Terrain Editing Demystified (mostly)

[ihleslie]

I have written a guide that can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2526352095

In summary, the regeneration of terrain is the result of a cap on total edits and the way NMS handles protected and unprotected terrain edits. Understanding the rules and limitations of No Man’s Sky terrain editing can alleviate much of the frustration from base building. Whether the developers can easily change this editing cap or not, it is, in my view, rather small for how many would like to play the game.

[ihleslie]

Originally posted by Deadly Peanut:

and how much easier would it be for HG to simply fix the flipping terran tool feature so that players could actually use the terrain tool around their bases and then build on the ground.... how uniquely elegant would that solution be?

but then that would require competence on the part of HG dev team... so perhaps not :steamsunny:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2514236109

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2514236518

Clearly you would rather complain about the HG devs than read my guide. You can use the flipping terrain tool around your base. There are just limitations. Not a difficult concept.

[Upholder98]

Originally posted by ihleslie:

I have written a guide that can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2526352095

This is interesting. Since I am just a player, not a dev, the best I can do is understand how the game works. Appreciate your time to post this info!

You make a solid case that there is a set of rules underlying terrain edits and these explain some behaviors I've seen. I am also certain that glitches occur. A week or so ago I teleported to a base and upon arriving, basically fell through the ground that no longer seemed to be there. I then popped back up to find every terrain change at my base to have been reset, even my base computer was now covered up. That felt more like a glitch instead of exceeding a limit.

[Anga Hakuna]

Though I'm not heavy into base expansion or massive terrain changes, I do appreciate your research and guide. What might seem an "easy" fix or change to an average gamer may be incredible fraught with difficulties to developers. I admire the tenacity of Hello Games in plugging away at bugs while also introducing new features -- all for free.

Re: "...replace the base edit meter with numerical output. The meter would read 0/10,000 at first, climbing toward 10,000/10,000. This would really put players on notice that edits are limited."

Great idea. I suggest you submit that as suggested enhancement[hellogames.zendesk.com].

[Xenomorph]

Im not interested in baking terrain edits from other players in my save, in case i visit a location. Also not interested in long download warps in case i go back and forth and the edits are not baked into my save.

It wouldnt be awkward at all seeing something that had been constructed in a moat covered in terrain, with the owner telling me "it's not buried!!!!" So does it really matter? Its totally possible to build on flat or a foot off the ground, and completely avoid this recurring crappy discussion.

[Crovax]

@ihlesli

I really enjoyed reading your 'published' guide. Well done!

Sadly though, there isn't really anything a player can do to circumvent the 15k edits limitation, except learning which terrain modification is the most effective one (or to use the undo terrain modification more frequently if helpful)

As a programmer (although not a game programmer), I can assure you that the number of buffer / edits are arbitrary! If a game is able to store the information that a certain base piece was placed, it's automatically able to know that any overlapping terrain ought to be removed. NO STATIC BUFFER / EDITS NECESSARY.

I.e. placing a base foundation or a cubic room should implicitely remove terrain, causing no static terrain edits at all.

And the fact that players surely don't like indoor terrain / assets (flora) can even be advantageous for the 3D rendering process, as fewer 'hand-made' modifications have to be calculated.

Furthermore, to see that the 'number of edits' count is a global limitation across multiple planets, indicates that it's supposely more a file size than a performance issue. This however is a highly questionable design choice!

Last but not least, the game also doesn't seem to optimize the terrain modification edits in an efficient way. F.e. I often found unconnected left-over terrain pieces.
____

So as a conclusion, the blame is still vastly on the development side.

A few things could be avoided easily:
If the devs thought they had to limit the number of edits in order for a proper multiplayer mode (less data transfer), there's still no reason to make it a global limitation per player. A player could easily create another account to do the extra digging (or create one account per base they like to build).

Ergo: There's no real reason behind a global limitation. And with the aforementioned auto-terrain modification based on player intention, it could increase the game experience significantly.

[ihleslie]

I've been experimenting a bit more. A third study used all 15,000 edits for a cave-like base. It was stable over a few days - no regeneration. I then excavated within the base radius producing a few hundred "protected" edits. These new protected edits overwrote older protected edits. Not at all clear how the game decided which to overwrite but "regeneration" could be seen in one area. It was one-to-one so I still had 15,000 protected edits.

I then went well outside the base radius to a Paraffinium deposit and mined it for a few hundred ore units. These went into my backpack storage. After exiting and restarting the game, all the Paraffinium was back. For this somewhat special case, the ore could be mined endlessly. These Paraffinium edits would have been unprotected if there had been somewhere to store them.

It seems protected can overwrite protected, but unprotected can't overwrite protected. While still in game it still appears that mining is proceeding as usual.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2532006676