XenoProbes

This program is a utility for the game Xenoblade Chronicles X, for the Wii U. In the game, the player is required to install data probes that extract resources from certain sites. There are various elements that change the output of resources, so I wrote this program to automatically search for the optimal configuration.

Usage

1. Copy the sample-inventory.csv file into inventory.csv. Open it up on a text editor, and change its contents to match your in-game inventory.

2. Did you discover all of Mira? With all the Sightseeing Spots? If not, open up sites.csv in a text editor and update it to match your map. If you haven't discovered a site, delete (or comment out) the line. If you don't have all Sightseeing Spots for that site yet, change the number too.

3. In a command prompt/shell, from the top directory, run:

    ./xenoprobes
   

   or

    xenoprobes.exe
   

And be patient. At any point you can press CTRL+C to make the program stop early. When it finishes, it'll print out the best configuration found, and the expected mining/revenue/storage total (minus some rounding errors.) Try running the program multiple times too, each time you might get a different (possibly better) solution.

Hint: if you see the program getting stuck at some value, run another instance in another command prompt. If the new instance reaches a better value before the old one gets unstuck, kill the older one. That's the nature of randomness.

Program Details

Try:

./xenoprobes --help

or

xenoprobes.exe --help

XenoProbes has both a Hill Climbing and a Genetic Algorithm implementation. The Hill Climbing approach is used by default, but you can try out the GA by passing in the --ga option. I couldn't make it beat the Hill Climbing method.

But the options you should really try to tweak are:

• --storageweight, --revenueweight and --productionweight: those affect how the program finds solutions; by default, it gives priority to storage (storageweight = 1000), then revenue (revenueweight = 10), and lastly Miranium production (productionweight = 1). If you want revenue to be more important, change the weights so revenueweight is larger than the others. Most people will want them in this order though.

• --iterations: you can make this really big, and leave it running overnight. Then come in the morning and just press CTRL+C to stop it.

• --population and --offsprings: affect how many solutions are being tracked at any given time, and how many variations will be generated from each. The larger those numbers, the more likely you'll find a good solution, but it slows things down.

• --mutation: it's the probability that a given probe will be swapped by another. This shouldn't be too high, or else whenever a mutation improves a solution, another one might happen that ruins it. It shouldn't be too low either, because sometimes many swaps are needed at once to improve a solution.