[2023] Flax / map mechanics.

Originally posted by Ranix: the devs changed the temperature ranges for flax mid-wipe so that flax was worldgenerated in places it would die after the update. The devs called this something like "made it easier to farm flax". Apparently making it easier means driving natural flax 100% extinct in every save and rendering it totally unobtainable unless players have hoarded seeds.

Someone else complained about this but all he got was verbal abuse.

Ask your server admin to generate 100 seeds so you can farm flax, it is probably extinct in your world

That is not fully correct. The habitability requirements of Flax were widened, which on most worlds causes the intended behaviour of the zone expanding. Our world generator is able to output worlds that have temperatures outside of what we had expected and had received and seen on our test worlds - on such the changes had an unintended effect of the zones moving. As the habitability for plants is defined for the plant directly in a core game file not related to the world at all, it is not possible to have that not affect existing worlds. The temperature as well as other overlays is part of the word generation and doesn't change once the world is generated without player interaction, but not the plant properties.

Admins on affected worlds can address the issue by reseeding through the /give command for seeds or by spawning plants directly with the command /spawnplant. We also provided an override mod file on our discord for admins that noticed and reported the problem early enough to keep flax in the prior state, that had much less plant availability, though.