So in my current playthrough there are about 10 labs within a half hour drive of my base.
They are just way too common. That’s three labs for every town I’ve encountered. This seems totally illogical and immersion breaking.
They should be rare, (Strange Temple rare) and none of them should be less than 5 floors deep. To compensate for making the labs rarer, I suggest a logical but steeply incrrasing difficulty,
Surface: As now.
1st sub floor: Sparse Zeds, chemical workrooms and dissection rooms only.
2nd sub floor: Massive Zed population, dorms, offices, cleaning and power areas.
3rd sub floor: Soldiers, Bio-Operators, Loose Hulks and Brutes, mutagen only found in prisoner containment areas and weapons only in barracks.
4th floor:Loose Nether creatures, basically a nether stronghold, gozu, shoggoth, the lot. Killing all creatures on this floor triggers “containment re-established” and opens otherwise impenetrable entrance to 5th floor. This floir should consist mainly of rubble and technical rooms (teleporter trap, electrical items)
5th floor: A CVD machine.
Having a CVD machine at the bottom of every lab is the sort of reward I imagine people would be happy with given the difficulty getting there.
I’d like to get into working on mapgen, but have no idea where to start. Any guides or threads I can read?
Keep in mind that labs aren’t just for raiding, but also for lab starts. And since mapgen can’t guarantee that a particular structure is generated, lab number has to be higher than what’s expected to pad those chances a bit.
Having killing all creatures on the floor be a trigger would be way harder to implement than it sounds, unless the floor was guaranteed to be small.
Having walls be totally impenetrable doesn’t make sense, but making them consist of a layer of concrete and then a layer of metal would make breaking through harder than killing all the nether creatures. Unless you heavily buffed those.
CVD machine isn’t a good reward. Only the first one of those matters, you need huge skills to use it and by the time you can use it you can’t really benefit from what it does. If you can fight hulks in cramped spaces, you can already easily kill anything without ranged attacks. And CVD-enhanced items won’t help against the tank drones, milspec turrets and bots with flamethrowers.
For layout of a single building: http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=10126.0
I can’t find a good guide for overmap layout. data/json/overmap_specials.json and data/json/overmap_terrain.json are quite readable, though. Pick one entry from there (LMOE should be good because it has more than one z-level) and try to make sense out of it.
Not sure if current mapgen supports random generation with jsons alone, though. Currently labs are implemented in src/mapgen.cpp, which is huge and quite hard to read.
Might I suggest an alternative possibility; that not all labs are created equally? Most ‘labs’ may be simply a building or two of simple genetics, robotics, or material RnD equipment (perhaps even civilian/low level corporate holdings) with little more security than a few zeds or police drones.
While on the other end of the scale would be the grand facilities worthy more of that Resident Evil/Vault-tech treatment. Black Sites concealing terrible secrets perhaps leading into Primordial Temples, Experimental AI mainframes, Resonance Cascade Research, Unethical Human Research, Alien Containment, High Energy Physics ect.
This wouldn’t ‘technically’ decrease the number of labs or possible science resources, but would decrease the probable yeild of fantastic finds and the ‘top secret’ facility density to something much more more plausible to a lower average.
If I may give a practical example, living in a university town I am constantly running into laboratories and research facilities where I least expect them, however, most of these are something fairly innocuous like ‘poultry disease research’, or ‘corn hybridization’, ‘hydrocarbon design’, ‘mouse development modeling’.
Places that could feasibly provide more useful tools and materials than someones basement drug den or a highschool chemistry room, but nothing booked under govt black projects. The best thing would be that in many of these cases you simply wouldn’t know til you drove down there to see, or even broke in to explore… Maybe it REALLY IS just a room full electronics, chemicals and mutant rats, but maybe that’s just a cover to hide the suspiciously large parking garage with a somehow still functional ‘soda machine’ hiding the multifloor elevator and robot death maze.
More variety on labs would be nice. As it is right now, it’s pretty much easy to farm one lab after the other once you figure out what to expect. Heck, you can pretty much clear out the starting area of a lab challenge.
In general, different lab layouts would be cool. Something where you have to have some variations in your plans on different labs. For example, maybe a lab that’s lit up and currently on some sort of alert mode. Lights all over the place, making it harder to tell if there’s a turret lurking in the next room. A constant alarm sound that pretty much prevents you from sleeping, and keeping all the denizens in the lab alert and annoyed. Maybe some security bots roaming hallways. Maybe some sort of computer that prevents you from hacking the turrets, and at some floor a mainframe where you can deactivate the security and the lights, and you can deconstruct the machine for parts or plutonium.
Or a radioactive lab; basically requiring you to wear a bulky hazmat suit at all times inside. Or a lab overrun with blobs. Like part-lab part slime pit, and maybe some new blob types in there even. Or a lab that’s currently doing some research on some artifacts, and said artifacts are causing some havoc at the same time; like nether creatures and shadows galore.
Would make Lab-challenge !!!FUN!!! to start in a irratiated lab with no radgear.
But the truth is, that the labs are a bit boring.
EVEN though I yet to escape alive, might need to get more starting points.
It can get pretty boring. Turrets, shotgun or rifle, or if you lack that, throw two by fours at them or basically just avoid them. That leaves a few zombies and zombie scientists running about, which are easy enough to fight. Computers can be hacked at level 3 skill, and you can usually find the skillbook for it. Same with electronics or mechanics. For lab challenges one way to escape is to craft an electric jackhammer, and there’s a good chance to find all the right skill and recipe books on the lab, and the components can definitely be found. The main threat are bio-operators and maybe a shoggoth, and with the latter you’re pretty much asking for it if you went ahead and opened the containment doors. Even then, they can be taken care of with a single goo pit. Skitterbots are more trouble, but they’re fragile. Security bots can be dangerous, but they’re more or less a roaming turret in the end.
More robots would be a good start. They’re significantly beefier than zombies. As I recall, all of the lab generation is done in the code and not json, making it harder/annoying to update.
Given how the safety of labs is done in CataMerica, perhaps you can have redundant, expendable labs (the labs we’ve all come to know and love/hate), and rarer bigger labs that are doing the actual groundwork science that will later be redelegated to the smaller labs.
Given how labs are loved&hated aswell as a part of the meta ( lab challenge, set place for the loot & etc )
Why not instead introduce a different dungeon-type area?
[quote=“joxer, post:10, topic:9727”]Given how labs are loved&hated aswell as a part of the meta ( lab challenge, set place for the loot & etc )
Why not instead introduce a different dungeon-type area?[/quote]
Good point. Aside from labs, the only other place that really goes deep down are mines. In sheer terms of volume of items, no underground area is as abundant as labs as well.
Fungal/Triffid environments could easily become multi-story dungeons of considerable scope (albeit build more upward than down.)
Problem I can see with implementing any of these large multilevel constructions is a lot of their design is tied up with being multi-level challanges and until Z-levels are properly overhauled it’s difficult to properly figure how they should work.
Hm, personally I haven’t played on the very latest experimental builds, but I don’t seem to get that many labs spawned at all.
Also, having a bigger variety of labs (e.g. “hot” lab, robot-focused lab, genetics-focused lab, etc.) seems like a really good idea to me.
Reducing the size of the labs also sounds good to me, labs are huge. (And since the rooms repeat themselves, it does get a little tedious after some time.)
I agree that there are generally too many labs. Could decrease the frequency to 10%-25% and it’d still be possible to find a lab consistently in your games.
