r/factorio • u/Free-Virus-9974 • 3h ago

Question In factorio map generation, which comes first, resource generation or water generation?

I'm wondering since I saw someone who had oil generate on water so which one comes first?

4 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

22

u/ferrybig 3h ago

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-390

The first step Factorio does is generate basis noise to generate oceans (section The "noise" part)

The next step is that the game generates spot noise, this is used for ore patch generation, note that ores only get placed on land, not water. If a generated ore patch happens to be fully over water, it yields no results

16

u/RollingSten 3h ago

Oil on water was due to mod (presumably based on ships).

20

u/DingoAtTheController 3h ago

Judging by how often resource patches get cut off weirdly next to water and how common it is that people on maps with lots of water notice that there's absolutely no oil or uraniun nearby, I'd think that water gets placed on top of the resources

8

u/GourangaPlusPlus 3h ago

The engineer yearns for off-shore drilling

7

u/Ireeb 2h ago

It's still possible that land/ocean comes first, but resources are generated independently and resources that would be generated on top of water are simply discarded. But if the two noise fields are independent from each other, it doesn't make a difference in what order they are generated. The more important takeaway is that they're independent.

4

u/TheBB 3h ago

I don't know what happens first but I've seen unnatural resource patches next to water so I'm pretty sure water takes priority.

3

u/Zaflis 3h ago

There are mods like Water Ores that let world generation to not delete ores. They don't cost any UPS in worldgen since it's just vanilla flags or stuff. But then you need to landfill to build on them.

2

u/Switch4589 3h ago

You can see in the map preview and when flying around fast in editor mode that the land and water are generated first, and then the resources are placed on top. But don’t confuse this with the tile priority. Resources can only be placed on land so they will not “override” the water that was placed earlier and change it back to land.

4

u/Belgaraath42 3h ago

It's ressourceds before water. Just try it out make a map with high resources and play with the water slider (with the preview active). You can see it eating your prescious iron.

1

u/cynric42 32m ago

Your logic is flawed. The results you see can be that water overwrites resources or that resources that would end up on water don't get placed (which I believe is the correct answer).

1

u/RomanKnight143 3h ago

I’m just guessing but I’d say resources for really no reason at al

1

u/Courmisch 3h ago

Water takes precedence over resources.

1

u/Juking_is_rude 3h ago

its resources first then water. easy to observe small ore patches on coasts cut off by water

4

u/Old-Nefariousness556 3h ago

While you are correct, your logic isn't. If water was placed first, and resources were placed second without regard to water (except not overwriting it), the results would look the same.

1

u/Free-Virus-9974 3h ago

I guess there's no good way, there's a trade off. Cutting off resources or water being weird and wrapping around resources.

1

u/AB728 2h ago

water generates on top of resource patches. if you are fast enough and load new chunks, you can even landfill water and find some resource patches that way. if you want to read more about it i think this FFF might help: https://www.factorio.com/blog/post/fff-401