Low Dairy Farm Spawn or Just My Bad Luck?

[ppanda0421]

Hi, I’m wondering if there is a bug/conflict with Dairy farm spawns. I found 1 (2x2) dairy farm (w/o any cows) in 4 years of in-game time (30 days seasons) and it was connected on outskirts of the city. Previously they were found in the woods, away from the city. Guess this has changed and now they are ‘in’ the city? My city size is set to 10. I have explored about 10-20 full map sizes in all directions (from spawn) and have not found any other dairy farms. Perhaps ‘More locations’ is conflicting? I see sooooo many mansions, apartment complexes, and motels it’s not even funny. I also found lots of normal farms but haven’t seen any cows there.

Or perhaps its just my bad luck? I just want to raise cows and make cheese dangit!

Currently using version 8081. I think I created the world with 806x.
Mods List:
[
“dda”,
“Medieval_Stuff”,
“More_Survival_Tools”,
“nw_pack”,
“more_locations”,
“Experimental-Z-Level”,
“boats”,
“blazemod”,
“Tanks”,
“No_Fungi”,
“filthy_morale”,
“StatsThroughSkills”,
“manualbionicinstall”,
“makeshift”,
“modular_turrets”,
“Mining_Mod”,
“alt_map_key”
]

Thanks.

[Orange01]

I also have had a very hard time finding a dairy farm/cows.

[Eastwardrope91]

It really depends on how many over map specials you have mods for the more you have the less likely you are to find it. That and I live in Maine and there really isn’t that many Dairy farms and if I recall rightly this takes place in New England.

[ppanda0421]

I think ‘More Locations’ is the only other over map specials mod.’ Yes I get that having more locations will ‘fill’ up the list. However, I see an overabundance of mansions, motels, apartment complexes and even mines. Heck I even found two map areas each having 4 labs within decent range. When I say map area I mean the area that is revealed when you use a lab to ‘download’ it. I played CDDA about a year ago and I found lots of farms, albeit most were empty but at least I found them. Just wondering if any changes were made to dairy farms/spawning since then. Wondering if I can change the rate (numbers) at which they spawn somehow. Also want to make changes to allow cows spawning on normal farms. I’ve seen dead pigs on those farms but not cows.

[TheMurderUnicorn]

The problem with the overmap specials is that the lowest possible setting is 0 - 1, meaning that 0 to 1 of that particular building will spawn on a single overmap tile. This means that even if you wanted a super rare building that spawns only 1 in every 15 overmap tiles, you can’t make it happen. At least, that’s what I know from my limited experience.

So, naturally, if the lowest possible setting is a 50/50 of whether it spawns or not, you end up with a TON of overmap specials in any given overmap square. I’d like to see this setting changed to a percentage spawn, rather than how it is now.

I’ll admit that I could be missing something, though, and could be wrong in my interpretation. Again, this is just what I’ve noticed. I’m trying to make a prison building, a huge thing that I only want to spawn rarely, but so far it shows up a LOT because of this setting.

[ppanda0421]

I made changes to my ‘specials.json’ file. Now, my Dairy Farm settings are similar to farms and mansions settings. We’ll see how it goes. After my initial post, I created a new game with the same settings/mods as my main game. I teleported several overmaps away in many directions (and revealed the overmaps) and saw the same issue in the new world…no dairy farms.

Some other things I noticed recently. Previously, monsters and animals (pigs, dogs, etc) would spawn/fight in the normal farm’s barn. Now they’re no longer there (eg. you pull that device and it’s empty). I think that normal farms should possibly spawn cows in those barns. Same goes for the (huge) ranch, you can find fodder in the big barns but there are no animals (or animal corpses) to be found. Doesn’t make sense to me. Doubt the farmers escaped with them. If the farm animals fled the ranch they should be in the surrounding areas. It is possible that they were butchered for survival but still there’s no trace of them…

As for your prison issue. Try changing location “land” to “wilderness” or use similar Dairy farm settings. Yeah the comments in that file aren’t very helpful…

[Viik]

Consider disabling locations mod. In my several recent games, I’ve used a couple of locations mods and while new buildings are really nice, in some cases they sort of break immersion or just bring some issues.
Some funny and not too funny examples:

1. High tech low life start, nice basement, very nice and compact new building, good place on the edge of huge city (max size). No accessible stairs from the house back into the basement…
2. Another high tech low life start, this time there is a proper entrance back to the basement and its actually in a shed instead of a house - very nice surprise. This time I’m in a small town with about a dozen buildings. Three of which are pharmacy, 2 bars, 3 diners and 2 fast food restaurants, a church, couple of libraries and just 3 houses, including one where I start. Good luck finding something besides a food in this place
3. Another start with a bit different settings - want to make sure that boat station spawns on a river. Reveal map and don’t see any boat station but there are like 5 mansions, two of which are larger than a typical shopping mall. Not a single hospital but bunch of different motels and various apartment blocks just in a middle of nowhere.

So while new locations are nice, I don’t think they are very “balanced” or embed themselves smoothly into CDDA experience. Aka if I’m doing a schizophrenic run I rather do it without reveal map cheats to make sure that at least one hospital/doctor office is available in 10 miles radius. I don’t recall having such problems without location mods. But could be just a personal anecdote

Try without locations mods and see if that helps.

[ppanda0421]

Hi, yes I experienced similar situations like #3 where there were way too many large mansions. #2 might be a vanilla thing since those are vanilla buildings.

Anyhow, I disabled the locations mod and immediately found a dairy farm in the wilderness (but no cows :() ! That might have been it! Perhaps these settings I set for Dairy Farm in the specials.json file helped as well.
“locations” : [ “land”, “wilderness” ],
“city_distance” : [1, 120],
“city_sizes” : [1, 12],
“rotate” : false,
“occurrences” : [0, 10]

If anyone can see any problems with those settings, please let me know.

PS - Disabling the locations mod turned huge mansions into buildings of % (nothing) and the tiles themselves became smooth floors.

Thanks.