Balancing/Customizing weather

[DokimiCU]

(I'm transferring old but still relevant issues from my unmaintained version)

Weather balance seems okay now, so this has mostly been addressed.

One thing that could be added - user settings. Mostly for testing purposes, but it does allow customization and replay value (e.g. try an ice world, super hot world)

Variables that could be opened up (from memory):

• year length
• random walk size
• day/night variation
• seasonal variation
• average temperature

(values would need to be capped. I've messed around with extreme values and it starts to break the logic of the game, specifically the way it uses averaging for shelter or gradients going underground)

Long term: different presets could be made for the weather files markov chains. e.g. so you can have a world that is always duststorms, or never snows etc. (low priority, mostly allows replay value)

[crodar33]

it is not weather, but some meteors, tornado and flood would be interesting

[DokimiCU]

it is not weather, but some meteors, tornado and flood would be interesting

That's issue #25

That broad discussion didn't get very far. But yes, these would be good. Weather is currently the closest thing we have to what I meant by events. It's all a question of figuring out systems to handle these sorts of unexpected occurrences.

In the meanwhile, perhaps some new weather types could be added?? Don't now about tornadoes (very tricky), but what have we missed? Hail storms? Hurricanes (would need some kind of wind effect, again like tornado. Tricky).

[crodar33]

weather generally - it is changing of temperature and humidity that can cause wind, rain and make based on this effects rain can be nice or destructive, same with wind I think need develop issue #25 and add there more interesting events

[DokimiCU]

Actually, this reminds me of an idea:

Wildfires could be made a significant part of the game, provided plants etc are given fire adaptations. Lightening strikes & player accidents could cause serious fires, without permanently destroying the landscape.

• Give trees/leaves/fruit a scorched version created by on-burn.
• scorched regenerates into normal version over time, perhaps after rain.
• ground plants could also have a scorched version, or set seed after fire.
• soils with grass could be made low-level flammable, and also have a scorched version.
• Lightening strikes % chance of causing fire could be raised significantly.
• Players need to manage fire risks (e.g. or their hut burns down). They could even use fire to promote grass growth from seed set.

Not sure if this would work. Doing all the regeneration may cause performance issues.??