Cave Type Mapping Project

[___________Kronocide]

EDIT: Changed data format to more sensible variant.

I feel a strong urge to avoid those annoying brown caves on my blitz missions. So, I have started a new habit. Every time I get to a new mission, I note down in a text file that I keep open:

Cave type <tab> My lvl <tab> Coordinates <tab> Mission lvl

Eventually, I want to have collected enough of this data to be useful in Clicksaver, helpbot, or in some stand-alone app. Obviously, this will take ages if I do it alone, so if you'd like to start this habit as well that would be an immense help.

One cool thing with doing this is that even if I abandon a mission, I may at least have mapped a new cave, so it doesn't feel like a complete waste of time.

The project depends on a few assumptions, that I have made after reading comments from more experienced blitzers:

* Cave type is always the same at the same location. With the possible exception noted below.

* Cave type may depend on your level or the level of the mission.

Someone more enlightened about these things may be able to correct me in my assumptions.

Eventually, I want to be able to avoid brown caves before I run to the other side of Varmint Woods.

I will put up a web page for the project were people can follow developments shortly.

Don't hesitate to contact Tenfour on RK1 when I'm online with questions or comments.

EDIT:
I should clarify that by "location" I mean coordinates. Sometimes coordinates aren't shown in mission descriptions for some reason, then you have to look them up on the map yourself.

[Dovve]

I gave this a try and was unsuccessfull back when I was doing missions for my 1k board.

I would get missions form onmi entertainment to mort or PW. Every time I got a grey cave mission i would enter it's coords into clicksaver as a location and then attempt to get a mission for the same coords.

Sometimes there would be another grey cave one there, but if i kept going to the same spot i would get a brown cave soon enough. Usually i only got a grey cave from the same point 2 times in a row (if i was lucky).

I kept at this process (since i didnt have much better to do) the whole time i was going for my 1k board. I was unable to ever find a mission entrace that was static in terms of cave type.

Its worth noting that i never leveled during all of the missions that i did due to my "terminate back to entertainment" way of doing things. So my level was not an issue.

I hope you have better luck than I did.

[___________Kronocide]

Thanks, that's useful info. I assume others have tried this course before me. There seems to be some dispute about whether caves are more or less static or random, so maybe it's possible to at least establish the behavior. And even if they are semi-random, there may be interesting statistical features that could help in choosing the best mission locations.

Anyway, I will keep at it for a while, and would appreciate any help.

Thanks!

[Jynne]

The mission entrance type has little-to-nothing to do with the type of mission you find. I think that location, zone and especially 'sub-zone,' is the determining factor.

[Ashuras]

Cave type is determined by these paramters:

0) Location of Mission Terminal
1) Mission Type
2) Mission QL
3) Mission Location (this is not an absolute, it's in "clusters" of nearby locations)
4) Mission pickup item (for those observe item mission)

I can only say for the observe item missions, coz I've done extension testing with this type of mission. Can't say for others.

If u pick the same settings for the above 5 parameters, u can be sure to get the SAME type of cave every time.

Oh.. not exactly the same, but rather, same set of 2 or 3 caves, for one set of the above tuple.

And lastly, mission reward does NOT matter.

[Phione]

Well, if we just take a look at Clon**** Missions for a second, I one time limited the search into 2 locations (can't remember the exact coord), and have exact 3 possible types of missions. But it seemed to be chosen randomly between the 3 for those 2 locations....

[engelstein]

This may not be practical for some lower-level players, but if you just pull missions to BS you always get building-type missions. They don't get really huge until after 200. But they can get really big. Once I was in a 238 so long my temp HP ran out. That was a scary mission.