Improve difficulty calculation

[ryanb]

Currently the "difficulty" calculation is very rough. Here are some ideas to improve it.

• Item reuse (don't add the hammer complexity on each hit)
• Rarity of natural resources, add difficulty for rarer items
• Time it takes (1 hour is much more difficult than 1 minute)
• Byproducts (if we got an empty bowl earlier, we don't need to craft another one)
• Quick transitions (ignore 1 second/instant transitions)

[ryanb]

For item rarity, I. Can calculate the percent that item shows up across all biomes. This will likely be a very small number. I can then take the log10 of this to get a nice number to work with for the difficulty.

Combining items would just add their difficulty together. If a tool is used then only factor in the difficulty based on the % that tool is used up.

Timed transitions could add a slight amount depending on the length of time. Perhaps add 10 difficulty per hour?

I may need to add a constant difficulty for each transition too. Maybe a minimum value. We will see.

[ryanb]

To determine difficulty we need:

• a list of natural objects used to craft the item
• count of transitions involving the player
• total decay time

We can then calculate the difficulty by estimating the time it takes to find the natural objects, adding a constant (1 second?) for the transition count, and then adding the decay time.

I will need to play around with the decay time to see what amounts best represent difficulty. Something that sits for an hour is not necessarily difficult.

Determining the natural objects is the hardest part because we need to consider consumed and leftover objects from both sides when applying a transition.

This will allow us to see if the overlapping objects from one side were a consumed object on the other. In that case we can delete that objects natural objects and transition count.

The number of uses remaining also need to be tracked on leftover objects to determine if we have enough to satisfy the consumed object.

The decay time should be the max decay time from the two objects in the transition.

Some questions:

• should repeated natural objects be more difficult? It is harder to find repeating objects because they become further away.
• should the number of natural objects be a factor? Since you can only carry a limited amount back to base.
• should the number of biomes raise difficulty? Looking for 10 objects in all biomes would be more challenging than in one biome.