New villager spawns in an inaccessible area

Title: New villager spawns in an inaccessible area

Summary: I received a notification that a new villager wanted to join my settlement. Hooray! Accepted the villager, but she unfortunately spawned on top of a nearby tree, and was unable to reach the ground/village. I know we have reports on error messages when new villagers arrive, but I wasn’t sure if this had surfaced yet ( @Phagocytosis, that’s your queue!)

Steps to reproduce: No specifics repro steps, other than to “trigger” several new villagers, and wait to see if one becomes “stuck”.

Attachments:

Versions and mods: @Froggy’s Why So Blue mod, but I doubt it’s the culprit.

System information:

  • OS: Windows 8.1 Enterprise

  • Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz (4 CPUs)

  • Memory: 16GB

  • GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770

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Did you try chopping the tree? Maybe she could have become unstuck if she fell. (First time replying with mobile phone, this is hard xD )

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that would be a perfectly reasonable thing to try! unfortunately, I am unable to reach her… :cry:

its hard to tell from the screenshot, but that tree is one level below the main settlement…

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If it’s still the same way, the reason would be that the entity placing function is (likely) running a trace from the sky to the ground - and wherever it hits something first, that’s the location it will be spawned.

In your case, a tree. In theory, by placing the banner near trees, you should be able to reproduce it with the starting resources/villagers easily if that’s the culprit.

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Hearthlings spawning randomly in map (not so far from your flag location but its far enough for a random spawn) and it can be a big problem sometimes as u can see in example. Why they dont spawn near at our flag?

No stairs ripperino gg.

The idea, I think, is that they walk in from “the surrounding area”. It definitely would be nice if they’d check whether they could actually pathfind to somewhere in your town - e.g. your flag - before spawning in.

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Just to add to this - while it isn’t technically inaccessible, I’ve had new villagers spawning too far away from my camp to find their way over. The first one was starving on his own about 100m ‘west’. I only discovered his existence when a zombie spawned near him and he began running away, towards my town.
The second one spawned at the edge of the map and I had to put him in a party to get him over:

Seeing how the party and flag-your-town trick works so well, could there not be some kind of a “run to the camp standard” order for new hearthlings?

I didn’t think this merited its own full report so I’m dropping it in this somewhat related thread, but if there’s a proper one for it, feel free to plop it in there, @8BitCrab! Also, is the pathfinder in any way related to one’s PC performance? I seem to get shorter pathfinding distances as my game progresses, which may be a cause for this in older computers…

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Hey @phector2004, yes, the pathfinder relates strongly to PC performance. Unlike a human brain, when a computer tries to figure out a path it has to do so in a purely logical way, one step at a time. This means that it has to consider many possible options before it can actually “complete” the path. While computer pathfinding has definitely improved in efficiency over the years, it is still one of the most difficult tasks to do well programmatically. As you pointed out, even when done well, the later in the game you are, the more entities are trying to path find at the exact same time. This includes all your hearthlings, as well as enemies and animals.

If you are curious about pathfinding, @not_owen_wilson wrote a great article on the dev blog, see http://stonehearth.net/desktop-tuesday-pathfinder-ii-terms-of-enspeedment/.

Edit: Yep, written by @not_owen_wilson, posted by @sdee, sorry guys :frowning:.

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Whoops… that should be ‘Pathfinder distance

My bad! Thanks for the link though!

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I also am experiencing a similar issue. My new settler appeared under a lake with a swimming animation. The settler will not swim up and out of the water. They just sit there.

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Hey @stuguy909, if you build a ladder at the edge of the lake, they should swim to it and climb out!

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Yeah, she can’t reach your ladders on the far left of the picture, she’s on a deeper zone and can’t climb without more ladders.

A worker spawned in the middle of a body of water. Probably a mermaid worker ?

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Thanks for reporting that this is still occurring. This is a known issue.

If you build a ladder down each of the steps in the water (likely need 2), your villager should climb out.

Paging @8BitCrab, @Relyss, @SteveAdamo, @Avairian, need a merge.

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I seem to have been lucky with not having them get stuck like that but I have had them run thought goblin camps many times

Same issue over here!

I started a new game, and placed my starting flag very close to the shoreline of a lake. Three of my hearthlings spawned IN the lake, and would not come up even after a ladder was build.

They also never drowned, which was… disturbing.

[quote=“krschreyer, post:1, topic:12060”]
They also never drowned, which was… disturbing.
[/quote]well, that makes things… interesting…

edit: also, could you toss up a screenshot?

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I don’t think this is really classified as a bug, just an unimplemented feature. ;p

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