Overview
Oreverhaul allows you to completely customize your ore generation and distribution, to massively increase the importance of trains and provide the option of forcing exploration for specific ore types or better fields. (Note: as of 0.17 vanilla does some level of both distance-based richness and distance tiering for crude and uranium, but both are limited in effect and the tiering only applies to those two ores).Background
Oreverhaul grew out of my attempts in late 2016 to require venturing ever further from spawn for successively higher tier ores, and make it so that ore richness in the starting area was poor enough to force expansion as soon as possible, without the risk of making any early-game ores not available nearby or making finding a specific ore type difficult to find. I tried RSO at first, but it lacked type-specific spawning control, and its "increasingly low per-chunk chance at higher distances" meant finding long-distance ores would have been very tedious. As a result, I started creating Oreverhaul, which has these capabilities and more.Generation
With Oreverhaul installed, all ores are sorted into successive "tiers", roughly corresponding to their place on the techtree. Each tier is assigned a minimum distance from spawn where it can appear, and as such more advanced ores will require increasingly far-flung outposts to acquire them. Additionally, the richness of the patches starts abysmally low near spawn, but increases rapidly with distance, with patches a few hundred tiles out being of ten times higher yield, and a thousand tiles away being another twenty times on top of that. Additionally, the patches themselves grow somewhat larger, meaning they can support more miners and yield better total yield per unit time.
A sample ore distribution with vanilla ores + sulfur. Note the increasing richness and size, and how each ore aside from the basic four only spawns at a set minimum distance, based on its tier. (Click or open in new tab to see full size.)
Sample distribution with Bob's mods, where the greater diversity in ores makes the tiering even more clear.
There are two generation modes in Oreverhaul. The first simply edits ores already placed by the native game autoplace specifications, deleting "too close to spawn" ores to enforce distance tiering and editing richnesses on a per-tile basis. This mode leaves the ore generation "feeling" mostly vanilla, but cannot apply all the normal effects of distance - for example patches growing in size with increasing distance - and because of the increasingly strict deletion behavior nearer the spawn, can result in the total amount of ore being unexpectedly low. Additionally, due to the possibility of overlapping ore patches of which Oreverhaul deletes one ore, this can result in some strange ore field geometries.
The second generation mode, the default, completely replaces the autoplace-based ore generation, and places ore patches explicitly, based on the set of ores which can spawn at that distance. This has no issues with ore amounts or placement irregularities, and is much more flexible and reliable, but is slightly less vanilla-feeling, and is marginally more expensive to generate. Additionally, with this mode selected, the "preview" feature in the map settings is no longer accurate for ore placement, and all ore-related map generation settings in the menu (size, frequency, richness) are entirely ignored.
Biters
To mesh with the ore generation changes, as well as to allow for the potential of forcing the player into conflict with biters to get increasingly high-tier ores, Oreverhaul can also redesign the placement and nature of biter nests, such that they grow increasingly large - and unit choices increasingly powerful - with increasing distance. As such, nests near the spawn will be single isolated spawners, and rarely spitters; with increasing distance, spitters may appear, as can worms of increasing size, and the nests will become clusters. By a thousand tiles away, these can include dozens of spawners, half of which are spitters, and equally many worms, including many big or behemoth ones (Oreverhaul actually used to create a green worm before one was added to vanilla in 0.17).Like with ore placement, the spawner generation system has "vanilla with modification pass" and "overhaul" modes, and has much the same advantages and caveats for both.
Configuration
Oreverhaul is extremely configurable, both in terms of toggling specific features as well as controlling numerical scaling factors and assignments. These settings are so extensive that they cannot cleanly be used inside the mod settings system; many consist of tables of values, or have extensive explanation, neither of which is compatible with the mod settings interface.As a result, configuration of Oreverhaul is done by editing the config file in the mod with a text editor, either directly with an archive program or by unpacking the zip and editing the resultant .lua file. These settings will take effect as soon as you reload the save; a game restart is not necessary.
This settings process means that in multiplayer, each player must have an identical copy of the configuration file; for that, the modpack creator (ie whoever sets up the pack and all the settings) should edit the config file and distribute that to the other players, who can just drop it into their mod zip files (overwriting the original). Do not make a habit of sharing the entire mod file, as this will cause versioning issues and will in the long term result in settings being lost as you update mods.
Configuration Settings
The following is the full list of the configuration settings, pulled directly from the code repository:oreTierDistances
Type: TableCurrent Default Value:
{
tier0 = 0,
tier1 = 40,
tier2 = 200,
tier3 = 500,
tier4 = 1000,
tier5 = 2000
}
tier0 = 0,
tier1 = 40,
tier2 = 200,
tier3 = 500,
tier4 = 1000,
tier5 = 2000
}
oreTiers
Type: TableCurrent Default Value:
{
coal = 0,
iron-ore = 0,
copper-ore = 0,
stone = 0,
ground-water = 0,
tin-ore = 1,
lead-ore = 1,
quartz = 1,
nickel-ore = 2,
silver-ore = 2,
crude-oil = 2,
lithia-water = 2,
zinc-ore = 2,
sulfur = 2,
cobalt-ore = 3,
bauxite-ore = 3,
gold-ore = 3,
gem-ore = 3,
rutile-ore = 4,
tungsten-ore = 4,
uraninite = 5,
fluorite = 5,
uranium-ore = 5,
thorium-ore = 5
}
coal = 0,
iron-ore = 0,
copper-ore = 0,
stone = 0,
ground-water = 0,
tin-ore = 1,
lead-ore = 1,
quartz = 1,
nickel-ore = 2,
silver-ore = 2,
crude-oil = 2,
lithia-water = 2,
zinc-ore = 2,
sulfur = 2,
cobalt-ore = 3,
bauxite-ore = 3,
gold-ore = 3,
gem-ore = 3,
rutile-ore = 4,
tungsten-ore = 4,
uraninite = 5,
fluorite = 5,
uranium-ore = 5,
thorium-ore = 5
}
starterOres
Type: TableCurrent Default Value:
{
coal = 4,
iron-ore = 7,
copper-ore = 4,
stone = 2
}
coal = 4,
iron-ore = 7,
copper-ore = 4,
stone = 2
}
ignoredOres
Type: ListCurrent Default Value:
[geothermal]
redoOrePlacement
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
true
redoSpawnerPlacement
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
true
richnessScaling
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
true
richnessFactors
Type: TableCurrent Default Value:
{
sulfur = 0.6
}
sulfur = 0.6
}
radiusFactors
Type: TableCurrent Default Value:
{
sulfur = 0.75
}
sulfur = 0.75
}
antiBias
Type: TableCurrent Default Value:
{
sulfur = 0.8,
stone = 0.3
}
sulfur = 0.8,
stone = 0.3
}
oreMixinSeed
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
0
spawnerMixinSeed
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
0
offsetX
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
0
offsetY
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
0
oreTierDistanceFactor
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
1
oreRichnessDistanceFactor
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
1
oreDistanceFactor
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
1
oreSizeDistanceFactor
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
1
spawnerDistanceFactor
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
1
minSpawnerDistance
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
400
spawnerClustering
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
1
oreRichnessScalingFactor
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
2.5
flatRichnessFactor
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
1
orePatchChanceFactor
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
1
plateauRichness
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
false
spawnerScaling
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
true
spawnerRateFactor
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
1
clearSmallPatches
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
true
orePatchCondensationStart
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
1.4
orePatchCondensationEnd
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
2
richnessPerOre
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
true
nestHealthFactor
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
10
retrogenOreDistance
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
-1
retrogenSpawnerDistance
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
-1
retrogenOreSet
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
{
}
}
enforceSpawnerTieringForBuiltBases
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
true
expensiveRecipeMultiplier
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
1.5
expensiveTechMultiplier
Type: Single ValueCurrent Default Value:
1.125