Meaningful variance in cat-tail distribution

[lyttol]

Although run to run the exact location of cat tails varies, the laws of probability dictate that you still end up with roughly the same number of cat tails in each cat tail rich location. 

For example, if there are 100 spots on the milton basin where cat tails might appear with and independent probability of say 20%, you will always get around 20 cat tails in total.

I would like the population of cat tails for each "cat tail location" to get rolled once, (so following the example, milton basin gets one random number between 10 and 40 cat tails  and those cat tails are then randomly distributed around possible cat tail locations. I feel that this would make it more interesting.

(A really simple way to implement this would be to assign each cat tail location a "local population label", and then modify the base spawn chance for each cat tail location by a "local population health modifier". In the example Milton Basin would be the local population label, the base spawn chance would be 0.2, and the local population modifier would a single random number between 0.5 and 2.0, for example!)

I actually am quite happy with the other harvestable resources, because there tend to be far fewer of them, the variation is more meaningful.

[lyttol]

So taking Milton for example. We would define local population labels so all cat tails belong to one of the following (you could have more or less areas depending on what granularity you wanted):

Milton Basin Lower

Milton Basin Upper

Long stream Lower portion

Long stream Upper portion

Pond near Radio Tower

Pond below crashed plane

Church Pond

Moose Pond

Spruce Falls Bridge Pond

Mystery Lake Ravine

Milton Town Pond

And each one would get a health modifier between 0.5 and 2.0 (or 0.25 and 4 or whatever) that modifies the spawn probability for each cat tail... 

This would ensure a more uneven and unpredictable distribution of cat tails between games, increasing replayability...

Hope its clear...

Edited July 10, 2019 by lyttol

[Alphyrion]

In keeping with my post on item locations, I favour anything like this that reduces the predictability of gameplay experience.

Edited July 11, 2019 by Alphyrion