[DEVBLOG#254] Exploration. Don't we hate it? (Patreon)

Hey everyone and welcome to another development blog. In this blog, I'd like to discuss the subject of Exploration in RimWorld.

As we can all mostly agree, exploration in RimWorld sucks. Let's disregard all mods right now - the only reason you ever really travel is to deal with pesky condition causers, as without dealing with them, you are suffering penalties. Maybe sometimes you will travel to another allied settlement to trade - but those settlements are usually so far apart, you can't really visit more than one at a time.

When you're travelling in this incredibly slow caravan to an arguably pointless destination, you're also missing out on a huge chunk of the game. Most events in the game can't occur to caravans. Caravans don't get toxic fallouts, psychic drones, infestations etc. That means that a truly nomad-style playthrough locks you out of a huge portion of the game, making everything very simple and trivial.

I cannot possibly hope to overhaul exploration and the caravan system - it's too convoluted. What we can do, however, is apply bandaids to it. One bandaid at the time, we're breathing life into this dead husk of RimWorld exploration. And oh man, we're getting ready for a major blow.

Many of our mods have added cool new locations you can travel to. A lot of people loves our Ancient vaults in Vanilla Factions Expanded - Ancients, as they provide really cool and sometimes creepy experience. With Vanilla Faction Bases Expanded, going out to raid your enemies is also way more exciting, as you are no longer just fighting the same base over and over again.

With Vanilla Vehicles Expanded, exploration became much less of a chore. Vehicles are powerful, and they are also fun. Getting ambushed by enemies no longer means life-or-death situation if your caravan is chilling in an armored personel carrier.

There is still three notable gaping holes in the exploration experience of RimWorld. These are:

• Lack of events that happen on the road - When you're in the caravan, you can either meet a friendly caravan, or be ambushed by either enemies or manhunting animals. That's it.
• Lack of viable caravan destinations - Even with mods, the caravan destinations are repetitive.
• Missing out on a huge chunk of the game when on the road - Most events can't happen to caravans as they don't actually exist on a 'local map'.

Let's take a look at the new addition to the roadmap. Not really a new addition actually, as we're merging Vanilla Events Expanded - Caravan events with this mod.

Our goal of Vanilla Exploration Expanded is to fix the two big gaping holes I mentioned above.

A first, major part of this mod is caravan events. The system for them is inspired by that of Faster Than Light - the events that occur may present you with some options - and certain options may require certain conditions to be met. For example, you may be approached by a stray animal that will run away from you, unless someone in the caravan has their Animal skill on a specific level.

Many of these caravan events are inspired by other events in the game. Your caravan may find a migrating animal herd, or they may stumble across an ancient danger!

With these events, caravanning through the world will no longer be a waiting game. A lot of cool things will be happening all the time!

The second big portion of the exploration mod is adding new viable caravan destination. Of course, our primary goal here is replayability. This means that these locations will need to be procedurally generated, so every time you visit one, you will explore a different place.

But we're not stopping there. What if we also made the loot in these locations procedurally generated? So that every time you go to a location, you might find different stuff?

Again, we're not stopping there! What if the threat on the map, if there is any, was also procedurally generated? That's right. The way I want to add these locations is that they exist in a form of a quest, with randomly selected quest parts that affect how this location looks and what you will find in it.

The game will select one of the location types. These can be:

• Ancient refueling station
• Shipping terminal
• Ancient bunker
• Homestead
• Ruined base
• ...and many more

Then, the game will generate these locations from a huge set of prefabs. Each building, each room, all randomly selected and randomly placed, so that no two locations are the same.

Then, the game will pick the honeypot for the player. This is a reward that will be placed somewhere inside the location. These honeypots can be:

• Sealed crates with resources
• Sealed containers
• Cryptosleep caskets with ancients in them
• Malfunctioning cargo pods
• Military cache
• Animal cages
• Hospital crates with random bionics
• Old chemfuel canisters
• Survival meal crates
• Medicine crates
• Drug stash
• Art wrapped in tarp
• Burnout techputers, that help with research until they explode
• Old radios that give recreation until they explode
• ...and more!

Ok, we have the location, and the honeypot. Now we need a threat. The game will select threat from a predefined list (some locations may have a higher commonality for specific threat), and will then spawn this threat on that location. Some threats, such as insectoids, will actually also spawn cocoons and insect filth everywhere, changing the location visually!

So far, I got these threats down:

• Unstable fuel nodes
• Rotstink canisters
• Sleeping mechanoids
• Raiders
• Awake mechanoids
• Insectoids
• Psychic drone
• Flash storm
• Tornado
• Localized Toxic fallout

This way, each location, despite using the same props, will always be a different experience. And oh, props, yeah, forgot about that! I've been working hard creating many 'ancient' props, so that each location looks very, very unique. I will show you some of them, but bear in mind I'm still working on dozens if not hundreds of them.

These new locations should ensure that the world feels alive. In fact - you may stumble upon such locations while caravanning without actually getting a quest first! This means that you can venture out and travel around aimlessly just to explore such locations!

All these cool new locations added by us actually made the terrible map generation of vanilla relic sites and explorable ruins stand out. As such, part of Vanilla Exploration Expanded will be overhauling how these locations look. They will still retain their random generation, but we will make the actual rooms generated more thematic and interesting.

The final point is doing something about the fact that the players are missing out on a big amount of content. There is no point in trying to change all base game events to respect caravans etc. Too much work. Instead, we want to add an easy way to generate temporary bases as you caravan. Such 'camps' would spawn a small map on which you can put your bedrolls, make a little campfire, cook a stew and share some stories. And on that small map... all events can occur :)

Let me know what you think about our plans, and if you have some suggestions for 'ancient, abandoned locations', give them to us! Remember: We're not looking to add some functional props. This is not the purpose of this mod, and frankly, with how much work we have on it anyway, we don't have time to add functionality to these props.