New types of generation: Since you don’t normally find mountains in deserts, we’re going to need more kinds of generation, ranging from extra flat (deserts) to extra tall (Incan-like mountains).
Temperature and weather: For making their a non-decorative, distinguishable difference in biomes temperature, so we can have/need wool coats for snowy areas and something lighter for deserts, as well as things like snow & drought.
Water requirements for things like crops and animals: So that living in a desert has a different playstyle from that of the plains, and so that living in the plains is different from the mangrove.
Biome specific animals: Lions for the Savannah, moose for the snowy areas, not to mention different sub-species, like the aggressive African bee bee-ing different than the humble honeybee.
New buildings physics: Making snow/desert dainty, susceptible to gravity and weak, while the rough stone of the crags would be much stronger.
This last one is more of a request, really, but, later down the road of development, rather than having biomes sprinkled in with each other, could we have biomes specific to certain climate areas instead? So, for example, more towards the equator of our area map, we’d have tropical rain forest, while up north we could have the pine forest and moose.
the maps on release are going to be very different than what we have now. the maps will either be procedurally generated, or so vast and expansive that you will never reach the edge (or even know what it looks like out there). as such, there won’t be an “equator”. biomes will have to be randomized, although starting areas will almost certainly be fair for survival (as you will also be making multiple cities), with plenty of access to food and base materials. even with deserts/tundras, starting versions of tundras would have lots of stone, wood, and animals, and starting deserts would be more like oasises. further out, you’ll get areas that are normally considered uninhabitable, such as true harsh deserts and arctic wastes. while you could expand into those areas, it would certainly be tough to manage, especially when considering food (you can’t grow anything in permafrost/ice, regardless of the temperature of the area, and the loose sand of desert wastelands makes even rooting itself into the ground a challenge for the hardiest of weeds, ignoring the fact that there’s no water). those areas would likely have other valuable materials that are unavailable to fairer grounds, but would rely almost entirely on trade, as there’s just no way they would survive otherwise.
(had to hop off the trolley)
I would certainly love the inclusion of no-man lands, though. there’s a reason those places are uninhabited in the real world, but there’s also a reason those places have bases built there in the real world. and the issues I mentioned with surviving, such as no water in the desert, can be resolved with terraforming and piping. water can be moved via an aquaduct, and farmland can be soil that is shipped from a city in a forest region. the arctic… well they would have to rely on hunting or fishing there and would always have food troubles, but they’re often still better off than a desert in terms of food anyway.
One aspect no one talk yet is the length of the day. Playing on day/night length can be a pretty cool feature to add more depth to the diversity of biomes. One can imagine an extreme northern map with continuous night and great need of artificial light and great need of warm from fire. The AI of Hearthlings could then be tweaked to have a resistance scale to cold temperatures and the need to go near a fire if a specific point in the scale is reached.
So day/night length could change depending the latitude of the biome and add some challenge to the management of time.
Fjords, volcanoes and glaciers! Think Iceland/New Zealand/Katmai.
Also to further biome specific animals, sheep raised by hearthlings could be different in different biomes… goats in the desert, maybe llamas or alpacas in the mountains or a more hardy looking breed of sheep like herdwick or blackface.
Anyone have any ideas for not-in-real life biomes and/or biomes for different realms? How about mini-biomes? Cause I do.
Also, I will put a loot-meter number next to the biome description, with 1 being no generated structures w/ loot at all, and 5 being plenty
Terrestrial plane magic biomes:
Great forest: Home to not only incredibly densely packed trees, but humongous (As in bigger than the world one trade center sized.) trees that can support many houses and a lot of life, as well as magical creatures such as ents and elves.(2-3)
Shifting sands: Like normal deserts, except the fact golems can randomly form out of the sand. Also, mirages can become physical, potentially… (3-4ish)
The Giant’s caves: Ginormous underground caves with little-to-none exits. Home to giant spiders,bats, mushrooms and more, hence the biomes namesake.(2)
The corrupting frost: Giant icicles hover over the landscape. Trees made of ice and snow dot the horizon. Here, when you freeze, you don’t simply freeze. Your body becomes another one of the frozen marauders, murderous beast of ice. (4)
The death swamps: Plains that had all the life sucked out of them, opening it to things like minor flooding, causing a new kind of tree to grow here. Expect undead versions of all your favorites, such as squirrels, hearthlings, deer and more. (4)
Magic-mini biomes.
Titan’s crypt: Basically a cave with a dead titan in it. Bone and marrow can be harvested and made into stuff. (3)
(Since I’m kinda a bee obbsessant) Giant hives: Home to bees the size of men, and commonly built in great forest and jungles. Species can range from honeybees, (complete with thousands of workers and a queen), to bumblebees (which die out in the winter), to solitary bees. Most of them don’t take kindly to intruders, though… (4, for natural resources)
The endless grove: A mini-biome that only generates in Great forest. Once you enter, it’s incredibly difficult to come out, complete with paths that take you back to where you were and monsters galore. The trees can be chopped down, but beware, you would be unleashing all the monsters that dwell here. (4)
Giant anthill: Another insect-related mini-biome in/near the great forest and jungles. Although the ants will fight for their home, if you manage to take over it, it makes for an extremely useful prebuilt-shelter, complete with food the ants have found and edible-but-not-tasty grubs, expansive and easily defended tunnels, and a single, easy to defend entrance, which is important for setting up any kind of camp or town in the Great forest. (2)
I like the ideas, but how will some of these work in a top-down environment with AI pathfinding? the maze grove, for example, would be hard in first-person, but very easy top-down, as you can see the entire maze, and hearthlings can simply take the fastest path to a log to get out of the maze, completely eliminating any difficulty. the great trees are a good idea, but again they can’t be TOO big due to the limits of top-down view. also, I’d like to add that the giant trees can’t be chopped down normally, and must be “mined”. the anthill would be a nightmare to navigate lol.
I’d also like to add the idea of marshes/swamps, which have a lot of water and are very rich farmland, but easily flood and are home to many hostile creatures. you’ll need to build levees to keep the water out.
“I’m going to drive this netherlands joke so far into the ground they’ll have to build levees around it to keep the water out” ~ xkcd
True, but the trick to it is A: Hearthlings have to navigate themselves if you don’t chop anything down, and, B: if you do chop trees down, than you would be unleashing a large variety of monsters that could be avoided else wise.
That’s the idea, so that players have a multitude of options if they wish to build in these trees.
At least you would be safe.
That’s exactly what came to mind when I was talking about the death swamps! Except the death swamps colors might be a bit darker.
Rayan forest: Similar to a normal Deciduous forest, except the fact they are home to unique trees and critters like cherry blossoms, and, if next to the ocean or such, things like Japanese (Rayan?) Spider crabs. Seeds for special crops like rice can be found here. Also, they’re slightly more rugged than the usual biome, and if your lucky, you/your hearthlings will spot a Tengu or two.
(You can look these upcoming ones up yourself, since I don’t have time to write descriptions for all these!)
Mangroves
Bayous
Rain forest
Savannah
Bamboo forest.
Oceans
And now, for some more magical ones, particularly ones that belong in certain planes of existence…
The Renwevi islands: Small-medium islands in the plane of water. Every year, the tides wash away everything on the surface, but once that is done, all the plants and animals are strangely multiple times healthier than they were before being washed away.However, because they are not natives, hearthlings cannot survive said flooding.
Flora-canos (A notable ones includes Mt. Bloom): Found in the plane of air, it is a short mountain covered in flowers. It occasionally spurts hundreds of flowers of various sizes into the air. And by various sizes, I mean as small as a dandelion or as big as a house. When the spurting does happen, prepare for various insects wanting to harvest the sweet nectar and nutritious pollen that comes from these flowers.
Seas of fire: Found in the plane of fire, these are literally seas of magma and flame. Complete with obsidian fish, molten whales, and more!
Inverted mountains: Abyssal holes in the plane of earth that have walls that have taken the shape of the side of a mountain. Valuable ores of unique properties can be found in here, but be careful; your hearthlings could easily get trapped.
I’d like to mention my Petrified Forest concept from a long while back in the “World Gen Variation ideas” thread.
I’m almost certain a few people already mentioned some sort of “giant forest” biome (EDIT: Hello, @Sandwitch) but I wanted to emphasize the “petrified” (or partially-petrified) status, since it’d be both an interesting twist on the concept and offer a resource-acquisition style that lets the player more realistically exist entirely within the canopy or off of the trunks and branches of the trees. Also consider needing to find creative ways to get water and food, like collection funnels/pipes and (possibly?) crude elevators or lifts using ropes.
It could also cause flammability to be a more interesting (less apocalyptic) concern: Tree #1 is still predominantly wood, so it could be set on fire, while #2 is mostly rock and less susceptible to scorching. But maybe the older (“stonier”) trees are more likely to have dangerous creatures in them, like Petrified Borers (insects) that nest inside!
Plus, we’d get some nice height variation in the world with these big forests! Just make sure the camera modes agree with such a biome and won’t give away hollowed parts of the trees before exploration!
Otherwise, I’m up for anything that brings terrain into more creative shapes, like canyons and crevices. Definitely looking forward to climate and precipitation being added!
EDIT: Also, while it’s not technically a biome (but sort of is, depending on the size), I’d really like seeing ruined cityscapes that the Hearthlings could either settle in initially or gradually reclaim over time.
something I’d like to see with biomes is varying difficulties within biomes.
for example, we all know that a snowy or desert biome is gonna be harder to live in than grasslands, that’s a given. however, some deserts are like oases, while others are total wastelands, like the sahara desert and death valley. some areas, like the ruined city you mentioned, could be poisonous (fallout from a previous era?), making living in an area with skyscrapers more dangerous than simply heights and risk of building collapse. these areas would be far more dangerous than, say, abandoned huts, which would be more dangerous than grasslands as maybe bandits have taken shelter there and such. of course, even without added difficulty with the “harder” versions of biomes, some biomes have the opportunity to become stupidly hard without adding any sort of “fake difficulty” in the form of nuclear fallout or level 90 goblins or stuff like that. simply by being wastelands, it could reach the level of impossible difficulty, making cities built in such areas heavily dependent on other cities.
of course I’ve already mentioned this, but I just think having varying difficulties in biomes would be nice, as it would make it so not every grassland or desert is the same.
I agree with you here. Some biomes could even be home to animals that could make things harder. For example: Rain forest. They look nice and pretty and all, home to pretty birds and all that, but you know what else it’s home to? Parasites. And lots of them. Not to mention plenty of other creepy bugs. Savannahs would be similar to grasslands, but they would be drier and have less trees. The real kicker is animals though. Lions, rhinos… the list goes on. So maybe, instead of having a hard mode, the player could simply choose a biome to make it harder/easier?
I still think a legitimate difficulty setting will be practical for the game, though I do agree there should be noticeable difficulty differences between some biomes. But a good portion of that will naturally come from the location choice, like @Ridesdragons was getting at.
I think it was after cases like this that Radiant realized they still needed to address the rock-farming issue, actually…farming proved to be quite sustainable in stupid locations at that point in development.
Related question: Are Radiant adding soil resource at some point? As you all know, at the moment you dig up soil and “!!!” its gone. With the soil blocks you could dig them up and transfer up to the mountains. Also the Incan ruins of Machu Picchu was a settlement on a mountain.
Always makes me chuckle when I read about players requesting extreme biomes. The biomes they always mention in reality are always sparsely populated by either nomadic or small communities of people. Time settings are always forgotten, maybe we can populate extreme environments today but the time setting of Stonehearth is medieval or renaissance, people would not look to settle these areas unless desperate. Look at Alaska, would it have the population figures if there were no trains, planes or automobiles? (great film), then again the resource draw always attracts people, gold anyone.
You want to settle mountains then play as the dwarves, long term goal for Radiant.
