Caves

[TheJebblue]

Where are the caves man? https://www.planet-nomads.com/gallery/ I'd love to see caves, explore them. Maybe find creatures that only live in them. I don't mind if they cause some lag when loading.

[Old-gamer]

Once the Devs decided to get rid of all the holes people were falling into, an unfortunate side effect was the caves also had to be removed. Many of us loved the caves and still do. The only caves I have today are ones that I've created and they make pretty spectacular bases, especially if you have one with Xaenite, Uranium, Gold and Titanium deposits.

[TheJebblue]

Originally posted by Old-gamer:

Once the Devs decided to get rid of all the holes people were falling into, an unfortunate side effect was the caves also had to be removed. Many of us loved the caves and still do. The only caves I have today are ones that I've created and they make pretty spectacular bases, especially if you have one with Xaenite, Uranium, Gold and Titanium deposits.

Yes, one great thing about this game, mining is fairly fast and efficent with the Multitool, not laborous like in some games.

[Old-gamer]

Oh yeah, anytime I have the ability to adjust voxel-dirt, I'm a happy player indeed.

[piddlefoot]

Yea I have to say, I REAAAALLLY MISS the caves.

This was one of the things that made the game better than Empyrion, and they removed it, and its not even MP anymore, bring back caves I say, or put a tick box on the start of the game menu and allow us to have them or not.

Let it be the players choice to fall in a hole or not.

The real Ironic thing here, if the devs had just given us a GRAVITY GUN like from HL2, the holescaves wouldnt really be an issue cos you could gravity gun your buggy out of a hole....Just sayin..........Really missed the mark there Craneballs.

[Caleon]

I thought about making caves into existing saves but so far I got no feedback from devs.
https://forum.planet-nomads.com/threads/1712-A-way-to-make-caves

It should be easy enough, the tech to make holes is there. It's already used for the initial impact crater. Random caves should be no problem, given a way to find the correct voxel data. That's where I'd need dev input.

So far I have not taken the time to check if I could transfer a cave from one save to another. It might be possible, I have no idea how the idChunk value behaves.

Imagine being able to import some user-designed caves into your world...

[piddlefoot]

Well if you can do that theres no reason why you could not allow modification of any chunk in the world, and now that opens up a can of worms of possibilities.

First thing that popped into my head was floating islands like in Avatar.

Whole custom planets made up of custom chunks.

Planet uploads to workshop.

PN could really benifit from this.

[Old-gamer]

One of my favorite seeds among the many I've played in PN was one where I was pod-crashed into large hill and had a very expansive cave waiting for me inside. That was instant cave-base, I loved building inside of it and digging/paving my way out.

[Caleon]

One limit so far: the sandy engine defines the border between terrain and sky/water. I don't think it's possible to create terrain on top of that. Only holes into the terrain that is given by the current seed.

This also means that the cave you import/generate could be hidden deep inside some mountain or just cut a small part away from a hill. But still interesting I think.

[Old-gamer]

Yes, the cave that got created for me when my pod came to rest inside of a mountain was before the holes/caves were removed from the game. I thought that particular crash was the best I've ever has from a visual perspective.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1080386074

[piddlefoot]

Maybe they will be clever and bring caves back for other planets and make this type of planet we have now a starter planet on easy mode.

[Red River]

Originally posted by piddlefoot:

Maybe they will be clever and bring caves back for other planets and make this type of planet we have now a starter planet on easy mode.

that's a very cool idea.. bring more planets and bigger ones. maybe keep the starter planet super tiny to get going..

[TheJebblue]

Originally posted by piddlefoot:

Yea I have to say, I REAAAALLLY MISS the caves.

This was one of the things that made the game better than Empyrion, and they removed it, and its not even MP anymore, bring back caves I say, or put a tick box on the start of the game menu and allow us to have them or not.

Let it be the players choice to fall in a hole or not.

The real Ironic thing here, if the devs had just given us a GRAVITY GUN like from HL2, the holescaves wouldnt really be an issue cos you could gravity gun your buggy out of a hole....Just sayin..........Really missed the mark there Craneballs.

Hmm...how about a Multitool feature that not only disassembles and places parts in the player's inventory but offers the ability to re-molecularize the atoms back into the original item being de-molecularized right where you tell the Multitool you want it placed? A Re-Molecularizer!

[TheJebblue]

Originally posted by Red River:

Originally posted by piddlefoot:

Maybe they will be clever and bring caves back for other planets and make this type of planet we have now a starter planet on easy mode.

that's a very cool idea.. bring more planets and bigger ones. maybe keep the starter planet super tiny to get going..

Those are good ideas. As long as they stay 100% procedural so they are always new and unique!

[CoinSpin]

Just FYI... A quote from the primary developer in response to a question on the PN forum about caves and where they went:

caves were introduced in the alpha, some time before Early Access release. They were really cool, which is why we kept them in the game even though their generation was around four times more demanding on the CPUs, when animals were added, the game performance was even worse, as the AI pathfinding had to take the caves, and ravines and holes into account as well now.

For this reason we decided to revert back to the original way of terrain generation (2D) in order to not have people outrunning the terrain and have objects spawning right in front of their cars or under their butts, killing them in the process.

It was obviously a trade off between the two. Another advantage is an extended visibility at the same game performance.

[Fitzroy]

I love mining and i'm currently making a huge cavern in the desert biome!