[2020] Going back to 18 because

Originally posted by Raeburn: I recall reading about the future plans for the built-in RWG back then. If memory serves correctly, the developers will be improving the RWG much further, also adding in options similar to NitroGen where you can choose (much) more detailed how the game world should look like.

I find the built-in RWG of A19 actually to be superior to NitroGen when it comes to placing towns / cities into the landscape.
NitroGen is great for creating wilderness maps and has its strengths, but for my taste, it also lacks too much of what the built-in RWG offers (e.g. POI biome and bridge placement logic, not to mention the really well done town / city wilderness integration the A19 RWG now has).

I think the Pimps will be improving the RWG even more. We'll see if NitroGen still has its place when the full game is released (which is apparently planned for sometime in 2021).

Yeah, Vanilla RWG is WAY better at placing buildings and cities into the terrain without it looking awful. That's mostly because Nitrogen is built upon a very outdated build of the vanilla RWG mechanics, back when issues like buildings on giant cylindrical towers of land were around. There's been a lot of work put into vanilla RWG since nitrogen was last updated; Nitrogen's actually out of date now and has many issues on A19 because the author hasn't been active since mid A17ish, iirc?

Originally posted by Earth Dragon: And it's the "Always green in the center" build that is honestly the most off-putting change. It was extremely fun to sometimes start in the center of the desert, and that's the most unfortunate part of the new direction. It seems like there could easily be 2-3 "level 1" Biomes instead of just the forest being the base.

Knowing where you start just ultimately decreases the "survive YOUR situation" feel of the older maps. I really hope they correct from this course, and make increased difficulty and better loot more based on relation from the center and less strict Biome dependent if thats the route they feel they have to go

Unfortunately, what you(and I) found fun, the larger majority found infuriating. Starting in a desert or snow biome or god forbid the wasteland was basically a death sentence for newbies and many others.

A rather large portion of players don't see the game as "Survive the hand you're dealt" and only see it as "Survive"; For which being dealt any hand that does not explicitly enable surviving with ease will upset them. For good or ill, the starter zone was relegated to the forest for the sake of this majority- Any player seeking a harder challenge can easily just walk to one of the harder biomes at the start of the game with no real ill effects except a loss of 5 mins if walking or seconds if teleporting.

They may, or may not, later add the ability to select your starter biome, And when RWG options finally come in it may even be possible to make maps where the center biome is something else other than forest...We just don't really know yet what all will be because TFP is working on other things to get them ready.


Making difficulty/loot based upon distance from center wouldn't work terribly well, without forcing the player to spawn at 0,0; which is directly counter to your desire to avoid knowing where you start. The player currently can spawn just about anywhere within the forest biome depending on how spawn points get set by the world gen; So a new player could potentially be starting way out at 4,000x4,000 in an 8k map and get absolutely stomped by the difficulty of the area they're in, And that's just not a good thing in most peoples eyes; That kind of onesided stomp is the type of thing that makes people refund games.