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Author Topic: Are loot drops from searchable locations fixed?  (Read 3163 times)

Vanshilar

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Re: Are loot drops from searchable locations fixed?
« Reply #15 on: July 14, 2021, 10:17:31 AM »

Salvage skills and rigs shouldn't increase the amount of rare loot like colony items or weapons, just supplies, fuel and so on. The reason they change rare loot is the way pseudorandom generator works. The sequence is always the same and depends entirely on the seed, but the actual number you get when you query it depends on how many times you've called it before. Presumably, the salvage % bonus changes how many times random numbers are used during basic loot generation, so when it's time to generate rare items, you get different numbers from that same sequence.

Well it's a bit ambiguous. The first part about resources specifically says it does not affect rare loot. However, the second part about post-battle salvage does not have a similar disclaimer. So it's unclear if that type of situation affects rare loot or not.

This was tested by killing the mothership first, then exiting and saving, then changing the salvage % as needed, then salvaging. So any pseudorandom number generator calls from the fight or its loot does not affect the salvage here. Now since the loot is generated in order starting with common stuff, then possibly that affects the rare loot, but then the number of calls is not actually changed. So it really depends on how the code is written.

At any rate though, as is currently in the game, your salvage % does affect the rare loot that you get from these situations. Whether or not the amount is actually increased is still an open question though.

I suspect the answer as to how it actually works and whether or not it's intended really depends on if Alex feels like weighing in, we as players don't get to see that part of the code I think...
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Alex

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Re: Are loot drops from searchable locations fixed?
« Reply #16 on: July 14, 2021, 10:39:00 AM »

Oh, interesting! The game is actually quite careful not to have changes to the quantity of the non-rare drops affect the RNG for the rare drops. However, in the case of the Domain Mothership - and *only* in that case - its drop data is misconfigured and what are supposed to be the rare drops are in the "value" drops column, which is affected by the Salvaging skill*. Glad this came up - fixed it up just now!

(*For the curious: the value of that drop is set to 1 - which would've been the quantity if it was in the correct "rare" column" - but since it's not, it's treated as the "credit value" of the items to drop. Which is too low, but it drops at least one item anyway. So if Salvaging boosted drops by some incredibly high percentage - probably a couple million percent? - you would actually get multiple rare items from the motherships, as things stand now.)
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Vanshilar

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Re: Are loot drops from searchable locations fixed?
« Reply #17 on: August 08, 2021, 09:52:24 PM »

Oh, interesting! The game is actually quite careful not to have changes to the quantity of the non-rare drops affect the RNG for the rare drops. However, in the case of the Domain Mothership - and *only* in that case - its drop data is misconfigured and what are supposed to be the rare drops are in the "value" drops column, which is affected by the Salvaging skill*. Glad this came up - fixed it up just now!

Haha just my luck I thought "hmm what's something to test it on" and the first thing I thought of was the mothership. Sigh.

That still leaves the issue of "post-battle salvage" though. Although, I assume then that the distinction of whether or not something is "rare" doesn't apply; it would simply be based on if that item was equipped by a ship in combat, right? In other words, "salvageWeaponProb" in settings.json is 0.25, meaning if an enemy ship used a vulcan then there's a 25% chance that the vulcan will drop. So if my post-battle salvage bonus were 20%, then that would increase this from 25% to 30% chance.

Then there would be two questions about "post-battle salvage":

1. Is the drop rate of AI cores affected by this? Since those are based on a different set of variables ("drop_prob_officer_alpha_core" "drop_prob_mult_ai_core_capital" etc.), instead of the usual salvage ones ("salvageWeaponProb" etc.); so this is if those variables also get modified by post-battle salvage in the code.

2. How does it affect the drops of Omega weapons after the hypershunt fight? It looks like this is almost certainly affected by post-battle salvage; however, the effect seems to be that it changes which weapons are given, rather than the total amount of them. I always get 2 larges, and then always 6-8 mediums and 7-9 smalls, regardless of the post-battle salvage % (testing from 0% up to 43%). For example, in my testing (seed <Lp>-5164560592258303327</Lp>, version RC12), at post-battle salvage 20%, I always got 1 resonator MRM launcher, 3 cryoblasters, and 1 cryoflamer, and then either 1 or 3 disintegrators as my medium loot. But I don't get "more" or "less" loot with different post-battle salvage amounts; just that what I get are different. This is despite the fact that only 2 cryoblasters ever appear during the whole fight (on one of the tesseracts; the other didn't have any, and none of the shards had it either), yet somehow I can end up with 3 with this particular post-battle salvage %. Different post-battle salvage % gives me a different mix of weapons. So it doesn't seem to be performing as advertised (increasing amount of post-battle salvage) with respect to Omega weapons, although it affects the drops.
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