I'm struggling to understand biomes ref the creation of a new biome within an existing 'biomeclusterdata'. I have used the SSG to form a basic planet then used the Playfield Designer tool to 'tweak' it etc however i have a specific poi i want to add to a mountain top. I would use the 'Fixed POI' facility but this doesn't seem to work very well with the PDA missions 'nearpoi' or 'guidance' (in MP specifically) so i'm forced to use the Random POI facility. I figured it should be easy, mountain tops are 'Height > 430' and 'Temperature < -46' so i created a new biome within the main cluster, kept it real simple and set the criteria but it just refuses to create/use that biome and the console informs me it was unable to place my poi. When i visit a qualifying location in game it's biome is Mountain. This is further complicated by the fact that the 'Low Mountains' biome criteria is 'Height > 500' yet the 'Mountain' biome criteria is 'Height > 200' and i still get 'Mountain' biomes (in game testing i see the biome change in the top right corner of screen). IF 'Mountain' was set to 'Overlap all' i would expect that but it's not, 'Low Mountains' is set to overlap all so why does it not overwrite the 'Mountain' biome ? I'm very confused, can anyone shed some light or point me to a guide (i've searched & searched but cannot find one). tia
Biomes that are placed first in the list take priority. The way mountains and lowmountains work is this: Lowmountains gets placed randomly by the stamps (StampForcesBiome: true). This means that the game will try to place "mountains" on the planet, and anywhere it's placed a mountain stamp will have the biome "lowmountains". Except... Mountains is above Lowmountains in the biome list and has "IgnoreForcedBiome: true" which means that the Mountains biome takes priority over Lowmountains whenever height is > 140. So anywhere the height is above 140, will have the biome of "mountain". To accomplish what you want, easiest way might be to copy the mountain biome and paste it above the mountain biome in the list. Change the name and selection criteria to what you want and it should take priority. Then just set your POI to spawn in that custom biome. Keep in mind that most mountains do not end up at height >430. Unless you play around with the terrain, most mountains are under 300 in height usually. I also suggest using "IsImportant: True" for your POI, to give it more tries to spawn in the very low surface area your custom biome will occupy. Preview it all in the SSG to make sure not only that your custom biome is spawning, but your POI as well. I hope this helps.
Thank you again Ravien_ff I did pretty much that but with no luck however i did not copy the mountain biome i manually created it in EPD, i'll give it a try. Another question: you mention "Preview it all in the SSG" but i cannot work out how to do that ! I've been using the SSG to create the initial playfield.yaml file and then the EPD to get a 'best case' followed by manually editing the .yaml directly for fine tweaking. After it's initial use, the SSG is redundant to me unless i mess something up in which case i call it up with the same seed/settings to regenerate the .yaml. I can't seem to grasp loading in a previously created playfield ! Sidenote: I don't like the solar system(s) the SSG creates therefore i generate random seeds until one planet is close to my needs at which point i fiddle the values and export it for use in the EPD. Guess it has more uses than that !
Ah yeah I don't know how to preview a playfield.yaml in the SSG, I don't think it can. You can customize the randomly generated solar system, but that's a whole other topic. I'm sorry you weren't able to get it to work. If you want, try uploading the playfield_dynamic.yaml, playfield_static.yaml, and playfield.yaml files here and maybe someone can take a look. Rename them to .txt or put them in a zip file so it lets you upload them.
I would point out in 9.4 the patchnotes seemed to indicate this is now possible, but I haven't been able to do it.
SSG: - Improved preview in SSG so that you can now see the terrain (stamps and textures) as it appears ingame ^on the 9.4 patch notes.
It gives you a preview of what the playfield.yaml file will look like based on the static and dynamic files and the preview seed used, but it can't open playfield.yaml files that have already been generated and edited, as far as I know.
I think it is time for the SSG to get ability to place manually POIs by hand also. After the planet is generated ofcourse.
