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Comment by antitoi | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the motivation for using multiple RNGs in the first place. If the game had one global, seed-able source of randomness, would this problem just disappear?

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The motivation boils down to trying to make runs with the same starting seed feel "similar" in meaningful ways. It's "better" in a vibes way if both you and I were offered the same card choices in runs with the same seed, even if we took different amounts of turns on the first battle.

The main reason to allow users to set seeds manually is to allow players to share seeds among themselves. And the reason that players want to share seeds is because players will find exceptionally rare seeds that other players might want to try out. This sort of exceptional rarity might take the form "the first shop in act 1 sells a relic that gives you 2 potion slots, then the act 2 ancient offers a relic that gives you 4 potion slots, then the act 3 ancient offers a relic that fills all your potions slots at the start of every combat". However, when players share seeds, they aren't sharing the exact series of inputs they performed in that game. This means that the relics that have been "randomly" offered like the ones above need to be offered on the same seed regardless of any prior player decision. And player decisions can generally cause the RNG to advance an arbitrary number of times. So this means that you want to have entirely separate RNGs for every thing that the player has any power to influence, because this makes the randomness of a single seed more usefully reproducible in practice.

They want two players with the same seed to have a similar gameplay experience in terms of challenges encountered.

For this reason they want to isolate the RNG that procedurally generates maps, card rewards, shop contents, from other RNG streams such as the RNG used by random enemy attacks in battles, random event outcomes, etc.

One example of the wonky things that are possible when there is a single RNG stream is speedrunners manipulate the RNG state. For example, in Super Mario 64 they can jump in place to produce dust clouds that advance the RNG state until it is in a favorable position.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiuLeTE2MeQ&t=476

Think of chaos theory, or at least the pop-science version of it. You brush aside a butterfly today, and the fated hurricane doesn't happen next week.

However if insect-wingbeats and weather-systems used two independent PRNGs, you could safely walk in the garden without changing the meteorological future.

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