What to do about rivers

[Snaaty]

Hello, thanks for your great mod! Sorry if it's unwelcome to post here, but I am encountering a problem with the mod/game:

The problem being rivers. They stretch for long extended areas and I have no way to cross them. That is, by now my character is skilled enough to cobble a boat together any time he would have to make one to get across (even though it does cost a lot of time), the actual problem is that since I am a "Wayfarer" I can't use said boats at all. This has led to the situation on several occasions where there is just no physical way for me to make it to the exit at all. I've resorted to the homing spell for those situations but it does feel like cheating a bit.

I do realize it's basically a vanilla issue but I feel it is affecting characters in this mod disproportionately harshly. Especially as rivers are a huge pain even for characters who can make a boat out of stuff they find?

Perhaps there is a way to reduce/turn off river mapgen spawn? Or maybe (this would be a vanilla issue) wayfarer shouldn't affect boats (while possbly being reduced in point cost)?

Do you have any ideas? Maybe I am missing something obvious, if so, please do let me know. Perhaps I could just debug teleport me across the river? Although I'd have to look up how to even do that.

Anyway, thanks for your time and this mod. If you feel like this issue is not of interest to you, feel free to delete it.

[TGWeaver]

The problem as I see it is that you took Wayfarer expecting it to be a ton of free points with no downside because of how this game mode plays, and now that you found out it has a downside, you're not willing to deal with the consequences. If you want free points in the future you can always just use freeform mode!

Jokes aside, I do agree rivers are generally the biggest obstacle in getting home in many raids. Even for non-wayfarers, building a boat is not a reasonable thing to do in most raids because of the time investment and the required tools, which you probably won't be bringing with you into the field every time. Rivers seem way more common in recent builds than they did even a year or two ago, but the even bigger problem is how rare bridges are. They only generate with the game's highway system, which is very sparse. You never get a pedestrian bridge and other methods of traversal are extremely limiting. I've had to swim across more than once, but this requires a lot of risk, skill, and the abandonment of nearly all loot.

I haven't looked into removing or toning down rivers in worldgen, so I'm not sure if it's possible, but I think rivers aren't the problem as much as the lack of options to deal with them. For now, I would say your best bet is still to try to find bridges or swim if you're in desperation -- still better to escape with little loot than to run out of time and die.

[Snaaty]

Thank you for your answer. In truth, I always take Wayfarer, even in normal games, as I prefer the feeling of just walking through the apocalypse. Idk driving a crazy deathmobile just seems weird to me. Also back when I tried things were still wonky with impact calculations etc. so that it felt actually more risky to drive if suddenly a roadblock showed up or dangerous enemies as they move several tiles into my FOV rather than 1-2, when walking.

Anyway, I understand that this is a difficult issue to really resolve without meddling with C++ code. I'm assuming your code calculates only tile distance? If the placement code for the missions could somehow utilize code (like the auto-travel one?) that takes into account passable tiles, perhaps one could get more sane mission locations? I don't know enough about the code, if that would be doable even.

[ziroc]

In my experience, the rivers are a big part of the difficulty of the mod and I like it. About 20% of my raids, I have to make a big decision which way to go in order to go to the extraction point, because of a river. The other big challenge is when the extraction points are in the middle of a city. If these challenges were gone, well, the mod won't be so appealing :)

[Snaaty]

Hm okay. Maybe I was just exceptionally unlucky with my river spawns as in one case I tried walking all the way around it one way only to get stuck and never be able to reach the exit and the other way around it was equally impossible for my character at the time. The two exits certainly help. I guess for everything else you just have to bring the recall mote thingy.

[alien10000]

yea also had a run end due to unfortunate river spawns I think an item that can be crafted with warp shards that lets you ether store a vehicle or summons a pre built boat as a consumable could work