TL;DR:
- Sector generation for this seed (maybe all seeds?) has a small chance to choose different hypershunt locations.
- Most blue stars in the sector can be chosen but not all.
- Other options selected at game start do not have an impact.
- Hypershunt locations are chosen in pairs, not individually and with a relatively uniform pattern suggesting a multinomial (choosing randomly from a fixed set of options) distribution.
I'm back with a larger sample size. I generated this sector (MN-6470290063350753680) 100 times for each possible set of starting choices to be made at game start. 1,2,3,4, or 5 for the starting fleets, 1 or 2 for companion ship if you picked a starting ship instead of a starting fleet, and 1 or 2 for easy or normal difficulty. There are 14 total combinations * 100 generations * 2 hypershunts = 2800 total hypershunt locations. These are the results for the hypershunt locations across all of the generated sectors, the generated sectors where the first option was always chosen at game start, and the generated sectors where the second option was always chosen at game start: (and please don’t worry about my sanity, ChatGPT formatted the table for me)
| Sample | All | Option 1 | Option 2 |
| Zeta Lamya | 1142 | 82 | 88 |
| Beta Ala | 1132 | 80 | 88 |
| Ukobach | 65 | 5 | 2 |
| Kigameng | 60 | 7 | 3 |
| Ranyox | 37 | 2 | 2 |
| Vucub-Came | 36 | 1 | 0 |
| Marax | 35 | 3 | 3 |
| Gamma Lamya | 32 | 3 | 1 |
| Epsilon Enyen | 30 | 4 | 2 |
| Neter-hkertet | 30 | 2 | 1 |
| Alpha Morum | 28 | 5 | 2 |
| Maderakka | 26 | 2 | 1 |
| Gamma Anyang | 20 | 0 | 1 |
| Delta Anyang | 18 | 0 | 1 |
| Beta Kalahari | 18 | 0 | 1 |
| Zeta Mbombo | 16 | 0 | 0 |
| Epsilon Deina | 13 | 0 | 0 |
| Carcus | 13 | 1 | 2 |
| Beta Meleuthia | 11 | 0 | 1 |
| Gamma Sidor | 11 | 0 | 1 |
| Sawal | 10 | 2 | 0 |
| Delta Kestral | 9 | 1 | 0 |
| Elsbeth | 8 | 0 | 0 |
From the total data we can make a few key observations. There is obviously a strong bias towards the hypershunts being at Zeta Lamya and Beta Ala, but it's actually possible for the hypershunts to spawn at most (but not all!) of the blue giants and supergiants outside of the core in this sector. However, even excluding the Zeta Lamya and Beta Ala systems there is still a bias towards some blue supergiants over others with a large distribution from 65 to 8. This does not match a normal distribution that we would expect from a random selection of any blue star outside of Zeta Lamya and Beta Ala.
Looking at the rightmost columns we can see that breaking it down by the options selected at game start shows that they have no effect. Generating 100 sectors for each set of selected options showed that Zeta Lamya – Beta Ala was chosen approximately 80/100 times for every set of starting conditions.
I was next curious whether the two systems selected for hypershunts were correlated. This heatmap depicts the frequency of each pair of hypershunt systems across all of the save files:
As we can see the locations of the two hypershunts are tightly correlated. The heatmap is largely empty, meaning that most combinations do not occur and indicating that the selection of the two hypershunt locations are entangled. Some hypershunts only occur with one other hypershunt, like Beta Kalahari and Delta Anyang. Some hypershunt locations can occur with multiple others like Kigameng with Alpha Morum, Maderakka, and Neter-hkertet. Looking at the data broken down in this way we can also see that the distributions are more even. The hypershunt locations outside of the Zeta Lamya and Beta Ala pair that are the most common, such as Kigameng and Ukobach, are the systems that have the most other partners.
This looks to me like it could be explained by a multinomial distribution, basically drawing marbles out of a bag where each system pair is a marble. The majority of the marbles are Zeta Lamya – Beta Ala, but one of the marbles in the bag is Zeta Lamya – Epsilon Enyen, and two of the marbles are Beta Kalahari – Delta Anyang, etc.
I will go ahead and run my script to generate results for another seed to compare the distributions to understand whether this seed is unique or if this stochasticity is present in all seeds. I might also take a look at orbital solar arrays. Hopefully this is helpful in narrowing down where the bug might be occurring. Even if it isn't, I'm enjoying myself
so thanks for humoring me. I would also just like to say I bought this game in 2012 and have been playing it ever since, so I want to thank you for the years of dedicated development and the inspiringly well-crafted game and I hope I can contribute in some small way to the project by helping you find this bug.
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Topic: Coronal Hypershunts and Orbital Solar Arrays only spawn sometimes for some seeds (Read 865 times)