0.91.18 Buying Building in Town Breaks Import/NPCs/Buildings

[Tolwrath]

After importing my rock bottom (solo hive character) game, the barman for The Hub no longer appears. I noticed that there is also a new fallen tree added to the city, which makes a large chunk of the city un-navigateable. This chunk happens to still have some npc spawns in and passed it though, so it may be related to the barman not showing up.

This is actually quite crippling to my game, as I have no "safe" place to buy/sell goods now. I mean there's the Waystation, but it's surrounded by dust bandits...

Edit: renamed thread from "The Hub Barman does not appear after import." to "Buying Building in Town Breaks Import/NPCs/Buildings"

[Tolwrath]

Seriously, please fix this. I'm playing as a solo hive prince, with a purchased house in "Rebel Base" just north of the Hub. I can't sell/buy from the hive, the road to waystation is filled with bandits and the long distance pathfinding runs into a collapsed path and gets stuck, and Mongol is waaaay too far away and unsafe to get to with a solo character.

[Sol Lignum]

After many imports i do not have any problems in hub. Just traded with barman from the lone shack, in fact. So, maybe repopulation of the map from shift+f12 menu can help? There's a button called [reset population]

[Tolwrath]

Upon doing some searching, I found that apparently there isn't supposed to be a bar IN The Hub anymore. Yet in my game, it's always filled with the same npcs (minus the barman) after importing. It also means the building I bought just north of The Hub might be the new bar. When I get home, I'm going to try deleting my map data, revalidating, and importing without buildings.

[Tolwrath]

Well after deleting the data folder and redownloading, the recruits have cycled, and the barman reappared. However, the same bar that's inside the townwalls of The Hub is in use, which apparently isn't supposed to be? And the small building to the north in "Rebel Base" is empty, but purchaseable again.

So I'm guessing one of the updates just did something funky with the gamedata, or... I dunno. But at the very least The Hub has a vendor again for me.

[Sol Lignum]

Most weird. My game has few barthugs at the gates of the hub, but no integral building to be found inside the city walls, and rebel base is filled with npc's, including barman. Can't tell if it's purchasable though, never attempted to. I recently made a clean install on another hard drive, but even before that, things has been as they are now.

[Berzerker Jay]

Yep, this is another aspect that I believe is making 0.91.16 unplayable.

I have imported my game so many times today, nearly had my guys starve for it, too. Nowhere is populating properly, and it seems the game is randomly choosing half the NPC's to actually spawn. I just made the run with all my guys back to Mongrel after doing the last import, only to find that Mongrel's bar is unstaffed. There's only one NPC in the entire building, a low-level hireling.

So basically I just got all the way to Mongrel with a pile of starving characters, and there's no one there to sell them food....

I really hope we see the next update soon. I just don't have any hope left for my next import.

[Ownizuka]

What I have found is that there are certain buildings that seem to be randomized. Each time I import, there are certain buildings in each city that get juggled around to become different shops/residences/faction hq's/etc. Depending on which building gets assigned to which, it affects how the NPC's spawn.

In my current game, the bar inside Hub is active and FULL of NPC's (at least 20) and the rebel outpost is empty. However, if I re-import, the opposite may be true. I have noticed this same phenomenon in the Hive villages and Mongrel as well. The Holy Nation cities seem to be more consistent but I don't spend a lot of time in them so it may be that they do the same thing and I haven't noticed.

It seems to me like this is an intended feature to diversify different play-throughs and the NPC spawn bugs are an unintended side effect. I could be wrong though.

[Ownizuka]

Just as an experiment, I checked out the Holy Nation cities as well and the same is true.

After each import the building designations were rearranged (meaning the building structures were the same but the type of each was different) and often times, some building types would be missing completely. For example, there would be no Weapons Shop and instead there would be an extra General Shop.

If this is an intended feature, it would be nice to at least have it generate a minimum of 1 of each shop type in the large cities. I foresee potentially getting a game world with no weapon/armor shops, making it impossible to acquire certain gear/blueprints.

[Tolwrath]

That's interesting. One of the original intended features I remember reading was a plan to eventually have randomized cities. I had assumed at the time that meant cities themselves would be placed randomly, but it would seem that it's been implemented so that cities in fixed locations have randomized contents.

However, the fact remains that the system was broken so that NPCs and buildings stopped cycling on import after I purchased a (the) building in Rebel Base. Incidentally, on my Wanderer start game (which was originally 90.1, I think, and continued into 91.14) there was no Rebel Base.

[Tolwrath]

As an experiment, I bought a home in Mongrel, put some furniture in it, and then imported with buildings. The buildings and NPCs shuffled, though incorrectly. Most of the shops are completely empty, etc. Further imports with buildings do not shuffle the buildings or NPCs, preserving the city in it's broken state.

Importing without buildings reset Mongrel's building layout and NPCs to exactly how it was before I bought the building in it. Importing without buildings again did not shuffle buildings or NPCs in mongrel. Importing with buildings did not shuffle the buildings, but I think it did shuffle the NPCs.

Conclusion: buying buildings inside of a city is currently a bad idea.

[Ownizuka]

Interesting. That's probably why I haven't experienced any similar issues: I've never purchased a building in a city.

Doing so must short-circuit the randomization formula when repopulating during import.

I'll definitely have to experiment with this.

[Sol Lignum]

Never imported purchased town buildings as well, but been noticing some weird things, like trader-less shop with half of stuff free to take in Stack. And been also noticing missplaced signs, like bed-sign on a bakery, etc. Perhaps it's related.

[Tolwrath]

I decided to just give up on buying a building in-town and instead built myself a station house out in a nice little valley in the fog. I did some importing afterwards to try to find new recruits (been trying to find a skeleton for ages, to do my research while Zan goes out and adventures).

For the following experiments, the word import should be considered to mean without resetting squad position, and with both buildings and research.

Experiment 1: Importing in Waystation to refresh recruits.
After several imports while I was IN Waystation, recruits did not change at all. However, I did notice that the NPCs who RUN Waystation changed up each time.

Experiment 2: Importing out in the wilderness to see if the recruits in Waystation change. For this experiment, the group of recruits I saw when I left Waystation should be referred to as A1.
1. I imported from quicksave, while Zan is on the road right next to where a small land-bridge connects the paths on the northwest and southeast sides of the river, southeast of The Hub.
2. I drop my gear and run to Waystation to find that there is indeed a new group of recruits now. We'll call them A2.
3. Out of curiosity, I imported from quicksave again (this time changing the number of nests, just to try to make sure there's a randomness), and ran back to Waystation to find that the recruits are again A2.

Experiment 3: Subsequent import from same location.
1. I import from quicksave again, but this time I don't move, and instead allow the game clock to progress to 10:21 (it starts at 10:00 after an import), and then quicksave. The quicksave now contains recruits group A2, with the clock advanced slightly, and Zan in the same location.
2. I import from quicksave, and proceed to Waystation to find the recruits are still A2.

I then later proceed to Mongrel. I then find that Mongrel has had it's buildings scrambled by the import. Some of the buildings remain inaccessible even after ctrl+shift+F11 (notably a residence that has a bar sign on it). Many of the buildings have incorrect signs on them now, but can still be identified correctly by left clicking on the building. Notably the snail house has gone from Faction HQ to Bar with no Barman.

Importing with buildings while in Mongrel did not fix the buildings. Importing from my new base did not fix it either.