Question about clay

[MDub 68]

From the change log back in .1 "Goldenrod flowers now grow over clay even if the clay is under a layer of soil."The last couple of times while playing the game I've run across several patches of goldenrod on the surface. They were typically near the beach, as I was just randomly roaming around, and tend to stay near water when I do that. While the goldenrod was there, there most certainly wasn't any clay anywhere near the surface. These are the cliff like features which were added in 79, and it was almost entirely a single layer of soil on top of stone of one type or another. Does this mean that clay can spawn much deeper than ~ sea level, or does it represent a bug with the flower spawning? I cant really say if I dug down more than one layer in every place possible, but I can say for sure that many goldenrod had spawned on single dirt layers which were directly above a stone block. This was on a server which was running 79.6, and I haven't seen it happen in .7 yet, but wonder none the less. I didn't notice anything else that I thought was relevant to clay in the 79 change logs, but I suppose I could have missed something. 

[EstebanLB 183]

Yeah, I noticed this too. Although I like the new terrain generation with more real ground, a single layer of dirt over the stone layer, the golden root trolling us is not fun ¬¬

[Bioxx 796]

This is odd but I'm already doing everything that I can to make sure that they only spawn near clay. If the claygen successfully places clay then it triggers a flag that lets goldenrod spawn in the vicinity. If it is somehow still doing this, I'm at a loss as to how to prevent it. :/

[CHeuberger 9]

This is odd but I'm already doing everything that I can to make sure that they only spawn near clay. If the claygen successfully places clay then it triggers a flag that lets goldenrod spawn in the vicinity. If it is somehow still doing this, I'm at a loss as to how to prevent it. :/

 

I had a look at the source code and found 2 possible causes:

 

1) what happens if the terrain is too step, that is, when the surface height changes a lot between the location used to call the generate method (j) and the location where the clay was created (yCoord)? I believe that there will be a Goldenrod Flower on the surface, but the clay can be kind of deep under the surface. I could not find any of this in my test world.

2) as I understand, Large Rocks are generated after clay so that the rock can eventually substitute the clay leaving the Goldenrod behind. I found that in my test world - location: 389, 151, -10339; seed: gr

 

I think that both point don't need to be changed... 

 

Probably it would help having an example: world seed and coordinates where the clay is missing...

[MDub 68]

You may or may not want to address this. For what its worth, I don't personally think the issue is big enough to warrant all that much escalation. I can still readily find clay most of the time, and while stumbling across some troll goldenrod from time to time sucks, it hasnt happened enough to me personally, or evidently others often enough for it to be that big of a deal. On Cheuberger's note, perhaps clay had indeed spawned there, and was replaced by the cliff stuff during world generation?

 

Honestly I was more interested in knowing if the spawn mechanics of clay had changed, than having this weird behavior fixed.

[Brodir43 0]

It seems impossible to find clay at the moment, on the world i created i've been playing for an hour and not been able to find any yet. Is it meant to be this way?

 

Ah - It may be because my world seems to be entirely made up of zones with 250 rain so far, so it won't spawn. Shame i found such an awesome island but no clay...

[Kittychanley 1,002]

I can confirm the boulder issue using the world seed and coords CHeuberger provided. However, unless more people provide world seeds and coordinates of this happening for cases other than boulders replacing clay, there is nothing we can do to fix this.