Rising world hydro-geography

    UPDATED


    This post lists some findings about RW "seas", i.e. sizeable extents of salted water and "lakes", i.e. sizeable extents of non-salted water. I surveyed several different worlds created with the last version and I found the following:


    A) General


    1) Seas, lakes, as well as other geographic features like mountain chains, have slots, i.e. modular areas which can be occupied by such a feature or not. It seems that the decision to fill a slot with a feature is made randomly, depending on the world seed, when the world is created or the area is first visited.


    2) Slots follow a module of 1024 x 1024 blocks. Some features use single slots, some use clusters of 2x2 slots (i.e. 2048 x 2048 blocks).


    B) Seas


    1) Seas take double slots, i.e. cluster of 4 slots in a 2x2 group and then occupy 2048 x 2048 blocks.


    2) Of this 2048x2048 blocks, the actual water portion occupy approx. the 1800x1800 central part, the remaining approx. 124 blocks of frame is taken half by the sand border and half by the surrounding green.


    3) From the above, it follows that seas may occur every 2048 blocks along either axis, at the minimum:



    4) As said above, not every sea-slot is actually occupied by a sea. As far as I can tell, approximately only 1/5 of the slots are actually occupied by a sea; the other contains land of some kind.


    5) All seas of a world are identical; but the sea model is different from world to world. Vegetation and other local details, however, may be different from sea to sea within the same world (for instance, trees and grass may be different).


    C) Lakes


    1) Lakes occupy single slots, i.e. 1024 x 1024 block areas.


    2) Of this 1024x1024 area, the water part occupies approx. 600~800 blocks in the centre, the rest being regular terrain.


    3) Therefore, lakes may occur every 1024 blocks along either axis, at the minimum:




    4) Again, not every lake slot is actually occupied by a lake; as far as I can tell, approx. only 1/15 of the slots are occupied by a lake.


    5) Lakes are not all identical; however they are not all different either. It seems like a small number of 'lake models' are generated for each world (2? 3? more?) and reused (randomly?) for all the lakes.



    Hoping this might of some use to somebody, M.


    Oh? I counted oceans to be oval shaped 1000 by 1000 which is a horrible way to do oceans. More like 5-15,000 for proper oceans please. My 'Poi!' seed has 'O' oceans connecting one another forming connected landmass peninsulas wondering how many times it's going to do that.


    Thanks for your very helpful information. Going through them now :)

    Oceans could stand to be much bigger. I think Red51 had some disagreements with making oceans massive like they are in Minecraft but the way its implemented now makes it feel more like a very large lake with a beach than a real ocean. But that aside, some irregularity to the shape would be nice. But considering that rivers and streams and swamps still haven't been implemented, I'm imagining that we will see more water updates in addition to the dynamic water update.

    I believe Red will increase the size of them in the future.Right now,there is no much use of them besides looking at them.Maybe If we get boats,larger ships and there is a coral reef biome,treasure chests,wrecks underwater and the visibility becomes close to subnautica game,then we would all aspire lots of water.Thats my personal opinion.

    I don't recall any specific official statements about oceans changes but I would hope so. The oceans look lovely but aren't really useful (same with the desert and snowy biomes). The only use for the desert biome now is to gather sandstone to make sandstone blocks. There doesn't seem much point now in crossing an ocean because you can still easily run around it to get to the other side. The oceans don't seem very deep either so that will probably also have to be adjusted in order for exploring the floor Subnautica style would be a thing. If planned, a sunken ship would make oceans more appealing to explore.


    Has anyone heard anything new about the dungeon previews?

    Quote from zfoxfire

    Oceans could stand to be much bigger. I think Red51 had some disagreements with making oceans massive like they are in Minecraft but the way its implemented now makes it feel more like a very large lake with a beach than a real ocean. But that aside, some irregularity to the shape would be nice. But considering that rivers and streams and swamps still haven't been implemented, I'm imagining that we will see more water updates in addition to the dynamic water update.


    Not sure where you got the disagreement from because when I talked to him he seemed open to having oceans as large as the ones Minecraft originally had (30,000 M), if at least in a loose functional manner. He was open to it, more so because of boats & animals, or maybe that's just being formally polite. ?( But I do agree the way oceans are now makes them feel like lakes, not oceans. If I have to make a canal then it's not an ocean.

    Quote from ArcticuKitsu

    Not sure where you got the disagreement from because when I talked to him he seemed open to having oceans as large as the ones Minecraft originally had (30,000 M), if at least in a loose functional manner. He was open to it, more so because of boats & animals, or maybe that's just being formally polite. ?( But I do agree the way oceans are now makes them feel like lakes, not oceans. If I have to make a canal then it's not an ocean.


    Hmm... I honestly do not remember if this was something I read on the forum or something I remember from a chat with him. Oh well, if he wants to make them larger (and more irregular in shape) than present then that's great! Considering that we are still waiting on swamps and volcanic biomes, I predict more terrain changes in the future :)

    It will be the same with dungeons. Yes, they will be placed in the world but until mobs hunt them,until minecarts get loaded with supplies and follow the tracks out towards the surface,dungeons will be holes underground.The future planning of new features,items,elements and the actual implementation will give tremendous value to all those empty places.

    Yeah, I forgot where I read it but dungeons shall be empty, yet animals at the least shall have collision detection. I guess Red51 might be considering chunk checking to find these dungeons for reverse spawn generation. I hope he does this for horses also to find a good sized area of the map to then load both dungeon mobs & horses into pre-existing worlds. You never know.

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