There’s a random chance that upon choosing a new game with said locations (and after having confirmed your character creation), the screen goes black with the following message: DEBUG: Could not find starting overmap terrain cabin
followed by DEBUG: Could not find starting place for character
after that, you start the game either in an open field or inside a forest.
I started a new game 20 times in each location, and the above error resulted 6 times when choosing the cabin. It is less frequent with LMOE (only 2) but still happens since they usually spawn close to forests as well.
Yes, I am using 4 as city size.
However, I always spawned in the middle of nowhere, with no town in sight. Only once I managed to see 4 houses at the egde of the overmap, but that’s it.
It’s not uncommon to have a rare structure not generate on the starting overmap; known issue with random mapgen. This is an issue but a comparatively minor one, and if I had to fix it NOW I’d remove the option to start in an LMOE or cabin.
It’s not just restricted to LMOE or cabin, sometimes as mall start, or even cop/firefighter start. Generating new worlds until a valid spawn happens isn’t such a big deal, but it would be nice if worlds had a way of creating at least one of these locations, rather than removing them or ignoring the problem.
For those suffering the same problem: use the save template option and generate a few worlds until it works.
A solution might be to change the minimum occurrences in overmap_specials.json to require at least one cabin/LMOE. These occurrences were pulled from the initial specials implementation and are not really balanced against the set of specials that exist now.
Personally, I’d like to see a change in mapgen (no idea how to that, sigh) that makes it more likely for towns to have 1 of every building rather than 4 gun shops or so.
Random generation is good, but it also leads to sometimes really strange town layouts, imo. If there was some mechanism that checked if certain real-life “common” buildings like fire stations, doctor’s office, are not at all there in your big town, to place one of them instead of the eleventh grocery store.