Just after I said to loot a Pop N Pills, I did mention to explore to find one. I dunno if this guy is trolling or just has trouble reading comments in their entirety.
Any my reply acknowledged that
True, but a small part of his point is to explore to find one.
And then I went on and said just exploring is not always that easy. For example, Here is one of the maps I have:
This is a low res screenshot, but I assure you I have a full 8k version I can zoom in on(
here if you want it)
Consider if you spawn above the lake and head East to the first trader and set up camp. Town too small, no pop N pills. Eventually you find the next town over, likely via a trader quest but again, no Pop n Pills. So consider a fairly enw player who may be hesitant to leave the forest. In this case the town to the far East DOES have(two IIRC) pop n pills), but look at the vast sea of forest with nothing in it and then the fact that that far East town is well over 4k from where you would likely set up your base. Now, you could go into the wasteland city in the center of the map(perhaps via a trader quest or perhaps exploring) and there is likewise a pop n pills there as well. But I know from experience, a heck of a lot of people don't go into the wasteland until deep into the game after they are geared up and some never do.
I am going on two assumptions here which I guess could be wrong:
- MOST people generated a random map and play without seeking out a "good" map
- most people don't have a deep understanding of the game mechanics.
Just look at the above map, if you were a player who stayed away from other biomes, just how much exploring might you do in that vast sea of green before you found a pop n pills in that far Eastern city? Outside of what i would consider a fairly small population(but likely the people who tend to come to the forums) more veteran players who might head straight to the wasteland, most will stick to the forest, and perhaps the desert for the first 30+ days. And in this example map, the desert and snow towns are fairly deep into their biomes.
As an aside, I have generated something on the order of 5000 maps in A19 and somewhere around 2000-2500 in A20 and use some programming tools(someone else wrote and I contributed a bit) to identify higher quality seeds based on objective standards. Suffice to say, I have visually seen a LOT of maps in great detail. While I completely agree that pop n pills tend to be found fairly easily in play, an unlucky world gen can completely bone you and especially people who don't like to go outside their comfort zone biome wise(which I assume to be the majority of casual players who don't KNOW that the best loot is in the harder biomes).
) and in every city center, there's always a Pop N Pills. Always. Of various sizes, but there's at least one. If not, people can look out in smaller townships with a commercial main street. The probability of finding such store is a bit less than in urban centers but it still is considerable in townships.
