FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Hello everyone,

I'm new to minetest and how everything works but I've been walking around with the idea of a survival mode that pushes you to make a base underground and go explore underground.
I wan't to acomplish that by making a couple of changes to the map:

Strip the surface of dirt and only leave stone so nothing grows there.

Make small villages above an undeground water source. (which could be sen as a kind of oasis because I want to let there be light and vegetation)

Some kind of dungeons with loot to give some more goals to the survival.

Underground oases like mentioned above.

So I know that I'll need to change the mapgen but how I don't know.

As well I want to have herds or caravans with cattle walking around on the surface so the player can raid one of the caravans and take the cattle to his underground base. Again I know I need to program the AI but how will I let it walk between these Villages on the surface?

Thank you for reading this so far, I hope you like my drafts of this idea. And if you know how I need to program the AI and how to change the mapgen please let me know.

If you use the v7 mapgen with no Lua biome mods, you will get a barren landscape that is stone only I think without dirt.

For the underground stuff, maybe you could hack mg_villages so villages are created underground instead of on the surface. mg_villages already creates a "hole" in the landscape for the village, so perhaps it would work underground and create a cavern? You will have to try.

I think mg_villages also creates a table of all villages on the map, so mob AI could use that data for mob spawning and to pick a destination. (Pathfinding in MT isn't so great, so mobs are not guaranteed to actually reach their destination, but at least they would walk in the general direction.)

Dungeons are in the builtin MT mapgen, but they don't have chests. So you probably need a custom Lua mod that creates dungeons with chests and fills them with random loot.

Minetest_modding wrote:Make small villages above an undeground water source. (which could be sen as a kind of oasis because I want to let there be light and vegetation)

An oasis would indeed be a nice new village type.

Minetest_modding wrote:Some kind of dungeons with loot to give some more goals to the survival.

All those dungeons created by mapgen are a bit empty. I'm just not sure yet what ought to be found inside. Does anyone have any good ideas for the dungeons created by mapgen? Who (what) would live in these? Increasing their frequency and adding a bit might already be enough for your needs.

Morn76 wrote:For the underground stuff, maybe you could hack mg_villages so villages are created underground instead of on the surface. mg_villages already creates a "hole" in the landscape for the village, so perhaps it would work underground and create a cavern? You will have to try.

Right now, mg_villages is (deliberately) limited to the chunks above ground, but that could of course be changed. And the noise would work as soon as there's only one village at a time at a given x,z coordinate (regardless of the height). Spawning underground cities may still be very tricky. Just enable noclip and fly through the stone next to your mine...and see how many dungeons and caves are there which you'll have never seen without noclip. The caverealms caves are HUGE and frequent enough so that some are found occasionally. Smaller structures would very rarely be encountered by players. Maybe such structures could be hinted at by a huge, visible entrance above surface, while not residing too deep.

Morn76 wrote:I think mg_villages also creates a table of all villages on the map, so mob AI could use that data for mob spawning and to pick a destination. (Pathfinding in MT isn't so great, so mobs are not guaranteed to actually reach their destination, but at least they would walk in the general direction.)

mg_villages creates such a table and makes the coordinates and other data of villages accessible by other mods. However, caravans between villages will fail for the same reason autonomous carts don't work - if a chunk inbetween is not loaded, the mob/entitiy will simply stop. Better let them wander around aimlessly and pretend they're on their way to a far-away village.

Morn76 wrote:If you use the v7 mapgen with no Lua biome mods, you will get a barren landscape that is stone only I think without dirt.

Either minetest_game or builtin now contains biomes.