3. Insufficient Data on novice/respawn areas to effectively run fully automated code

Insufficient Data on novice/respawn areas to effectively run fully automated code


  • While working on a fully automated bot, I've run into serious issues while working around novice/respawn areas. There just isn't any information available on respawn/novice areas except that which is only available through the UI. I've found no way in my code to determine when the walls come down, I don't know how far the novice wall extends or which rooms are contained within the novice area. I can't even tell if I am in the novice area or outside of it. Can we expose an api call that would either A. Give us the protection level of the room i.e. "novice"/"respawn"/"normal". Or B. Give us the status of the novice/respawn areas in the world i.e. decay time, boundaries, which rooms are protected.


  • There is a property on the temporary walls called ticksTolive http://docs.screeps.com/api/#StructureWall.ticksToLive This will tell you the number of ticks until the wall comes down.

    However, it doesn't tell you whether you are inside or outside of the walls. Although I cant see what you would do with that information. As for novice area, when you try to claim your fourth room you will get a ERR_FULL error code.

    I realise these are workarounds and in the ideal world this information would be available in the API in a well formatted way. But we dont live in an ideal world!

    Other than having walls around you I am not aware of any differences between a respawn area and a normal area.

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  • @stevetrov The respawn area differences are outlined here: http://docs.screeps.com/start-areas.html

    @Rajecz There are some programmatic clues to potential new areas with room signs (constants: SYSTEM_USERNAME, SIGN_NOVICE_AREA, SIGN_RESPAWN_AREA), http://blog.screeps.com/2017/03/Changelog-2017-03-09/ but once the room formally becomes a green/blue zone I guess you'd have to inspect the boundaries and use the ticksToLive like Steve pointed out...Maybe someone has found a better way?

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  • I agree with this sentiment. I don't even know of a way to easily find new sectors. I wish that if a new respawn area popped up, and I have no current location, I could get notified somehow that a new area was available.


  • @stevetrov said in Insufficient Data on novice/respawn areas to effectively run fully automated code:

    I realise these are workarounds and in the ideal world this information would be available in the API in a well formatted way. But we dont live in an ideal world!

    Ugh, you could have left that last sentence out. With that mindset, why improve anything as long as there's some sort of workaround? At least it's not a mindset a developer (of said world) should have -hopefully you aren't one 😉


  • FYI I am an experienced software developer and have been working as a professional software developer for 18 years. In that time I have never worked on a project that didn't have a larger backlog of features that we would like to implement than we had time and effort to implement.

    I hate having to use workarounds but my point was that although it would be nice to have these features, IMHO there are features that would be more beneficial for the developers to spend their time on.

    Sorry if you misunderstood me.


  • @mashee said in Insufficient Data on novice/respawn areas to effectively run fully automated code:

    @stevetrov The respawn area differences are outlined here: http://docs.screeps.com/start-areas.html

    I have completely missed the bit about no nukes in the respawn area. Thanks for the link.


  • Running into this currently. Really disappointing. My observers find a great room and the code tries to claim it and has no way to know it's unavailable.