Show Posts
16
Modding / Re: Improving Fennec's random plant generator
« on: May 16, 2019, 03:26:18 AM »
Hey, sorry for the late reply! It's been awhile since I've touched my mod, or even URW.
You can find the source code by extracting the files from the JAR (7-zip will do this if you're on Windows). The formatting's a mess if you open it in Notepad, but it's fine in NetBeans.
Herbal effects can be assigned to any type of plant, except crops. Herbs always have some sort of effect, with a 20% chance of being poisonous and 80% chance of being beneficial. Berries about a 14% chance of being poisonous and 17% chance of being medicinal. Even mushrooms can be medicinal, but the chance is only about 7% (whereas the chance of poison of some sort is 50%). Psychoactive chance is slightly above 2% for any plants which roll for effects, whether medicinal or poisonous, and regardless of plant type. The reason for these odds is that I wanted to roughly mimic the vanilla distribution of effects of plants (hence also why some medicinal effects are more common than others), but I also didn't want to make any effects exclusive to certain types of plants (and I wanted to make berries actually worthwhile... if they don't kill you).
Crops don't have special effects because they are only meant to be used as a food source, not used for healing purposes, but throwing in a small chance of non-poisonous, non-psychoactive effects might be a good idea.
The plant type quotas is a good idea, but that'd take more than a little tweaking to implement. The easiest solution I could see would be to generate semi-randomized plants with certain characteristics first, then make fully-randomized ones after. If this is done without huge overhaul to the mod, though, these would have to be hardcoded to match certain plant types, since the individual flora files are generated entirely separately. So, for instance, instead of a guaranteed shamanic plant (of any type), it'd be a guaranteed magic mushroom, and so on. But it could work.
Flour should never be an issue with this mod. 33% of crops are grains, and all herbs produce seeds. (Making flour from certain roots should be possible, but, looking back over the code, it looks like it isn't possible after all. That was definitely an oversight on my part.) Threads and dyes are outside the scope of this mod -- forcing it by overriding the name generation to contain certain elements is possible (as you suggested), but it's honestly easier to just change the crafting recipes. Just don't mix plant types when crafting, and you're good.
It's theoretically possible for a region to end up devoid of plants, or at least mostly barren, but I'm not sure some minimum number of plant species is necessary to enforce. Each plant has a 1/3 chance of appearing in any given region (except southern, which is 1/2) and can appear in multiple regions (minimum of 1), and the mod generates a minimum of 30 species (not counting crops, as they're distributed differently), so that results in an average of at least ten species per non-southern region (though it'll realistically end up being around 15 per region).
Editable settings is something I've considered, but never got around to implementing because that'd be a ton of extra work. Adjusting the rate of poison by plant type is definitely a good idea, as well as being able to toggle whether or not deadly poison can occur. Maybe you want mushrooms to be more abundant. Maybe you want to go on an endless lsd trip. There's a lot of possibilities here, especially with settings that are highly customizable. (That's a lot of work, of course, but even something simpler like a difficulty setting (higher difficulty = higher chance of poison; lowest difficulty = no deadly) would add more depth.
Some berries and mushrooms can usually be found in winter, although this isn't hardcoded. On average, you'll wind up with 1-4 kinds of berries and 2-4 kinds of mushrooms that don't wither until December (Winter month). Only cranberries and Tellervo's gift mushrooms last this long in vanilla, so personally I think those are decent odds.
Your template idea is interesting, but it would also be difficult to implement, since it involves largely overriding the random generation. I'm also not sure how much point it'd even have -- correct me if I'm wrong, but if you can identify anything about a plant (even with uncertainty), doesn't it always tell you whether it's edible or not?
Stimulant plants do exist, and chances are you'll end up with at least a couple. There's a 1 in 10 chance any given medicinal or poisonous plant (hopefully edible when boiled!) will have a stimulant effect (although realistically the chance is slightly lower -- there's also a 1 in 10 chance for sedative, and the stimulant check is skipped for sedative plants, so it's more like a 10% chance for sedative, 9% for stimulant).
Personally, I don't see the need for mod-related recipes, mainly because the existing recipes in game (minus pea soup) don't call for specific ingredients. Regional dishes are an interesting idea, but seriously complicated to make. Right now, the mod just generates some herbs, dumps them in a text file, generates some crops, dumps them in another text file, and so on. Anything like recipe generation would require either a) overhauling the mod so that it holds onto all generated Plant objects to be referred back to later, instead of overwriting them once they've been dumped to a file, or b) creating a separate mod which takes flora files as input and works things out from there. I'm actually not sure atm which would be more practical.
I'm not sure if you can obscure plant names in cookery descriptions, or if you can create recipes with additional effects besides those of the basic ingredients, so I don't see what advantage recipes for medicines or psychoactive mixtures or medicines would have over simply boiling herbs and drinking them or using them in other recipes.
You've got a lot of interesting ideas, though. Thank you for the feedback!
You can find the source code by extracting the files from the JAR (7-zip will do this if you're on Windows). The formatting's a mess if you open it in Notepad, but it's fine in NetBeans.
Herbal effects can be assigned to any type of plant, except crops. Herbs always have some sort of effect, with a 20% chance of being poisonous and 80% chance of being beneficial. Berries about a 14% chance of being poisonous and 17% chance of being medicinal. Even mushrooms can be medicinal, but the chance is only about 7% (whereas the chance of poison of some sort is 50%). Psychoactive chance is slightly above 2% for any plants which roll for effects, whether medicinal or poisonous, and regardless of plant type. The reason for these odds is that I wanted to roughly mimic the vanilla distribution of effects of plants (hence also why some medicinal effects are more common than others), but I also didn't want to make any effects exclusive to certain types of plants (and I wanted to make berries actually worthwhile... if they don't kill you).
Crops don't have special effects because they are only meant to be used as a food source, not used for healing purposes, but throwing in a small chance of non-poisonous, non-psychoactive effects might be a good idea.
The plant type quotas is a good idea, but that'd take more than a little tweaking to implement. The easiest solution I could see would be to generate semi-randomized plants with certain characteristics first, then make fully-randomized ones after. If this is done without huge overhaul to the mod, though, these would have to be hardcoded to match certain plant types, since the individual flora files are generated entirely separately. So, for instance, instead of a guaranteed shamanic plant (of any type), it'd be a guaranteed magic mushroom, and so on. But it could work.
Flour should never be an issue with this mod. 33% of crops are grains, and all herbs produce seeds. (Making flour from certain roots should be possible, but, looking back over the code, it looks like it isn't possible after all. That was definitely an oversight on my part.) Threads and dyes are outside the scope of this mod -- forcing it by overriding the name generation to contain certain elements is possible (as you suggested), but it's honestly easier to just change the crafting recipes. Just don't mix plant types when crafting, and you're good.
It's theoretically possible for a region to end up devoid of plants, or at least mostly barren, but I'm not sure some minimum number of plant species is necessary to enforce. Each plant has a 1/3 chance of appearing in any given region (except southern, which is 1/2) and can appear in multiple regions (minimum of 1), and the mod generates a minimum of 30 species (not counting crops, as they're distributed differently), so that results in an average of at least ten species per non-southern region (though it'll realistically end up being around 15 per region).
Editable settings is something I've considered, but never got around to implementing because that'd be a ton of extra work. Adjusting the rate of poison by plant type is definitely a good idea, as well as being able to toggle whether or not deadly poison can occur. Maybe you want mushrooms to be more abundant. Maybe you want to go on an endless lsd trip. There's a lot of possibilities here, especially with settings that are highly customizable. (That's a lot of work, of course, but even something simpler like a difficulty setting (higher difficulty = higher chance of poison; lowest difficulty = no deadly) would add more depth.
Some berries and mushrooms can usually be found in winter, although this isn't hardcoded. On average, you'll wind up with 1-4 kinds of berries and 2-4 kinds of mushrooms that don't wither until December (Winter month). Only cranberries and Tellervo's gift mushrooms last this long in vanilla, so personally I think those are decent odds.
Your template idea is interesting, but it would also be difficult to implement, since it involves largely overriding the random generation. I'm also not sure how much point it'd even have -- correct me if I'm wrong, but if you can identify anything about a plant (even with uncertainty), doesn't it always tell you whether it's edible or not?
Stimulant plants do exist, and chances are you'll end up with at least a couple. There's a 1 in 10 chance any given medicinal or poisonous plant (hopefully edible when boiled!) will have a stimulant effect (although realistically the chance is slightly lower -- there's also a 1 in 10 chance for sedative, and the stimulant check is skipped for sedative plants, so it's more like a 10% chance for sedative, 9% for stimulant).
Personally, I don't see the need for mod-related recipes, mainly because the existing recipes in game (minus pea soup) don't call for specific ingredients. Regional dishes are an interesting idea, but seriously complicated to make. Right now, the mod just generates some herbs, dumps them in a text file, generates some crops, dumps them in another text file, and so on. Anything like recipe generation would require either a) overhauling the mod so that it holds onto all generated Plant objects to be referred back to later, instead of overwriting them once they've been dumped to a file, or b) creating a separate mod which takes flora files as input and works things out from there. I'm actually not sure atm which would be more practical.
I'm not sure if you can obscure plant names in cookery descriptions, or if you can create recipes with additional effects besides those of the basic ingredients, so I don't see what advantage recipes for medicines or psychoactive mixtures or medicines would have over simply boiling herbs and drinking them or using them in other recipes.
You've got a lot of interesting ideas, though. Thank you for the feedback!
