More Sensible Planetary Dungeon Distribution
This is a module for the More Sensible Tweaks series of mods aiming to make the game more realistically plausible and less railroaded, with this instance in particular aiming for making the distribution of dungeons across planetary biomes more even and less railroaded.
Every planetary biome has a list of possible dungeons that are authorized to spawn within them, each carrying a different spawn weight. In theory, you can find nearly all vanilla dungeons in every non-Garden planet. Unfortunately, because of Starbound’s extremely railroaded nature, in practice this is rarely the case – presumably in order to make the grindy story fetch-quest of gathering "clues" on each race’s settlements less time-consuming, the developers made each species be arbitrarily "associated" with each planet type:
- Apex – Tundra
- Avian – Jungle
- Floran – Forest
- Glitch – Volcanic
- Human – No associated planets
- Hylotl – Ocean
- Novakid – No associated planets
While most regular dungeons carry a spawn weight of 1.0 on all planets, a species "associated" with that planetary biome instead has a spawn weight of 4.0, effectively making them 4x more likely to spawn over any other dungeon. This means it’s very rare to find, for example, Jungles that aren’t solely inhabited by Avians, or Human and Novakid settlements in general, and the galaxy ends up feeling rather segregated as a result. It becomes another of many examples of how what was meant to be a sandbox game became lifeless and repetitive in its quest to railroad itself.
This mod rectifies this by redistributing the spawn weights of all vanilla dungeons to follow how inhabitable a planetary biome would be for their species and culture, following a rule of using one of three different spawn weights:
- x4.0 – Very Inhabitable
- x2.0 – Moderately Inhabitable
- x1.0 – Barely Inhabitable
Because of this rule, the player is likely to run into more mixed sets of alien settlements on planets as more species are likely to share high habitability for a planet – for example, Forest planets are Very Inhabitable to both Florans, Avians and Glitch – while also giving other species a chance to appear on planets that aren’t necessarily their "style" but aren’t hostile to them either. Additionally, this rule was also given to planets that lacked an unique spawn weight table (such as Desert planets, which weigh higher toward Novakid) to further diversify spawn rates.
It’s recommended to use this mod alongside another mod that increases the maximum amount of dungeons that can spawn per planet (and make planets bigger to accomodate that) to fully experience the variety of dungeon spawning, such as Planets Generation Overhaul, but it’s not a strict requirement.
Obviously, as mentioned earlier, it goes without saying that using this mod without Story Disabler or another mod that overrides the story will make the story’s progression significantly more frustrating, as the dungeons you need to visit won’t be guaranteed to spawn in planets that are close to you or possible even accessible. Or the opposite issue might happen in which all the dungeons you need spawn in early-game planets, which may screw with the game’s balance. I recommend not using this mod with a vanilla story.
In order to preserve compatibility, this mod deliberately does not modify Garden planets.
Guaranteed to be compatible with any mod that adds custom dungeons (unless they change the spawn rates of vanilla dungeons), but this mod will not affect the spawn chances of other dungeon mods at all – it only affects the vanilla dungeons.
Compatible with (and recommended to be used alongside) Lush to Reclaimed, as this mod does not modify Garden planets.
Because this mod requires Story Disabler, it’s by proxy not compatible with Frackin’ Universe.
