Crypt Cleanser
Posts: 689
Joined: Saturday, 12th December 2015, 23:54
Don't spawn literal trash monsters
Here's what a line in the pop_entry for dungeon looks like:
{ 6, 16, 1000, FLAT, MONS_BULLFROG }
The first number is min depth, second is max depth, third is weight (this doesn't mean anything without the context of all the other weights but 1000 is pretty high), FLAT is a type of curve that defines how the weight changes with depth (in this case it doesn't change), and lastly it tells us that this info is for bullfrogs. You can get out of depth spawns, hence you can see bullfrogs above D:6, but D:6 is the first floor that they're in depth.
You might notice that bullfrogs stay in depth for the entire dungeon past D:6 and even a little beyond that (this matters for OOD spawns). I assert without argument that D:15 bullfrogs are not threatening in any reasonable circumstance. Why are they still in depth at the bottom of dungeon? Here are some other notable offenders:
- Giant cockroaches and ball pythons are in depth through D:8
- leopard geckos and jackals are in depth through D:11
- adders and quokkas are in depth through D:12
- worker ants, iguanas, scorpions, hounds and phantoms, are in depth through D:14
- crimson imps, shadow imps, jellies, quasits, sky beasts, ice beasts, and necrophages are in depth through D:15
- hungry ghosts and their fearsome five damage attack don't start being in depth until D:7 and stay in depth through the end of dungeon (and into the OOD only zone!)
- gnolls can get spawned in orc
- shadows can get spawned in swamp and crypt
The obvious solution is to just tighten up the lower ranges. For example, stop spawning cockroaches and ball pythons past D:3. Two minor caveats with this approach though: 1) some of the weights use a curve of some variety or another so you'd have to do some calculations to retain the same spawn rate for that monster on the upper floors, and 2) if you "just" remove D:8 cockroaches, you will generate slightly more of the other monsters that can generate on D:8, increasing the average available experience and difficulty for those floors. So I appreciate that a good solution would require some amount of work.
I would suggest the following changes for the monsters I listed:
- cockroach, ball python, leopard gecko, jackal max depth D:3
- adder and quokka max depth D:4
- worker ant, iguana, scorpion, hound, phantom max depth D:8
- crimson imp, shadow imp, jelly, quasit, sky beast, ice beast max depth D:8
- bullfrog max depth D:8
- No necrophages or hungry ghosts at all
- No gnolls in orc
- No shadows in swamp or crypt
If you want to check out the monster data for yourself it's in mon-pick-data.h.
- For this message the author Hellmonk has received thanks: 9
- Arrhythmia, bel, chequers, duvessa, Gigaslurp, Implojin, nago, Shard1697, VeryAngryFelid