I’ll explain what I want to suggest with an example:
The Shepherd has no “crafting” menu.
After promoting a trapper to a shepherd you can designate a Zone for a animal pasture, like now.
Now you can open up a menu where you give the shepherd orders like the craftes but for each zone.
A Shepherd level 0 with her or his first zone can only get little animals like rabbits, raccons or chicken.
And can only harvest and raise those animals.
(Note the zones will have more animals as now)
With the menu you can define that the zone should have at least 6 out of maximal 12 animals, not less. define that the shepherds should harvest xyz resources(like in the crafting menue build xyz of something) or maintain an amount of xzy resources.
Some pros are
With this menu you do not have to gather manually and also you won’t get way to much wool like now.
You can see, with only one look at the menu, what your animal stock is or you can easy change animal pastures.
But some cons are
Another menu.
Could makes things complicated for some people … maybe.
I certainly don’t see a problem with making the shepherd level up to unlock animals - after all, a similar thing happens on a town-wide basis with seeds for farming (only you level with gold / trade goods instead of XP).
Far more important to my mind though is the ability to automate herd culling, sheep shearing, and such (imagine having to tell your farmers to harvest each corn plant - urgh !) - and yes, having a central UI for doing this for the whole town would probably work quite well.
Hmm Something like:
-craft a smelter, having a menu similar to the farm, select the type of bars (iron,copper,bronze) you want to craft and the blacksmith whether loads a bunch of ores to smelt 'em like in minecraft automaticly or he also could smelt them one by one (something like in tinkers construct in minecraft)
-fermenting barrel/juice squeezer, select the product you want and the cook will fill up the needed ingredients to craft it active or passive (fermenting is more about waiting than using ure own power…)
-grinding stone for a wind/water mill or even raccoon in a running wheel, made by the engineer, crafts all the grinded stuff you want, but in bigger numbers and only one type at once.
-Forestzone used only by the trapper and the herbalist. The trapper will automatically cut trees, place traps, while the herbalist will collect herbs/flowers/mushrooms (should only grow in these zones instead of cultivated by the farmer), plant trees, maybe place beehives. A needed change would be to change the traps (and beehives) to be crafted by the carpenter, so the player can decide how many traps/hives are placed so the classes can keep up with all tasks. Maybe the forestzone could have another menu where some of the tasks could be disabled.
I greatly miss Gnomoria’s per pasture automation, but not their terrible GUI. It auto-slaughtered animals over the max. I also liked their use of troughs to store multiple days worth of food, though potentially unnecessary. The male vs female control is probably too micro for Stonehearth. I do wish the animals pasture size to animal count was more intuitive or documented with a tooltip.
!) - and yes, having a central UI for doing this for the whole town would probably work quite well.
