PC Trader Spawns

[Zombie2b]

Hiya love the game! Just one minor flaw - can the map generator OR it's logic be improved so that it allows for traders to spawn inside cities/ towns?
What happened now is I started a nice little run, done all the quests for trader Rekt and it was great as they mostly were 100-500m far and life was good. Then i got my bicycle, pedaled all the way to trader Jen and all her missions are like 1km away lol. To clarify it's not 1km away because level 2 POI happen to be far away, no. It's 1km away because she spawned in middle of burned forest with closest town / city being 1km away.
No way i am pedaling back and forth 2km for each mission, this is crap.
This is not great so can we have a checkbox or ability for make traders spawn inside towns/cities, please? Also when generating map there is no way to see where the actual traders are, would be cool if they would have their own colour or some designation in generated map preview as arguably a convenient trader location makes or breaks the game.


Also to save everyones valuable time when I asked this same question on steam forums I got advised that I can actually edit my own XML settings for tags i.e. this: <property name="Tags" value="gateway, nocheckpoint" /> which is found here: 7 Days To Die\Data\Prefabs\POIs for specific trader POI's which is very helpful but could someone, please provide a full list of what values are acceptable in this tag setting? Like I can put commercial but what else would be acceptable?
 
Thank you for your attention.
 

 

[Riamus]

Traders are normally on the edges of towns, but they have a "country tile" system they added that allows a tile to be placed in the wilderness and traders can get placed on those.  Those aren't too common, but you will likely see a couple on a map. 

To avoid that, you can edit that line and remove gateway since only gateway tiles spawn in the wilderness like that.  You of course need something else there so they can spawn somewhere, and that would be the districts in the towns.

Be aware that not all towns use all districts, so if you only put something like commercial, you won't get any traders in the forest, which doesn't have commercial in its towns AFAIK. So it is good to include most districts, even if you don't want all of them. 

Vanilla districts include: 

Rural, residential, countryresidential, commercial, industrial, downtown, and oldwest for the old west towns.  I think I may be missing one, but I can't think of it right now.

For a very short time, RWG placed traders inside towns instead of only on gateway tiles, and it was great.  But the next version removed that for some reason.  At least it is easy to do yourself as you are finding, and Teragon will do it as well when making maps.

 

[Zombie2b]

Thank you! While discussing this exact thing over on steam a user with over 2k hours pasted an app that he created that allows for an easy xml editing. Since only thing I wanted is traders in town, I was able to do it using this: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3309358974 (not an advert, just spreading the love since it helped me) and I generated new map after tweaking settings and now I have traders in town.

If gamers can do it themselves is there a reason why TFP wont add a simple checkbox that would override trader tags to allow them to spawn in towns /cities? Looks like it is already possible with a little knowhow.

Anyway with traders in town my next playtrough will be FIRE!!!

 

[Riamus]

If gamers can do it themselves is there a reason why TFP wont add a simple checkbox that would override trader tags to allow them to spawn in towns /cities? Looks like it is already possible with a little knowhow.

Probably just because RWG is intended to be very basic and easy to use that anyone can use without any difficulty.  More settings are not inherently difficult, but people can get confused as you add more, so RWG is very basic and likely to stay that way.  Also, the game is intended to be modded, which includes modding how RWG does things.  There are any number of options that could be added that would all be useful, but once you start, where do you end?  Third party map generators provide the additional options for those interested.

 

[theFlu]

If gamers can do it themselves is there a reason why TFP wont add a simple checkbox that would override trader tags to allow them to spawn in towns /cities? Looks like it is already possible with a little knowhow.

You also have the advantage of being free to mess up your own map. Whatever options TFP puts in the vanilla game, have to work "flawlessly". Even something this simple, especially combined with other random settings, might easily end up having no trader spawn in the forest biome. With the coming biome progression, such a map might be entirely unplayable. Each new toggle is a massive increase in variation for testing.

I'd say something about alpha releases, but as we're pretending it's not ... I dunno..

 

[Zombie2b]

You also have the advantage of being free to mess up your own map. Whatever options TFP puts in the vanilla game, have to work "flawlessly". Even something this simple, especially combined with other random settings, might easily end up having no trader spawn in the forest biome. With the coming biome progression, such a map might be entirely unplayable. Each new toggle is a massive increase in variation for testing.

I'd say something about alpha releases, but as we're pretending it's not ... I dunno..

That is a good take on the situation for sure. Likewise not changing how your traders spawn can result in situation when Jen spawns in middle of nowhere with closest quest being over a kilometer away or 5 buried treasure quests on offer. Yeah thats pretty unplayable too.
https://imgur.com/a/distance-tfRxenN
https://imgur.com/a/qeKovAc

 

[theFlu]

when Jen spawns in middle of nowhere with closest quest being over a kilometer away

It's annoying for sure, but it's about 2 mins per klik, on foot. Compared to "well, I won't ever get to enter the burnt biome", it's relatively playable

EDIT: Had to go and check, surprise. Gearless, skillless, overhydrated, taking 3 bird nests while recover stamina, 999m was pretty exactly 3 mins. The freebie point in cardio will drop that down a bit for the marathonally inclined.

Spoiler

1/3 cardio + coffee about 2:35
bike about 2:00
mega crush + cardio 1:50 (lasts for 6 mins, so use for ~3k for max value)

 

[Zombie2b]

It's annoying for sure, but it's about 2 mins per klik, on foot. Compared to "well, I won't ever get to enter the burnt biome", it's relatively playable

EDIT: Had to go and check, surprise. Gearless, skillless, overhydrated, taking 3 bird nests while recover stamina, 999m was pretty exactly 3 mins. The freebie point in cardio will drop that down a bit for the marathonally inclined.

Spoiler

1/3 cardio + coffee about 2:35
bike about 2:00
mega crush + cardio 1:50 (lasts for 6 mins, so use for ~3k for max value)

But the most important question - did you have fun doing that and would you be willing to do that 11 more times? (traders set to 6 quests to progress 1 way there and 1 back) I think not + the 7th day would roll on and no such thing as quick nip to the trader for some essentials   

That said though, i am glad it happened to me now when I was able to find a way to deal with it so that my next playtrough of 2.0 storms brewing is even more epic as my traders will be nice and close.

 

[Uncle Al]

 Also when generating map there is no way to see where the actual traders are, would be cool if they would have their own colour or some designation in generated map preview as arguably a convenient trader location makes or breaks the game.
 

Traders do show as pale red squares in the map preview. It's not obvious until you know what to look for, but they're there.