Ribbon Maze

by H8UL

The maze itself is destined to be automated.

Overhaul
4 years ago
0.16 - 0.17
50

i Slightly better control over resource spawn

5 years ago

I had to reroll and explore the maps with cheats a few times before I found a layout I thought was acceptable. Had some instances where large uranium patches spawned under me, but oil was thousands of tiles away. Others where everything was mixed ore for thousands of tiles, and one map in particular I had to travel 10,000 tiles to get to oil through some seriously dense biter nests. I like the idea of oil and uranium not spawning at the start and needing to go search it out, but some controls would be nice because pushing back hordes of aliens without oil is a really boring slog. No tanks, no lasers, no flamethrowers, only AP ammo and short range turrets. Stinks I felt the need to scout a map before starting on it.

5 years ago

The game forces oil to be within 32 chunks. I could give control over that, but it won't fix the problem, just increase your chances.

Frankly anything short of an RSO region approach is going to create some sense of RNG giving "bad" maps, and that's most people's experience even with just vanilla terrain. A standard region approach won't work here because of the maze, so the problem is intensified. If uranium spawned right under you, it means you spawned in a long corridor, and that will always be possible. You could force oil onto the first row and still have to travel huge distances to get to it, because it's a maze. The only way to guarantee within a "fun" distance is for the game to brute-force solve the maze when the map generates. I can look at that but it is a major feature.

In the meantime I recommend the options to scan one oil immediately at start, it lets you see where the oil is without knowing how to get to it. Like I say it doesn't mean the route there isn't long but it does help a lot.

That all said, with vanilla default biters even with faster expansion I don't feel they are a big issue with the 32-tile wide maze block size. On my current map I'm playing with expensive recipes and haven't found oil yet, but building up to a big exploration mission is proving fun. With a bigger maze block size, biters will be more of a problem, but I am happy to start with the default settings without cheat charting the map.

5 years ago

Issue tracking for major feature to solve maze at start to improve resource placement: https://github.com/h8ul-modder/factorio-ribbon-maze/issues/31

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