Hello, I'm not really a modder per se but I figured this might be the place to come to for advice. It may be a simple question and I just need a quick pointer. What I'm trying to do is as follows: 1) Find planets which definitely have the "stardust" or "glowing rain" weather effect. 2) Search as efficiently as is possible. 3) Determine, from the .world file if possible, what the 'percentage' of time a particular world exhibits the "stardust" or "glowing rain" effect. I have the notepad++ application which affords me some ability to look inside the *.world files deep inside my Starbound directory. But I'm new to this and not 100% sure what I'm doing. Mostly, unsure of what I'm looking for. I'm hoping that a modder who has taken an interest in weather effects can turn me on to what I should be looking for and/or where to find it in a *.world file. Understand, I don't really want to change or mod it at this point; I want to start to catalog a list of worlds in the game which have this particular weather effect and to what degree. Also useful would be to know if it is already a given that certain biomes or sub-biomes (or planets orbiting types of stars?) are more or less likely to have it in the first place. Thanks in advance for any advice or pointers.
I can't really help you with the first two, but all weather effect durations are the same across biomes. You can look at the .surfacebiome files in Starbound\assets\biomes\surface\[whatever] and find the weather heading. The weather heading consists of a list of lists of potential weather effects for the planet type to generate when it's first created, and then the list of weather effects gives you the percentage of time that the planet is going to use a particular weather effect. It's a bit better in example: Code: "weather" : [ [ [0.1, "glowingrain"], [0.9, "clear"] ], [ [0.03, "meteorshower"], [0.97, "clear"] ], [ [0.01, "largemeteor"], [0.99, "clear"] ], [ [1.0, "clear"] ] ], Here's a snipped version of a .surfacebiome file. A planet can choose from any one of these blocks of weather, and in this case has a 25% chance to pick a glowingrain block. Each block can have multiple weather types, and the number inside is the percentage of the time it's active. At least, that's my understanding of the weather system at the moment.
Wow, that was a huge help! Thank you. So as you suggested; looking in the .surfacebiome files under the heading "weather" I can see it just as you've laid out. From biome to biome there are some differences. Some have a different number of blocks [ ... ] and some have a different chance for "glowingrain". At the most basic level (not adjusting for number of blocks; most of which are typically the 1.0 "clear" variety in any event; there is always a chance for a planet to have glowing rain IF the block that has "glowingrain" is the one picked by the planet. What remains is to find out how to determine, after a planet is generated, which 'block' it picked. As of now the only biome listed which does NOT have a block with a chance for "glowingrain" is the Ocean biome which I don't think is even active at this time. Most biomes have in it a single block which includes chance for "glowingrain" at 0.025 along with "rain (0.1)", "storm (0.05)" and "drizzle (0.125)". (Barren, Forest, Grassland, Jungle, Magma, Savannah, Snow, Tentacles and Volcanic.) These biomes have the block with only "glowingrain" at a 0.1 chance and no other weather effects. Artic, Arid, Asteroid Field, Desert, Moon and Tundra. Again, not correcting for the number of blocks (most of which have only the "clear" attribute) which seem to be around ten for each biome, this would indicate that there is a better chance of seeing "glowing rain" on Artic, Arid, Asteroid Field, Desert, Moon and Tundra biome planets. Not a given but if so then it would produce glowing rain about 10% of the time. But assuming that for the biome the number of blocks is ten and nine of those do NOT contain "glowingrain" and the single block that does has it just 10% of the time means that without being able to parse that info from the *.world file after it is generated one might waste a lot of time determining whether a given world did or did not have "glowingrain" by having to hang out and wait and see for something that might never come... But a great step; thanks again!
I used Notepad++ to search all of the nearly 400 *.world files in my Starbound Universe folder for the "glowingrain" value and it returned hits in, I think, 28 of them. And because every *.world file is named for the quadrant and X,Y coordinate of the star it should be fairly trivial to work my way back to and to begin to catalog the planets I have generated which took the biome's weather block containing "glowingrain". Yay! More importantly, going forward, I'm going to keep a quick chart of not only the quadrant, X and Y, but specifically the system's name and the position (3rd orbit, moon "b") of the world I'm visiting (and thus generating a *.world file for). I will hop around to as many different systems as my fuel stores will permit, then search them all with Notepad++ and find which ones have "glowingrain" and THEN return and evaluate those planets more closely. Update: Have expanded my questions about world files; if anyone was interested by this thread I'd appreciate a read and comment here: http://community.playstarbound.com/index.php?threads/woolgathering-about-the-world-files.65312/
