[MOD]Better Market Stalls v0.11 (Updated 23Aug2016)

##Better Market Stalls
This mod makes a change to the trader game mechanic to limit what they will purchase from you, and adds in more specialized stalls and traders. Each of the new stalls have multiple levels. The higher the level, the more items offered, and the lower the prices.

Currently this has only been programmed for the Ascendancy. Stall’s are available for crafting to Rayya’s Children, and will limit what they will buy from you, but only offer wood and stone for selling. I’ll make that happen once I work out some issues, and have a better picture solidified on how everything will work within this mod.

Blue Market Stall (from the base game)

  • Lowered carpenter level to build
  • Is the base for building all other stalls.
  • Sells all Resources (instead of just wood and stone)
  • Only buys resources

Blacksmith Stall

  • Buys and sells Armor, Weapons, and Ingots.
  • 4 Levels

Farmers Market

  • Buys and sells crops and cooking ingredients.
  • 2 Levels

Furniture Stall

  • Buys and sells furniture items.
  • 2 Levels

Decoration

  • Buys and sells decoration items.
  • 2 Levels

##Some Extra Information.
I originally set out to make stalls where your hearthlings could sell off items they made, but wanted a way to do limit what each trader would buy from you. No sense in having a farmers market that is easier to obtain than a blacksmith market, if you could sell weapons to the same trader that was buying food from you. That idea morphed the more I played with everything and started coming up with more ideas on how to expand on it.

I’m not 100% set on anything that I have made here. You will see at the moment the crafting of the different levels of stalls aren’t as limited as the probably should be. I went back and forth with myself on different ways to go about these, and also plan on adding on more. Here’s some of the arguments I had with myself so far and will be revisited again based on feedback:

Do I go with class specialty markets, or item type?
Originally I was thinking class specialty, then I went more towards item type because 1) not all classes can craft, 2) item types turned out to be easier. I had to start getting more and more specific in what each trader/market sold going the class route, but I don’t want to start limiting it down to only base game items, and leave it open enough so that this mod will interact well with items created in other mods.

How should the levels be unlocked
With not all classes being able to craft, I thought about going to make them require something that class produces to be involved with the crafting of the stalls: eg: Farmers Market 1 would take a couple baskets of a crop, and Farmers Market 2 require something a cook made. Something seemed really silly about watching a carpenter saw through a basket of carrots. I also thought about having money involved in the crafting, the whole “it takes money to make money”, that turned problematic in actually implementing. This is the route I took for now, and made a work around of having to buy upgrade plaques from the blue market stall at 100g a pop, and stalls take different amounts to upgrade.

I also though of creating a merchant class, and that would make the level unlocks part easy, but I don’t have a feasible plan yet on how implement the merchant gaining experience to level up, and kind of seems like a waist of a hearthling promotion without having other stuff to do than build a market stall every once in a while.

Anyway, here’s the download link and look forward to feedback.
Version 0.11 w/ Hot Fix - better_markets.zip (572.6 KB)
Fixed the farmers market stall recipe.

Version 0.11 - better_markets011.zip (572.6 KB)
Mob and region tweaks.
Stalls will line up with correctly with with each other, and the Blue Market Stall from the base game.
Traders are more likely to hang out in front of the stall instead of behind or to the side.

Version 0.1 - better_markets.zip (571.9 KB)

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xxdalexx, this seems like a cool mod, but can you give a screenshot or two? Do the specialized market stalls incorporate the stall style into its graphic? So the Blacksmith stall has a chunk of Ore, or ingot on it or something?

I like the idea of the Marketeer, or Merchant class, can it be implemented like the Engineer class and traps, where 1 Merchant can only manage 1 Stall at level 1, 2 stalls at level 2, etc? I agree it seems a little of a waste of a Hearthling to create someone who only crafts a market stall every once in a great while, but from an RP stance it seems legitimate that it requires a trained hearthling to manage the better deals of the higher class stalls. Not sure if they can earn experience from the actual trades that occur though, that would make them awesome if they could level up that way.

Just an idea, what about the stalls taking damage as they age, and the Merchant the only class that can repair them, like a trap, and earn experience that way. In a way it isn’t really “damage” as much as maintenance of the market itself? Maybe a stretch…

Thanks for the input man.

Sure, for now here are some nitty-gritty shots:
Decoration 1 & 2

Furniture 1 & 2

Blacksmith 1-4

Farmers 1 & 2

Eventually I’ll get around to making a scene where it shows a full market full of stalls. I think they all need some design tweaking, the only one I’m truly happy with is the blacksmith market.

I’ll add this into my list of ideas for sure.

In my opinion, I think this would involve to much micro-management which goes against the concept the game is aiming for. On the dev streams, they talk frequently about things they have changed or removed for this reason.

I’m not aware of any way to accomplish this because the shop interacts with you as a user, not any of the individual hearthlings, so I don’t believe there is an easy way to put an observer on a merchant class to give xp when trading deals are done. It probably could be done with changes to the Lua files for the shop mechanic, but I wan’t to avoid overriding files as much as possible until if/when there is a way to mixinto them.

I think I’m going to remove the upgrade plaque aspect of this and make everything unlock-able through campaigns with a combination of entities existing in the world, net worth, and job levels. I know in a coming version there is a way to trigger based on a job level, I’m going to go through the files later and see if that is something where the game mechanic already exists, or if I need to wait until that is released.

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Very nice designs, I especially like the Blacksmith’s and Farmer’s stalls too.

In my opinion, I think this would involve to much micro-management which goes against the concept the game is aiming for. On the dev streams, they talk frequently about things they have changed or removed for this reason.

I thought the Engineers Auto-fixed the turrets or traps as they needed fixing, and it wasn’t a micro-management. That was more what I was thinking, so as you purchased from the stall (Or age whatever is easier to implement) the stall would take damage, or uses, and the merchant would then automatically wander over and repair or reset it. Thus giving it “something” to do that allowed it to earn experience. Anyway, I haven’t modded Stonehearth, so you would know more about the mechanics than I, just thought I would toss out some ideas. Will have to add this to my mod list.

Thanks for the work so far!

Ok, I see now. I haven’t looked to much into the engineer ai, but I think that could be doable. Would probably have to clone and rename the engineer system so you didn’t have engineers fixing stalls, or a merchant fixing turrets. I’ll keep it in mind, for sure.

I made some tweaks because I noticed the stalls were mostly lining up with each other, but not the original Blue Market Stall. They all line up nice with each other nicely and I changed the destination regions so the traders would hang out in front of the stall instead of behind it. They’re doing it more often now, but still not 100% of the time.

Ok, I know how the different stalls will be unlocked once the next alpha starts rolling out. In the meantime, if anyone has any ideas for additional stalls, or price balancing or what have you, I’m all ears.

Hum where are the blueprint for the upgrade plaque??

you can add stall for every job (engineer,cooker,herbalist and weaver??

I can t craft and find upgrade plaque? where are he

They’re not craft-able, you purchase them from the original blue market stall from the base game.[quote=“Dhaphy, post:9, topic:23876, full:true”]
you can add stall for every job (engineer,cooker,herbalist and weaver??
[/quote]

Originally that’s how I was doing it, but I changed strategy after I got started to have it dependent on the type of entity instead of who made it.

Ho okay thank you :slight_smile:

The mod is great!
But two problems:

  1. I cannot build the farmers stall, in the workshop - the requirements are 1 Blue stall, 1 upgrade plague and one missing item, its just an empty box. Makes it unbuildable.
  2. i cnannot use this mod in an existing save game, in can see all the other stalls in the workshops, however the blue stall does not all raw ressources neither hte upgrade plague.

Thanks for catching that, it’s fixed now. I updated the original post with a new download link.

Sorry bud, I have no control over this. It has to do with what the game loads when you create your game, so the overwrites this mod does doesn’t take place on an existing game, only a new one.
A workaround for the plaque: You could download the debug tools and manually place the needed plaques into your stockpiles.

Probably a dumb question, but how do I install this mod? I have only used .smod files before. Thank you!

You just unzip it to your mods folder.

Not sure if this mod is dead or not, but it’s a great idea and it would be a shame if it’s no longer being updated.

I know that you feel happy with the Blacksmith Stall right now, but I think it might look more interesting with a red cover rather than a flat stone cover, likewise the black plaques might be more easily seen if they were red as well.

“Oh no! Kasarov, you performed thread necromancy!”

Bump I guess

I wouldn’t so much call it dead, just dormant. It was originally going to be an aspect of a tycoon mod I had in mind, but started running into implementation ideas, then picked up other projects that are stretching my time out thin, and nobody was really giving any feedback on what to expand, so it’s just back burnered for me at the moment.

I just stumbled upon this (I am the new kid on this playground) and it sounds very interesting. More stalls to create a real marketplace is what this game needs. And when those stalls come fully functional, it is even better. If you still are interested in advancing this mod, I would be happy to give some feedback - does it work with A18?

I don’t think so, I remember seeing something about a lot of changes to the structure of the entity json structure. I just deployed my latest project, so I will go back and take a look at this in the next couple of days granted there are no issues.

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