While upgrading cave generation to a deterministic system, partially for multiplayer support, I made a few improvements to them including adding a navmesh generation system so that monsters can now be added in. I also limited cave depth to a maximum of 20 caves, still quite large, which means there is now a known end to each cave. Along with this new location ripe for treasure and the new procedural towers screaming for more rewards I started working on more monsters and more loot.

New monsters I've got, and quite a few more that I would like to get in, but having grown immensely from who I was as a developer 12 months ago, I'm much more interested in building modular, component based systems that I can "plug" and "unplug" with ease. This opens the doors to user content (modding) but also makes things much much easier for me once the systems are set up nicely.

Resources
The first system I added was for resource spawning. I can now add resources to any biome with only a few numbers to dictate necessary information like their spawn rate. In order to make sure this works I changed the ore nodes from being the same no matter where you go.



The above is the new large ore node model, different now from the medium and small ore nodes. Ore is now also handled very differently for each biome. In the grass biome there are no large nor medium nodes, and small nodes only spawn at 10% the base rate. However, in the mountains, for example, small medium and large nodes can all spawn, with the large nodes having up to as much as 70 ore per node. This all is handled with only a few lines of code now that the system works the way it does.

Monsters
Next up came adding new monsters, which now too can be accomplished with only a few lines of code. To make sure things are working I've added in two new monsters: the Ice Golem, and the Rock Golem.



Items
The real reason for adding new monsters in though is of course to create new loot. So I finally got my hands dirty and built an external file friendly item creation system. This way I can add new items into the game very easily using a pre-made template to just fill in a few fields such as item name. That also means that anyone else will be able to add new items into the game by simply creating them, and putting them in a folder I've for now set as Solace Crafting/Mod Files/Items. The items that I add into the base game will be built-in and not present in the folder when it goes live, but it will be the first of several doors to be opened soon allowing players to add and share their own content.

The item template file is in ini format, and will automatically ignore any data that it doesn't care about. For example there are a few entries for consumables, but if you're adding a sword you can leave them blank, or delete them entirely, the system won't be using that data in runtime.

Loot
One drawback to this system, as things were, was that I didn't have an easy way to define what drops where. So I built one! Up until now Solace Crafting has used a "loot table" system, where when loot is to be generated it will pick one or two items off the appropriate pre-defined loot table. Now it instead categorizes loot by biomes and monster names assigning a drop rate to each item individually. In short, that means that any given monster could have any number of a dozen possible drops on them, though it's more likely they will only have one or two basic drops. Each item will be calculated for each chance individually.

This new loot system of course also only requires a few lines of code, or a new item template, to add it into the game. The final section of each item template offers the ability to define biome specific drop rates, including multiple biomes, or all biomes, as well as the ability to define name specific drops, so that our new Rock Golems can have a chance at dropping their own specific resource.

It ended up being a lot of small steps that are all intertwined and I let more than a week pass by without an update! I still need to make a few tweaks to the loot system, then I should be good to add 6-7 new monsters complete with new resources for each of them.

We had a good discussion about monsters on our Discord server, and everyone was pretty much in agreement with my stance that we don't want gory and disgusting in our game and so I'm sticking with elemental and golem types for the most part, for now, though I'm pretty sure a giant spider and giant snake will be coming in. There may be a "no giant spiders" button for those that really don't like spiders (I know a guy, it's not me), as again this is all designed to be sort of "plug-and-play" though the question was: how can you disable giant spiders if they're the only thing that drops venom sacs? What we came up with, and is something that has been requested before, was an option to make monsters passive. That combined with the already possible settings of extremely low monster health and damage, and you would effectively be in "safe" mode but still be able to "harvest" monsters for specific ingredients when needed.

I hope to get a beta patch up tomorrow with all the new goodies, though I still need to work on building Item Recipe and Enchant Recipe templates so that I can make those new ingredients be worth the adventure!