Fog of War oddness and a suggestion

So, I think the FoW system added quite a while ago added a nice side-element to the game, with you gradually discovering what the world looks like. However I have identified two things about it that bother me a bit, both related to how currently, FoW is (only) cleared directly when you move your personal location to a new patch:

  1. You can “explore around” by moving yourself around to each adjacent patch (revealing every patch adjacent to those) before selecting the one you actually want to play in. Essentially, if you have patience to click around everywhere, your “sight range” is one patch further than it should be.
  2. Migrating your species (without moving yourself) does not reveal FoW, so every now and then you have to move yourself to the different patches your species has migrated to, just to reveal the adjacent patches. For example so that you can migrate without moving your own cell again.

Of course there are workarounds:

  1. Don’t cheat.
  2. do just that moving around your cell that I mentioned.

So I would not say this is high priority, but I do think there is a way to fix this:

Don’t instantly reveal adjacent patches when you click move to new patch.
Instead, at the start of an editor session, reveal all patches adjacent to patches where your species currently lives.

If this was changed, it would make the first issue much, much worse. This is the reason why things are the way they are. I made the decision to pick the feature configuration that leads to the least amount of exploits and weirdness.

This could work, though there could be surprising code interactions that result in more edge cases / bugs that need fixing.

As I was aware of the limitations, an issue has been open for a while about this:

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