I know you can edit OMDATA_FREQ to increase or decrease how far apart specials spawn in the overmap, but is there a reason it’s not a configurable worldgen option? You can already adjust quite a few other variables such as city size and loot spawn rate, so it can’t be a balance thing. Sometimes I like a world to be packed with weird stuff (especially with mods, the current limit is pretty restrictive), other times I might want to wander an empty apocalyptic world, and I don’t wanna have to have to instances of cata to do so.
I don’t know that much about actual coding (took me 3 days to figure out how to compile), so if this is a ridiculously hard request I understand. I’m not so selfish to expect the devs to drop what they’re currently doing to work on some super difficult minor detail, but if it’s simple then maybe even if they don’t wanna do it someone coughCoolthulucough might add it to a fork.
Its not a matter of balance, the problem is the special placement code is kind of fragile, if you adjust those numbers it can result in extremely long mapgen times and generation of non-functional maps.
Ahh I see. There’s already a disclaimer on the city size option though, could something like that work? As long as the player knows what they’re getting into, I don’t think anyone would be upset about it. The players who will want to adjust the value will already but they might not know they can break their mapgen with it (I didn’t), and if they do mess things up they need to recompile the game instead of just reverting the option. I don’t mean to be pushy, I love the game and how much you’re working on it, I just think as long as the issue isn’t difficulty of coding then it would be an awesome QOL improvement for heavy mod users.