I made a new world and embarked on top of another cave site. Same version as before. (I'm making this post so everyone can understand, not just Rico.) I should mention that this world (and the world from my previous screenshots) were made using advanced world gen and have Make Caves Visible set to yes, which is why the caves are visible on the screen; in normal gen, they would be invisible (you can still embark on it if you knew its location beforehand, or if you're lucky).
Below is the screenshot of the surface. This one has an entrance. I drew the borders between local/embark tiles with yellow lines. (Used DFHack to reveal the whole map)
In this site, the entrance generated in the mid-bottom embark/local tile. At first glance, it seems like a lot of area, but it isn't. Your char's daytime vision range is bigger than one of those yellow squares. As said before, stepping a short distance away from the centre, then encircling it is a good strategy. Another strat I didn't mention before is using the trac[K]ing feature; creatures will sometimes leave a trail behind when they walk to and from the entrance. That said, this is also a flat open area. Searching in heavily vegetated, hilly terrain at night will undoubtedly be harder.
If this was in adv mode, the compass direction would change based on the square you're on. Reminder: the compass points towards the centre of the site. If you're on the centre square, the compass would read
***. On the top-left square,
SE, top-middle square
S, top-right
SW, centre-left
E, etc.
The colour of the direction symbols change when you travel. It can turn gray, white, brown, dark green, and light green. Don't know what they mean though.
So to reiterate what is wanted based on previous discussion:
- Bug 0001867 needs to be fixed (+stagnant pools).
- One or more of the following suggested changes:
- The original: upon discovery (i.e. announcement) of the entrance, a new compass direction, pointing towards the entrance itself, should appear. The implication is that it would make searching the entrance easier once you have "discovered" it, but until then, players still have to do a little manual searching around the site (aka walking in a big circle).
- Same as above, but instead, the compass that's pointing towards the centre of the cave site should just update to point towards the entrance.
- A wider area surrounding the entrance should be altered. Surface features can be replaced with something more indicative of a cave (e.g. rocky floor tiles replacing soil).
- My suggestion is that the entrance should always generate on the centre so that its placement aligns where the compass points towards. Players can just follow the compass that way.
Remember that before 0.44, cave sites were only 1x1 local tile-sized. While the site itself is hidden on the world and fast travel maps (w/ default params), once you discovered the site, finding the entrance was easy peasy. But now that site borders have been expanded, and since entrance placements are random, they're harder to find now. The fact that you can't fast travel through the site (which is probably intended, and not the issue here) and the fact that caves don't have visible markers on the fast travel map when you're close by (which is strange since there is a marker on the local map; see bottom of post) exacerbate the difficulty of the search.
Searching for the cave on the world map and having to ask for directions is the original challenge; searching for the entrance once you found the site was not and should not be the challenge. To put it another way, a huge rock mound jutting out of the surface should not be difficult to find once you're well near it.
I prefer the "new compass direction pointing towards the entrance" suggestion, although I think it should appear as soon as you enter the site limits, for reasons stated above. I recall that in adv mode, you can ask an NPC for the location of a specific person. Normally they would just tell you the site the person's in (if they knew), but if you ask someone while in the site, they used to tell you the structure the person inhabits and directions to said structure: "
We are in <site name>. Search first in <structure (e.g. house, hillock)> to the <direction>". The latter feature seems to be broken in current versions, but the point is that the game already keeps track of the direction of certain small structures in relation to the player (or it used to).
Some may be wondering why cave sites need all this space, when entrances only take one local tile. This is 1 z-level below the surface:
This kobold cave didn't have an egg room for some reason (top-left is the corpse pit).
Last thing I want to bring up: on the local map (when it appears in the fast travel and quest log screens), the cave marker/symbol "
•" is always on the top-left corner for all cave sites for some reason (another possible bug). This is same site as above, so if this symbol is supposed to represent the entrance, it should be on the mid-bottom of the highlighted box in the screenshot below. The highlighted box is the cave site. The symbol doesn't even appear at all in the zoomed-in fast travel map.
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Topic: The Simpliest Solution To Not Being Able To Find Cave Entrance (Read 2897 times)