Universe not so random after all?

I guess you didn't read my post, because everything you just said agrees with it. I was replying to someone who was trying to argue that the difference between true randomness and pseudo-randomness is important in the generation of planets in Starbound, thinking that I assumed procedural generation was truly random.

 

I was actually focusing on the first line you had there:'

In your own words they are not random, as true randomness is impossible and this system is designed to make it easy to replicate results.

 

You say that as if editing a config file is a reasonable alternative to simply having the ~option~ to type in a seed from an in game menu. Too many suggestions that people propose on this board are met with "Well, you can already do that by going through this convoluted series of steps". I personally think it is a great idea, and believe that many people would enjoy the idea that the universe they are exploring is truly unique, even if it is just for the novelty. Also, a button in the menu to wipe the universe would be pretty cool.

 

Technically, unless you are looking up seeds to warp to, the universe you're going through is 100% unique. As the chance of randomly stumbling on a world already discovered by someone else (even if you do not know that someone's already been there) is very, very low. Like .00000001%. I've done the math before and it'd take about 1000 years for the entire Starbound community to just warp to each world, let alone explore it. So when you warp to that new world you can be 99.99999% sure that no one has ever been there before.

That said I can understand that people may not have the will power to resist looking up coords (or stumble upon them by accident) so the option to change the universe seed is nice. It may be slightly arduous to do so right now, but that's to be expected as it's still beta and I expect that this opinion is not the majority. Hopefully official support comes soon, or at least a decent mod.

Personally I'm hoping to see good use out of the sector system. Rather than have a unique universe, I'd like to be able to spawn a unique sector for myself (that exists alongside vanilla Starbound). This could also be used for any mods that have their own races or stories. If it's all contained in it's own sector(s) I won't have to change anything to play the mod.

 

That line was simply to sum up what I was saying in laymen's terms. Some random reader may not understand the concept of procedural generation.