Spellflight

5/29/15 | Categories:

• General,
• Kerbal Space Program,
• Pathfinder

The stock resource system in Kerbal Space Program (KSP) 1.0 is pretty neat. Based upon the Regolith mod, the stock resource system uses a seed value- basically a large randomly generated number- as the basis for resource concentrations and distributions. Each time you create a new save, a new number gets generated. All the planets and asteroids in the game will have randomly distributed resources based upon this one number. Change it, and everything gets changed. Since a core mechanic of Pathfinder is the ability to alter the local region’s (known as a biome) resource distribution, changing that seed value is out of the question.

Fortunately, I found a way around the problem, and it works beautifully.

With that core mechanic proven to be possible, I started building the core sample analyzer last night, in the form of the “Gold Digger” mini drill, a new part I’m creating that uses the stock Drill-O-Matic 3D art coupled with my custom code. I ran into a bug in the game though. When you do a surface analysis using the surface scanner, you “unlock” the biome and gain access to better resource concentrations. But when you ask the ResourceMap if a biome is unlocked, it cheerfully reports that it’s unlocked, even though it isn’t (and you can verify that by looking inside your save-game file).

As you can imagine, I’ve found a workaround for that bug, you have to go to the ResourceScenario and go look at the biome lock data. Now my little Gold Digger will correctly tell you that you need to perform a surface scan before taking a core sample. And with my newfound ability to alter the biome’s resource distributions without altering them everywhere, Pathfinder’s core concept remains firmly intact: move in, find the best spot for a future base, and move on- and possibly strike gold…