This game wants to kill me

Wow, that is a huge monster zoo.

 

I'm glad that wasn't me. My response would have beeen "" followed by "Kill ALL the things!"

It probably would not have ended well.

 

Wow, I know I couldn't go downstairs until it is finished. I can't resist killing them all. Also, that is probably the reason why I only killed dredmor once...

 

Somewhere, there are Prometheans fapping like crazy to that.

 

That's actually a warrior build's wet dream. Back away a bit, take them on in melee combat,and now you have a wall in the center to hide behind so the ranged stragglers don't all attack you at once!

 

So it _does_ spawn. I've noticed that odd-shaped zoo in the main-game files before, and thought it "how weird that I've never seen that room in-game despite 400 hours of play. It only appears on that floor, and really damn rarely.

Code:

  <room width="27" height="21" name="I Heard You Like Mudkips">
  <row text="###########################"/>
  <row text="###########################"/>
  <row text="##GGG...............GGGGG##"/>
  <row text="##GGG...............GGGGG##"/>
  <row text="##GGGGGGGG...GG.....GGGGG##"/>
  <row text="##GGGGGGGG...GG.....GGGGG##"/>
  <row text="##GGGGG......GGGG...GGG..##"/>
  <row text="##GGGGG......GGGG...GGG..##"/>
  <row text="##........GGGGGGG........##"/>
  <row text="#.........GGGGGGG........##"/>
  <row text="d.........GGGGGGG........##"/>
  <row text="#...........GGGGG........##"/>
  <row text="##..........GGGGG........##"/>
  <row text="##GGGGG.............GGGGG##"/>
  <row text="##GGGGG.....GGG.....GGGGG##"/>
  <row text="##GGG.......GGG.....GGGGG##"/>
  <row text="##GGG.......GGG.....GGGGG##"/>
  <row text="##GGG...............GGGGG##"/>
  <row text="##GGG...............GGGGG##"/>
  <row text="###########################"/>
  <row text="###########################"/>
  <flags zoo="1" minLevel="2" maxLevel="2"/>
  </room>

That's really great. I'm super thrilled to see that works. Testing that room by deleting the two common zoos has been on my "to do" list for a long time, and I just hadn't gotten around to it. Your post and screenshot just saved me from that chore, and confirmed a number of theories I've had about how zoos work and how dungeon layout happens. Thanks for sharing it.

Expect some crazy-shaped zoos in future versions of Interior Dredmorating.

 

That's insane. One of the normal zoos has room for 220 monsters ? Evil Gaslamp developpers !

Daynab you're lucky you had visited the whole floor before kicking that door open...

 

I live in breathless anticipation of the day I get that as a double zoo.

 

that's nothing. i traveled into the future and played DoD 5.0.6. They had one floor that was ALL monster zoo.

 

LOL... I love how one of the monsters is saying "No hard feelings" on that too

 

I barely managed to kill off my first zoo last night... holy crackers was it tough O_O

But that right there's just scary...

 

What theories, may I ask?

 

Have I mentioned I love the name of this thread?

This game? Trying to kill you? Absurd!

 

The biggest one:
1.) Monster zoos are stocked by giving each open floor space a high (but not 100%) chance of spawning a monster. Goo, Water, and Ice probably don't trigger monster spawns in zoos. The room in question has around 230 floor spaces, plus another 200 Goo spaces, yet spawned only 220 monsters.



While that's the main revelation, it also provides evidence in favor of the following theories I'd already had going for a while:

2.) The larger the room, the less likely it spawns. I've had plenty of anecdotal evidence towards this end, and this is just one more data point. (Or one more bit of confirmation bias.) If the size didn't matter, one would expect this room to be 1/3rd of the zoos on this floor, and it's clearly not.

3.) The more doors, and the more directions they are oriented in, the more likely the room will spawn. This room is so rare because of the combo of being huge and having just one door, placed in the middle of a large side. It won't spawn if there's any other rooms intruding on the 13 spaces north or south of an east-facing door that it could potentially be attached to. This was an obvious supposition again based on lots of other anecdotal evidence from the rooms.xml. But I couldn't previously rule out the possibility that there was something else about this room that was preventing it, such as the possibility it was just an artifact from some previous iteration of the zoo spawning algorithm and that gaslamp had just forgotten to comment or delete it out. Now I know that it's perfectly capable of spawning on the moonbase floor, and would be 1/3rd of all zoos there if not for the combo of size and door placement.

4.) Whatever the floor generation sequence is it definitively doesn't start with the zoo and work outward. There was plenty of reason to doubt that anyway (as it's possible to get a floor with zero or two zoos) but this again is further corroboration of such a fact. Again, if it did work that way, this zoo should come up 1 time in 3 on this floor.

5.) Map generation starts at some random point (possibly the first room you enter) and spreads outward simultaneously, one room at a time in each direction. You'll notice that this room spawned on a room with 3 exits, two of which lead to long room chains. I would guess that the dungeon placement started either with that 3-way room he's standing in, or maybe with the room to the west with the stairs up (if that's the stairs he came down initially). It generated the room he's standing in (just west of the zoo) in one step. Then it generated the room to the northeast of that one, the zoo, and another room south (possibly further south if the start point was indeed the west staircase) all on the same step. Once the big zoo was in place, the other chains had no choice but to wrap around it.
This also explains double-zoo floors, being streaky RNG hiccups where the same room spawns on two different branches at the same time. Further evidence supporting this can be found in another thread around here where someone (Raust maybe?) got double identical zoos with one room in-between. I've also seen a rare bug where rooms set with special="1" can actually spawn twice on the same floor, which I suspect is the same thing going on.


Here's an tangentially-related room theory that I'll share despite it having nothing to do with this particular zoo:

6.) On NTTG, the game may actually generate an entire normal floor, then trims off or deactivates any room that's partially or completely outside the smaller map size. I've seen some freakishly tiny NTTG floors, that I can say for certain aren't the result of hidden rooms. As if the chain of rooms crossed the border and wound back, but you couldn't access the ones that were back inside the frame because one or more rooms in the chain were cut off. I've also seen some weirdness where rooms right at the border of the NTTG map have 1-thick walls with clearly an empty space behind them, always in places where a door could have been according to the room diagram. Unfortunately, every time I've encountered these NTTG peculiarities I've been playing builds with no random teleports or digging powers, so I couldn't slip past the wall. Hmm... guess I should put testing that on my to-do list.

 

Oh wow and you were on NTTG ! The God of RNG wants you to die.

 

Yeah, but not like the "get lots of money" lottery, more like the "lottery" from that one kinda-creepy short story.