So SnowiestDrowners is similar but not 100% anymore of course, giving it a try while waiting to see further seed analysis from @JoeDaFrogman but I have no clue if the POI placement is the same and it is too soon to tell (guess I should have done a creative flythrough). I'd love to know more of your methodology since it seems like you've got a much better understanding of it than most.
PC Alpha 20 Seed Thread!
- Thread starter SylenThunder
- Start date
JoeDaFrogman
New member
@Red Eagle LXIX
Ok, steel yourselves, this is going to be a very long reply.
The first question you have to ask is "what makes a good seed?" If someone posted 2,3,10 seeds in a single comment how would you "KNOW" objectively which is the best seed and which is the worst? The answer is you just can't unless your answer is "this one looks pretty" and that's ok as every data point is always subjective. My thought process is to remove at least SOME of the subjectivity and inject some objectivity, ie things you can put a concrete measurement to.
Lets look at A19 seeds for example to start with. Say I were to somehow(pretend with me here) have the EXACT same image file for the same seed name/size with the same cities in the same locations everything was exactly the same except one difference. Both have largish cites centralized near 0,0 and coincidentally this is roughly near where you chose to put your living base. From the picture you could not tell one from the other.
Now if I add in the FACT that for picture 1, 4 of the tier 5's were in one of those two cities(and thus very close by to you) but for the picture 2 NONE of the tier 5's were in those two cities and you had to travel 3.5 k to any of the tier 5's AND those 4 tier 5's were all in opposite corners of the map(and thus in different biomes from each other). So out of those two seeds, which would be preferable? I suspect that for the vast majority of people, unless they REALLY enjoy the exploration element of the game(and there as some who do!), that picture 1 would be the seed the would prefer to have.
Now, being that there is always some subjectivity, the goal is to try to reduce that as much as possible(I will admit, this this moves the subjectively back into the hands of the program author!). I am working the @dcsobral, who has written and refined over a few alpha's a set of tools to generate worlds in a mostly automated way. He has evolved this quite a bit until A20. At this point, he has a working rating for each seed based on (and this is a super high level overview as I do not know all of the variables):
For a given list of POI's(traders, tier 3, tier 4, tier 5's, etc) locate and rank each POI(currently each POI has the same ranking, possibly changing in a future version!) and find the one spot on the entire map in radius(currently 1km from a central point) with the highest rating of unique POIs with the rating criteria(ie, regular houses with nothing in them count for nothing.) We are currently generating random worlds automatically using this technique and throwing away any that don't meet an arbitrary cut off, while saving the remaining into a zip file of the world plus some extras. We are finding that given a roughly 12-13 hour run of 100 seeds(8k) will produce about 12 or so that are above that cut off. This then gives us something to look over both objectively by reviewing the number(and which ones) of tier 4's or tier 5's, etc are within that 1km from the best base location and then a subjective assessment of "does the map look pretty, where is the best base location, etc". For me, I won't hold out of hand for someone else a best base location in the wasteland, but "I" won't use that seed.
How does this all work? It uses the windows subsystem for linux as currently many of the "programs" are shell scripts. Dan(and I to some extend) are working on converting these to use Python with an ultimate goal to possibly make a Python based GUI that can be run from a windows machine. Note that there are some other third party programs required as well AND most importantly, you cant be using that computer while you are running the scripts. In any event, once the scripts are completed the world generation, there are some other scripts that can then help you analyze some of the data that is saved for each world and rank them according to each other.
Now, in A19, we did NOT have a rating, but I did Perl script to take all the seeds and analyze and it spit out something like the below. I then simply sorted by the top15 POI's(this is an arbitrary list Dan and a number of others determined were the most desirable POI's) based on unique count. Note that this was the results of somewhere near 3000 seeds generated that took a bit over a month of my computer doing nothing for long stretch's at a time:
This program no longer works in A20 due to the file format changes the world gen put into place, so I am taking this opportunity to port the logic to python(which I am learning) as well as to add in the rating and a few other goodies such as the best base location coordinates, etc. My first attempt at this was just the information from column J and to the left and with Dan's help we eventually added the biome percentages since for some people that's important information to know.
I am extremely happy that Dan now has the rating system, as again it removes even MORE subjectivity and mainly as that means I don't have to write it (lol). One of the thoughts he had recently was to possibly add a "forest rating" as well as the overall rating, again where the rating is "find the one point with the highest rating within radius of X". If he does add, this would then bring back some subjectively to the system as how would you sort those on a spreadsheet with two data points? Our goal is not to say "here is THE best seed" but to help narrow down to a curated list of some good seeds so someone does have to wade through COMPLETELY subjective "here is a good seed". We both belong to a YTer's community so a big part of our goal is to help support that community with some "good" seeds.
For reference, I have a person I play with on occasion and toward the end of A19, she said "we are starting a new world", She told me she got the seed from a video some random person made and when she told me the seed, I looked it up and found it was on I had created! I watched the video and two of the 15 on the list were ones I had created, so I was quite proud/happy/smug(not really sure what I should have felt).
If you are VERY technical, especially with some linux knowledge, then his code is located here: https://github.com/dcsobral/seedGen. Ill be honest, set up is a PITA. And the less you know about linux the worse it would be and not advisable to use. the processing tools can create a high res image with the idea base location pin pointed on a copy of the map, as well a thumbnail, and there is even a script to make montages like this one using the low rez thumbnails(though you do have to be a bit careful with TOO many images or the total file size gets too large):
I am sure there are plenty of things I missed but if you are interested in more details, PM me (Red, I know you already did, just reply) and I can send you a discord link if you feel up to joining(again it's a YT'ers discord but we do discuss the seeds in there as we create them).
Red Eagle LXIX said:Here are 3 size 6k Alpha 20 (b233) seeds.
I am quite keen to take that very top seed name and see just how good it is via Dan's rating system. I don't have any hard numbers for 6k seeds, so am not sure bad or well it would compare, but the image grouping of cities in the top right quadrant is particularly promising.
I mean it's always going to be subjective to a degree, but "best" by the current meta I think most of us would agree you guys are on it.
Higher tier POIs obviously worth more points, certainly tier 5 if nothing else. I'd love to see the chart and best base location (there's a lake there now but I built on the shore since it is still between the big towns and not too far but not to close to wasteland) for Snowydowners in stable like you did for dev if you feel inclined, before I invest much more time into it.
JoeDaFrogman
New member
Ok, I got rid of ALL of my copies of seeds prior to stable, just in case. Let me make a run and get back to you. Hopefully, it will be exactly the same or closely similar.
JoeDaFrogman
New member
Dan changed the rating system to swap a few "top15" POI's for other POI's so the ratings changed a bit. In this case, the rating went up by about 1.5k
The suggested base location is still in the exact same spot though. Note, you don't have to be slavishly devoted to taht specific spot, it's a good guideline for things "near by" for the definition of near by being 1k radius.
Dan also made some changes to the formatting but here is what at least I got within the radius:
I have some small doubts that if you generate the seed(or I do a second time) that the results above would ALWAYS be 100% the same. I have had 1 time where they differed, but several times where they were exactly the same and I had Dan verify on the same seed as I did last night and we both had the same values so<shrug> In that one instance, the map generated the same biomes, city and block type locations within, but the exact POI differed in a few spots. It WAS between slightly different builds though so perhaps that was it...
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Awesome! Thanks so much!
5 out of 8 t5 is not too shabby! and the rest looks really good too.
Hmmmm...now oddly I am next to a Trader Hugh, but I thought this was more or less the spot (there is a large lake right in the middle of the circle)
Now I went back to the other page and I got the seed name wrong lol. It wasn't Snowydowners it was Snowiestdrowners
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JoeDaFrogman
New member
Don't forget, taht's JUST within the 1km radius. Eventually, I/we will also add to the report(likely via a third color and a counter/colored counter) how many of those POI's are in the world as well as within the radius. It's jut coming along slow becasue you know playing and stuff
Oh wow! That is a lot better than A19 then, since I remember if you could get just some of the POIs on the map you were happy.
JoeDaFrogman
New member
You would need to mod the world gen. I don't know how but check in the mods forum.
With taht said, one or two in the posts above have a high ratio of snow+desert+wasteland vs forest. There are more than 1 that have less than 25%(eyeballing it) forest coverage(and I have NEVER seen a single seed out of over 3000 in A19 and about 600 in A20 experimental with within 15% of your 90% ratio.... the highest I have documented proof of is somewhere around 75% forest.) EDIT: that number should be around 37% of the total land mass being forest is the highest I have seen A19. The 75ish % number was for the ratio of POI's within each biome.
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the 90% forest is the amount of poi's (meaning roughly 4 out of 5 cities that spawn are in forest as well as many of the wilderness poi's) (it might also be that for some reason my computer cant handle the map preview so it may be alot less it's just 90% of the area i see in game is forest)
JoeDaFrogman
New member
Ok, then you must not have generated many or are just very unlucky or have some bad settings. As you can easily see in my above montage of seeds there is a pretty darn good mix of seeds with various POI's in various biomes, I don't see that many there there is an overwhelming majority of POI's in the forest biome(and nothing close to 90% as you noted. I ACTUALLY have the exact count of POI's per biome(as well as the exact ratio of POI to map volume) for each of the above montages, but don't yet have my reader to provide the calculations at a glance(working on the code now amount other things) However, if you look at AponeuroticBroadcastings, the majority of the POI's are in the desert, with a decent number in the snow, then forest, finally wasteland and you can EASILY see that to be true. Nm, screw it, im gonna open and look it up:
Even looking at the montage above the one I would guess with the most POI's in the forest, AnticipantEditor has just shy of 53%.
There. That does not look anywhere NEAR your 90% claim does it? In fact, if you want, give me the generation settings of a few of the seeds you claim have such high percentage of forest POI spawn rations and I will run them and give them the exact numbers because I call BS.
In addition, I posted in the A20 dev stream last week about what appeared to be a LACK of many seeds with forest POI counts based on a few hundred runs JUST in case it as a bug introduced as I and another guy running many dozens of seeds are not really seeing a ton of high forest POI counts(for the ones which meet our rating threshold and are "kept" around for further analysis.)
Hi all, sorry for this question, but I can't find a working answer anywhere. Is there a way (biomes.xml, rwgmixer.xml ???) to generate a mostly, if not all, single biome map in A20? I notice this thread asks submitters to include "Biome Adjustment Settings". What are these, and where can I find them? Thanks for any suggestions!
The adjustment settings are the stuff under World name that you can adjust when generating. See...most of the screenshots starting from OP.
As to the first part of your question, not without external utils (which I don't think are updated yet) or modding, but I don't think anyone has made a mod to do that so you'd probably be on your own (although the modding community here is very helpful). Nor would it be recommended. While it isn't like Minecraft where there are unique resources per biome, it is going to make it a lot harder to find some of them in appreciable quantities.
Doh! Sorry for making you play Captain Obvious there, I should have picked up on that.
Understood and thank you for your reply. I have a very different playstyle than most 7dtd players, so I just thought I'd ask.
Guess I'll wait for an A20 Nitrogen-ish tool to show up jn the modding community, Thanks again, much appreciated!
Does biome distribution stay the same with a seed while mountains, pois and stuff change with varied settings ?
I'm looking for a good biome layout that suits my tastes, preferably smaller wasteland and snow and desert not touching.... at almost 12 min to generate the 10240 maps, its a little bit of tedium to run through a number of iterations to find just the right one.
I'm looking for a good biome layout that suits my tastes, preferably smaller wasteland and snow and desert not touching.... at almost 12 min to generate the 10240 maps, its a little bit of tedium to run through a number of iterations to find just the right one.
JoeDaFrogman
New member
go check the mod forum in one of the sub forums... someone recently made a video in A20 of how to change the biome AFTER world generation. So some POI's might be in the wrong place, but is that a big deal? Its extremely easy if you can pick the correct color out of 4 options and paint. I am sure there is a way to edit BEFORE world generation, but I have not looked that closely as I don't care that much.
Not sure I read you correctly, but the only things affecting the biomes shape/volume/area is the seed name and size. The other things on generation screen with all the sliders an None/Few/Default/Many will affect the placement of the various "tiles"(such as hills, mountains, lakes, etc) as well as cities WITHIN the seed. If want a specific biome distribution, see my comment I JUST made above and go "paint" your own after the fact by checking the mods sub forum.
JoeDaFrogman
New member
Ok, are you ready for some goodies? I have run somewhere close to 500 randomly generated seed names and have about 40 seeds. These are all fairly high rating using the rating criteria ranging from 15k to 80k.
NOTE: while not required, if you use one of these seeds in a YT video, I would appreciate a shoutout.
Generation settings:
Version: A20 b238
Size: 8192
Towns: Many
Wilderness POI: Default
Rivers: Default
Craters: Default
Cracks: Default
Lakes: Default
Plains: 8
Hills: 3 (EDIT: had this set to TWO by accident, it has always supposed to have been THREE)
Mountains: 1
The below link contains
EVENTUALLY, perhaps later next week if I get busy, there will be another link with a spreadsheet for each of these seeds showing tons of seed specific details:
The below image is broken down into 4 groupings IN ORDER of the column they are in(lower in the image is BETTER for each column):
And a montage of all thumbnails, including a circled best base location radius.
Ok, I have edited the google drive location. There are now 79 images on the montage and all 79 high res images and thumbnails.
If you like a forest base with close(ish) access to desert and snow, then AstronomicBoozes is an exceedingly good seed rating-wise.
NOTE: while not required, if you use one of these seeds in a YT video, I would appreciate a shoutout.
Generation settings:
Version: A20 b238
Size: 8192
Towns: Many
Wilderness POI: Default
Rivers: Default
Craters: Default
Cracks: Default
Lakes: Default
Plains: 8
Hills: 3 (EDIT: had this set to TWO by accident, it has always supposed to have been THREE)
Mountains: 1
The below link contains
- the montage of thumbnails as seen the in the bottom image named 8192.png
- Each map in high resolution(8192x 8192) so you can zoom in quite close and see image previews of each POI in it's position(assuming generation remains constant!)
- a thumbs folder which contains the same thumbnail used to make the montage image below
EVENTUALLY, perhaps later next week if I get busy, there will be another link with a spreadsheet for each of these seeds showing tons of seed specific details:
- Seed name
- Seed World name (ie, West Cojuja County or something like that)
- Best base location coordinates
- Counts for each grouping of specials within default range of best base location(1km at this point)
- POI per biome percentage
- POI per landmass percentage
The below image is broken down into 4 groupings IN ORDER of the column they are in(lower in the image is BETTER for each column):
- Total of all prefabs on the map. This includes EVERYTHING the fun pimps refers to as a prefab, so that includes various filler pieces such as road intersections, etc
- # of traders(all 13 except for one seed)
- UNIQUE prefabs
- Rate. This number is representative of the number of unique good prefabs near the best base location(within 1km). The higher, the more unique high quality prefabs are near the best base location.
And a montage of all thumbnails, including a circled best base location radius.
Ok, I have edited the google drive location. There are now 79 images on the montage and all 79 high res images and thumbnails.
If you like a forest base with close(ish) access to desert and snow, then AstronomicBoozes is an exceedingly good seed rating-wise.
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So - I'm looking for maps where the biomes of desert and snow DO NOT TOUCH. There are a couple up there, the UnattainableCatalogs being the closest to what I'm after - Snow north, Desert South, Others in the middle somewhere... I've found that I can generate a full map in about 3.5 minutes if I put everything to none and 0, so I'm counting up from Seed "1" and going up from there until I find what I'm looking for... But do I have to?
Every map created makes a 'biomes.png' file that shows the biomes. Seed 3 gave me this one:
This is ok - but not ideal. So my question - this is a simply PNG... Can I edit this in any old image editor and just pick the colors and doodle it into what I wanted, and will the generated world adapt to the new biome map, or is this fixed in stone once the world is generated? Anyone know?
I'm going to attempt to swap in this one mid-generation and see what pops up:
Every map created makes a 'biomes.png' file that shows the biomes. Seed 3 gave me this one:
This is ok - but not ideal. So my question - this is a simply PNG... Can I edit this in any old image editor and just pick the colors and doodle it into what I wanted, and will the generated world adapt to the new biome map, or is this fixed in stone once the world is generated? Anyone know?
I'm going to attempt to swap in this one mid-generation and see what pops up:
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