Dungeoneering 101 Chapter 6: METAFORGE: Testing your dungeon

March 7, 2019 (updated 4 years ago) by

Ylva,

So, you've made your dungeon pieces, the .dungeon file and you've added plugs and sockets to your pieces. And this point you must be eager to fill your dungeons with traps and decorations but we advise you to make the following checks before you decorate.

Test your dungeon.

It's very important to test your dungeon. Decorating your dungeon is a very pleasant but time-consuming step and it can be all for nothing if you have to redo your pieces in a voxel editor.

To test your dungeon generation, open Trove and jump in the Metaforge (/mf). When loaded you can generate a complete assembly of your dungeon by dragging in the .dungeon file.

Does your dungeon generate? Good! But even when your dungeon generates without issues, it is still important to validate this more than once.

Example:

We open Trove in a windowed mode and drag the guidehouse.dungeon file in and it assembles the house we made. Note that each time you drag in .dungeon file a layout.txt will be generated, this is a debug log file, you do not need to edit it or do anything with it at all.

Tests you should always do.

Generate your dungeon multiple times and check the results for:

How is the variation?
Do all the different pieces get used or is a certain piece missing in the assembled dungeon?
Are pieces placed where they are supposed to be (or are they rotated)?
Display debug information (/debugtext) and make sure that voxel count (Elements) on your dungeon is not red. The higher is the voxel count the longer it takes for the server to generate and render your dungeon into the world. Green is good, orange is acceptable, red means you and other players will have to stare into the abyss for a bit waiting for a dungeon to show up.

Your dungeon will always try to assemble. If one piece fails to load it will just keep trying other pieces. Dungeon file will not be able to pick up pieces that do not have plugs or sockets in them.

Sometimes with variations it is hard to get every possible layout to spawn for you to check, changing Weight of pieces can help with that. You can set the weight to 1 to force it to spawn for sure (if you want to out rule the plug/socket issue) or set Weight (or Quantity) to 0 if you do not want piece to spawn at all.

Important:

Check all your pieces for plugs and sockets
Orientation matters! Plugs and sockets won't rotate for you!

Common Generation failures

It might also be possible your dungeon doesn't generate at all. Metaforge just displays an empty green field and shows a lot of text in the system chat window that vanishes too quickly.

A good thing that text is also saved into the layout.txt next to the .dungeon file.

Opening that file will display dungeon generation information, whether your dungeon assembles or not.

1. one or more blueprints is missing a plug or socket

solution: check all blueprints, one blueprint can only have one plug but it can have multiple sockets.

2. other sockets or blockers prevent rooms from spawning

solution: make sure that there are possible spawn options for all layouts, start simpler .dungeon file designs and add more complex layouts on top of already working ones

3. there are not enough rooms with plugs to fill all sockets

solution: create empty endcap blueprints with plugs that fill empty sockets if no room spawns there

4. due to rotation\placement of plugs and sockets rooms spawn outside of dimension box

solution: build up your dungeon layout in voxel editor to make sure everything fits in dimension box, check plugs orientation

Consider checking out the Metaforge Sungoddes Trials, completing those will help you understand more about plugs, sockets, and dungeon generating.

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