Mod-Idea: Typographer / Chronicle

Let me share an idea about a mod, which came into my mind recently. Would be interesting to hear if this kind of mods would be interesting for more people than me, so fire away with your feedback ;-).

Working Title: “Gutenberg” - Introducing the “Typographer” as a new profession

Requirements: The Typographer might require a letterpress which can be created by the carpenter and maybe he is a specialization of him. As a resource he consumes wood to create paper (another tool and additional resources might be required for that).

Function: He could have two functions. On the one hand he could print flyers which are distributed within the city and which might increase the mood of your townsfolk. Maybe could be also distributed to the “enemy” and could lower their moral… or to neutral NPCs and increase your standing with them.

The second function could be much more interesting (and was my initial idea with this class). He would be able to write down your achievements in a personal chronicle, incl. Screenshots. Depending on Stonehearth (if there is an achievement system and how it looks like), either Stonehearth or you could trigger the Typographer to add an entry into your chronicle. This should be a nice black / white kind of newspaper which you can read ingame but which you maybe can export and share with friends (e.g. as a pdf).

For sure the details would have to be worked out, but you might get the idea I am heading towards.

What do you think? Having kind of a “diary” or story of your people which you can share outside the game…

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Love the diary idea, heavily reminds me of [urlhttp://www.zafehouse.com/] Zafehouse [/url], everything in that game is written down in a diary (well, the game essentially runs form the diary), and you can then export it to share with everyone.

Would be pretty cool if there was a way of recording events that happen to your settlement in such a way.

Also, I’m pretty sure that the guys stated in one of the livestreams that there would be a fog of war type thing … it would be cool if by having your suggestion of a typographer, this fog of war would be reduced etc as you uncovered and charted the land.

I like this idea. The requirements make a lot of sense. I think the functions your suggested are pretty good too. Especially as a sort of social/achievement key.

I think the typographer can have a lot more functions than that though. What about spreading knowledge and experience? He can create books that other villagers can use to increase their expertise, learn new classes, etc. He can create recipes to share and trade with other players…

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I LOVE the idea of post-game ‘saga’ generated by the game that you could share with other players. King of Dragon Pass had this as well and it was very cool and a neat way to remember past games.

Spu’s concepts about books being a crafted item for various benefits is also cool.

-Will

I like the idea of “experience books”. Maybe it would be possible to store the “achieved level” in a profession. If your settler with this profession dies, that might give you a faster path to get a trained guy back in place. Also the other ideas a worth a second thought.

However, this experience books and other advantages have to be hard to create, otherwise something like that might be game-breaking. For me it is important that mods are kind of balanced.

I like also your idea Geoffers of an impact on the map. Not aware though of “Zafehouse”, need to check that out now ^^.

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This sounds pretty cool… also it fits with the technology level of the game perfectly!! There’s a lot of posibilities to what he can do, but i’ll treat that class as an end-game one, because it seems pretty powerful; it can start as a common writer with manuscripts, or as a person that makes the public announcementsand once you develop the press, you can make a printing house.

Agree, depending on how many skills this class would have, it might be more of an advanced class and additional complexity might be added in. However, the “chronicle-function” should be available early on in the game. Otherwise half of your story would have been “gone”, once you can start writing it down.

Can we change the class name to Archivist (or maybe Chronicler), so that we include maps and other written things? Having one could trigger modules such as a caravan brings news of far away cities or ruins where treasure and unique resources are located.

I agree that the experience books could be a game breaker and would have to be balanced carefully.

I definitely like the idea of having a chronicle to share. I’ve never played Dwarf Fortress, but I am enamored with the persistence of the world in that game where even if you lose in one game, the world goes on and you can start over in another location. Maybe the world persistence is outside the current scope of Stonehearth, but it might be fun to have modules and story elements persist between one game and the next. We are supposed to get attached to a civs and what better way than to have some character in your current game comment on actions taken by your settlers in a past game.

@xophnog Just reading your comment… it would be crazy if you could use this “stories” exported from one game, in the next game you have started. E.g. the Goblins will remember that you have attacked their camp in the last game. So they will attack you and say something about “revenge”. Just something linking one game with the other.

O_o, and then we include inside your mod a “bloodlines” core, the surnames of your citicens can prevail years later, and maybe the goblin king awaits for revenge in the deep of the caves beneath the ground.

BOOM

At this time the mind of the writer has blown with the amount of ideas

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Technically a typographer is the person who designs the type faces that are then used by printers. In earlier times their primary function was to make the molds that would then be purchased by printers to make the physical printing blocks in a “hot type” press. In a modern context with computers and what typographers do today, they are more artists who design the letters that you see on the computer screen or design the shapes that are used by computer printing devices.

In other words, this is a highly specialized profession that would likely have just a couple individuals in a huge empire of millions of people.

This said, I think the role of a printer in a village could be useful in terms of helping with morale. I have a better idea… but it would require a much more extensive post than to hijack your thread here.

If you are going to have a printer though, you do need somebody to make paper as well. One idea you might want to consider is to introduce the idea of the “Ragman”. In the 18th and 19th Centuries in most of western Europe (and to an extent somewhat earlier) printers and paper makers were so desperate for paper that they paid some pretty good money for people’s used clothing and discarded textiles (bedsheets, towels, or anything else with cloth). The “ragmen” would go door to door in a village or city to collect this clothing and would also collect bones (which were used for making gunpowder). Essentially an early form of recycling. The clothing would be chopped up into fibers, washed considerably, and then turned into paper that was even considered very high quality. Keep in mind that low-quality paper is the stuff made of wood pulp.

The highest quality paper is actually “parchment”, which is made from animal skins which are cured and scraped out, sometimes split but always made from a whole skin of the animal. It differs from leather mainly from the curing method (leather is tanned and not scraped so completely, where as parchment is treated with lime). It is a “Parchmenter” that makes parchment. A slightly higher quality going a step further still is known as “vellum”, but essentially just a very high quality piece of parchment.

Documents like the U.S. Constitution and the Magna Carta were written on vellum.

A pressmen could definitely be something useful as a profession in Stonehearth though, so keep up the ideas and work on it some more.

I definitely second Archivist. I’ll help implement this in beta if it doesn’t go through production.

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@KingKorihor Thanks for the small education lesson, saves me some time with google ;-). Actually I am not so concerned about names for the moment… that might be the smallest of all issues on the way ^^. Interesting idea with the “ragman” thought.

The idea to add some value to the city comes actually from the understanding that we might not see hundrets of settlers running around. So if you have to sacrifice one of them to “just” create a chronicle, that might be a price which is too high to pay. So I have started to think about additional values such a profession could bring. However, more as a side effect.

Let’s see where all this brainstorming will lead to… interesting suggestions / ideas so far. Thanks for that @ all!

First off, I know this game doesn’t have to correspond with real history, but the invention of the Gutenberg Press led to the Renaissance. So maybe by distributing books among your citizens, you unlock the ability to craft new things.

I’d always wanted to look back at what I’d done in a sandbox game (you know, before everything bad happens) so I really like the idea of it making notes that you can maybe add to your own stuff too. But this would be the job of an Archivist of course.

Thanks once more for all the comments… really appreciate it. This helps me a lot with my further thoughts.

Thinking about a possible Mod, my biggest concern is that you might get lost in all the features you want to include. So I like the idea of starting small and adding other features along the way.

Having this in my mind, I think the first focus of this one could be centered around the “Chronicle” (as there seems to be enough interest for it). For the beginning I would not even make it depening on a new class for several reasons:

  1. A “Chronicle” should be avaiable early on in the game, to start recording also the first steps.
  2. A stand-alone class would require some additional benefits to compensate for the loss of a settler, which could come in a second step.

To make it a bit more interesting however, there should be a requirement which needs to be fulfilled prior writing your chronicle. I have a tool (like a “printing press”) and some consumable resources (e.g. paper) in my mind.

I also like the idea that the chronicle could be a real item in the game. Raistlin hast posted some “Spellbooks”. I can already imagine how nice it would be to have such a book as your city-chronicle, labled like “The Rise and Fall of Megalopolis” and if you click on it, the book is opening up and you can flip through your story with some screenshots.

Maybe it is also possible to exchange books, i.e. you can load the story of someone else or your past cities into the game… and create a library ;-). Personally, I think this would be awesome. This idea is more appealing to me at the moment, than saving the story in a .pdf-File and make it readable outside the game.

hi!! ty for mentioning my creations!! haha and yes, to watch how the chronicler writes in one of those giants books looks soo cool!!

Also as starter items you can add ink and glass bottles and a quill to write with image I think it should be easy enough to find the ingredients to make it.

But… what kind of events should be registered?? and what data would the chronicler collect?? would he make like “photographs”?? what events are considered important?

Also to start with a few features, it’s the correct option; there’s always time to add more content, and the first releases take a lot of time to release because they use to be filled with bugs.So it’s better to start with something smaller.

I’d like to know if there will be some tool in the editor to test quickly the mods that we’re creating… probably i’ll make another topic about this in a months when the beta it’s closer.

That is the big question… which events will be collected. To answer that we need to see how the observer works in Stonehearth. I understand that this is the starting point for an event, so it could also notify the “chronicle”. Regarding screenshots I think that the user would have to create one and add it… but let’s see and understand the game, once we have access.

P.S. Based on your layout of the books I have created a set of others already… nice idea ^^.

Maybe you can use the writings as “knowledge” for a new civilization to find (if you can start a new game in an old world).

The writings could unlock certain things faster, or level up the villager who finds it by a balanced amount.