Hi
In order to keep the player longer and attract new ones, the islands should be more interesting.
I don’t know exactly what the procedural creation of the game world is about. But I know that nothing can replace human imagination and creativity.
A set of seeds should contain islands that were designed by humans. Only then will each island be different, mysterious and stimulating the player’s curiosity.
I cannot understand why the potential of the game is not being used? Because anyone who has tried to design their own island can see that the possibilities are huge. In the same space to be designed, islands can be larger, with more cliffs, rocks and vegetation. They can be less schematic, more diverse and dangerous. All this while maintaining the reefs.
The game can contain up to several hundred island designs that can be randomly selected during seed creation. Procedurally, you can add chests and their contents as well as the contents of containers. Procedurally, you can enrich the islands with additional gameplay elements (additional challenges, puzzles, secrets).
This change takes a lot of work. But it is probably not much, compared to the one already done. And the effect …
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The defaults I’ve encountered do seem quite samey. Successful games usually have interesting maps that keep the player immersed.
Some ideas:
- Larger islands with coves and beaches based on real geography
- More plant variety, variety is the spice of life
- Ancient ruins (mainly cosmetic) with buried chests containing useful items that can be collected by digging in certain areas with pickaxe. Maybe includes metals that can be used for upgraded tools (see post about metal tools).
- Fossils (cosmetic)
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I like this idea.
I still don’t know why non-standard islands cause problems with the game, since they are created by the game itself.
Why not involve players in the creation of the game world? Just give guidelines for what you can and what not, and hundreds if not thousands of islands will be ready to be included in the game world. It is enough to announce some competition, for example After all, the island’s design is only a few hundred KB. There should be no problems submitting them to the forum.
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Space Engineers has a blueprints system and dialogue where players can upload and download blueprints for making starships, stations, and rovers (blueprints = 'print’able guides for making specific constructions). Perhaps a system like that but with islands?
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Such a system would also be good. But I mean the basic version of the game. Random selection of already pre-made islands, rather than procedurally created.
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Some variety would be good, it would also make it easier to navigate as easy to get lost when every island looks the same or so. It also makes exploration more interesting rather than leave (on raft), travel travel, arrive at island identical to the one you left except without your structures, find the same stuff (more or less) as where you started 
. It can drag a bit.
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I think some of the bugs reported are due to the procedural creation of the game world. When you design an island yourself, you are unlikely to put a tree inside a cliff.
The islands cannot be expected to be very diverse. However, with each new update, the islands change. For the better.
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For comparison, Minecraft has very diverse procedurally-generated landmasses and that’s part of the appeal, the exploration, and that rarely bugs suggesting it can be done.
As I wrote at the beginning, I do not know exactly what the procedural creation of the game world is about. Certainly such creation is also good as long as it does not cause errors.
However, I think that man-made islands will be more interesting, but that is just my opinion.
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I haven’t experienced any placement bugs that I can recall. Just the issue of samey islands.
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Well, I have a riddle. I think I will reinstall SD.
Since the islands aren’t re-generated there’s a higher probability they’re based on an older version of the game which may have been fixed since. When did you start your current game? It’s particularly likely you’ll experience this kind of issue here as the game is not really complete yet (early days) whereas Minecraft etc. has had a long time to resolve these issues.
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Soon after the last update. Now I’m at the stage of coming up with ‘what else to do’. Thanks for the advice anyway.
I don’t know when the last update was. I’ve only had the current world maybe a few weeks.
May 27 (0.80.01). I think I will play at the most difficult level, although I know that I do not know much about SD yet.
In the meantime check out Hantacore’s mods on Nexusmods. This mod generates a random world of custom islands from your cartographer.
https ://www.nexusmods.com/strandeddeep/mods/161
(remove the space after https)
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