort of makes it seem more apparent just how clustered they really are.

In the ideal game, you would have to make a difficult choice as to which steam vent you want to build your base nearby, because it will be difficult to protect all the vents far off from base, from raiders etc. unless you have the resources and turret defenses to defend them all.

I have seen some seeds where 2 or 3 vents were near the mountain edge, but I have always chosen one to settle by as getting all of them is too difficult (atleast for me, to maintain i.e.)

That's the thing, is these don't really present a difficult choice. It's an ideal start. I landed in a protected area with a reasonably nearby geyser, dug into the mountain a bit and found a second one, have an easy protected route to a third one, and those last two are at the edge of the map (the very right edge of that last snip is the map border), so I could pretty easily abuse all of the extra power I'll have to just wall it off and stick some turrets up to spawnkill anything that shows up right there. It's all very defensible and I literally didn't have to move from my spawn, the kitchen is practically built on top of the landing site.

I'm not sure if it's something about how worldgen works now, or just pure luck. It may not actually be a bug, but if this is an intended feature (more bunched up geysers/geysers closer to landing site), I'm not sure how I feel about it. I'm not complaining about a good start, of course, but this is only my second colony since A6 came out, and I've never had a spawn this ridiculously lucky.

Edit: Since I already did the legwork of finding the exact coordinates of all the geysers on the map, I figured I'd go the extra mile and figure out the distances between them, just to confirm. In terms of tiles:

Code Select Expand

Distance between each geyser is 87/68/62/49.

Following 54, 0, 93 -> 124, 0, 76 -> 169, 0, 99 -> 228, 0, 96 -> 235, 0, 145 as a path.

To put that into figures you'd see actually in game, that's ~1050 metal to build the generators/conduits, in exchange for 18k power in your grid (or ~1100 metal for 20k even, should you choose to add a solar panel). This feels imbalanced to me if this is meant to be usual... I mean, why would I need solar in this situation?

[ShadowTani]

I've noticed that the amount of steam vents jumped a lot when having larger worlds than the default. Between the default medium (250x250) and slightly larger medium (275x275) the steam vent amount jumped from 3 to 6. I wouldn't call that a bug, but it is a potential balance issue. That they where located relatively close together was however just a lucky and rare seed I believe.