Fine furniture not built into house

Summary: I was building the pre-made Dining Hall, and the building itself was done, but my carpenter was still crafting the tables and chairs to be placed inside. I noticed that the Fine Wooden Chair she had crafted was not placed inside, unlike the regular Simple Wooden Chairs. I think the nice versions should count as the relevant type as well when it comes to placing them in structures like that.

Steps to reproduce: Have a Dining Hall built (or other structure that has inside furniture), making sure that you don’t have enough regular quality items, and at least one fine quality item.

Attachments:
27:40

Versions and mods:
No mods; latest release version in Steam at the time of writing, version 0.1.0 (release 375), according to the title screen.

System information:
DxDiag 2015-06-07.txt (66.6 KB)

I don’t necessarily agree with that. I think they should count as different versions.

In earlier versions, the carpenter made a different colour fence. It was pretty annoying that you had a whole fence where 2 or 3 pieces where a different colour than the other ones.

Hmm, right. Well, I personally don’t mind that (actually kinda like it), but I can understand if that’s not the same for everyone. But at least for my playstyle/preferences, I would like them to put in the chair. Perhaps it’s one of those things that could eventually be a toggle, or something.

For clarity, I’m using “furniture” here to refer to placeable crafted items. I can’t recall if the game uses another term. There’s three factors that IMO come into play here:

  1. Aestethics. For tables and chairs I don’t find the differences that jarring, but for lanterns, the color differences between fine and normal quality lanterns is kind of… drastic. So I can understand why you’d (general you) want all furniture of a certain type to be a certain quality.

  2. Satisfaction. I’m not sure if the quality of a chair/table/bed/lantern changes how much the Hearthlings appreciate their surroundings (I’m guessing furniture plays into Shelter score?) and/or the effect you get from them sleeping in a bed or sitting on a chair while eating instead of on the ground. If there’s no difference, this isn’t an argument for installing the fine quality furniture, but if the Hearthlings actually appreciate good workmanship, I’d say that’s a pretty strong argument in favor of installing fine furniture.

  3. Economics. On one hand, does a placed fine quality piece of furniture increase your wealth score more than a regular quality one? (Probably.) On the other, if you actually are actively using the traders, you might be wanting to save up the fine quality items for sale as they fetch higher prices.

What bugs me more about the quality thing is selecting crafters with high creativity, and then ending up having the traders come and request, say, 5 simple chairs. I’ll end up assigning 6-7 chairs, at least, to be crafted, because the traders won’t take the fine quality chairs and with my luck I’ll end up with at least one if I only ask the carpenter to make 5 chairs. This means I usually end up with a bunch of stray furniture hanging around. Not sure that this is desirable.

What I’d like to see, that I’ve sorta mentioned before, is a placeholder “best available” ghost item for all the functional furniture (tables, chairs, and beds, right now, I believe?), where the Hearthlings will prefer a fine comfy bed over a regular comfy bed, over a fine mean bed, over a regular mean bed, and preferably even replace lower-quality furniture with higher-quality furniture as the fine furniture becomes available. Obviously this might not be desirable in all cases, but at least for me personally, it’d take care of some obnoxious micro-management, especially in multistory buildings where placing/replacing furniture can otherwise be a bit of a pain.

I suppose when placing furniture from the menu (rather than by clicking a piece of furniture in your stockpile and selecting place, there could be a checkbox for “use best item” and that’d be remembered as long as the piece of furniture in question wasn’t moved. Or even have it be a checkbox/toggle in the little info box when selecting a placed piece of furniture.

I do like to keep my furniture etc uniform and symmetrical, but if I can tell my Hearthlings to replace furniture with better stuff as it becomes available, I could at least comfort myself with the thought that EVENTUALLY if I keep crafting I’ll end up with all fine comfy chairs in my dining hall. :wink:

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That’s the sort of thing, yes. Or you want eight chairs for a house, so you have the house built which has these chairs in its blueprint, but one of them is fine so only seven get installed into the house.

I think it would be nice if it worked a bit like in Dwarf Fortress (as always!) where normally it treats them the same even if at different quality, but when ordering placements etc. you can give the additional specification that it should be a certain quality of item that will be placed. If you don’t give that additional specification, the citizens will just use whichever is available/closeby.

The above is just talking about placement; for usage, of course, the “best available” thing you mentioned makes more sense.

Before long, we will need general settings for your town, where you specify things like this, and other stuff like the distance Hearthians are allowed to go from the campfire for harvesting, whether Hearthians are allowed outside (might be nice to turn it off for defensive reasons), how often Hearthians are allowed to have a feast (once these are in), etc.

It’s funny, I like it symmetrical but not necessarily uniform. It doesn’t bother me if a couple have a different color; I kind of like the random/patchwork effect of it. But since there are many people who feel the same way you do, it should definitely be taken into account I think.

It would be cool if the hearthlings had some rhyme or reason to the placement of fine items, such as a fine chair at the head of a table. Though I’m sure that would be a good piece of coding to deal with unless you specified which piece of furniture should be fine.

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I understand the aesthetic thing, but yeah, when I have my carpenter build stacks of things to fit in a new building, I often just build what I need. If they happening to craft a “fine” one, then I end up without all the furnishing and sometimes don’t even realizing it until an hour later!

Must be some way to strike a balance.

I would say have the crafter automatically continue crafting mats for a building until it is complete. That way if he accidentally crafts a fine piece of wooden furniture, then the que to craft a normal one will stay.

If you choose “Maintain in Stockpile” it’ll craft until it gets the correct amount. Just make sure to uncheck it before trading else it’ll be crafted again.

It’ll keep crafring it if any of them are used in building as well. Ntm that, as far as I go, idk all that I need until I design the building, which is frustrating when I need some amount of furniture just to design it. However, that’s another topic that’s been spoken of before.

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