A panel for each worker

Hello,

Recently I tried to have 2 blacksmith but unfortunately, the control of production system made it useless !

Here is what I suggest to better this, each citizen who have a job would have his proper panel of production this why It would be easier to make an industrial system of production.

Why not add (like you did for bed) a assignation system for each object placed ? Like, if you don’t assign, every one can use it, but if you assign to one minion, no one else can use the object.

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Im honest i like the actuall system if you have more crafters they will both work on your queue. so the needed timeframe is decreased and you dont have to much micromanagment - you must consider at the end of all you will have a very big city with lots of crafters and when you then must manage every of them you will not find time for other things ^^

Yeah except that if they have a different level, the one with the lower don’t work on thing with a lower lvl needed if it’s a the bottom of the queue.

Yes, the coordination of multible crafters on one workbench needs a bit of improvement, but I also prefer having only one panel of each crafter type.

Perhaps we can even have recipes which need more than one crafter at the same time or better workbenches that allow two crafters work on different objects at the same time (the forge is pretty big for example … )

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The shared queue is really nice for /most/ purposes, but training new crafters and fishing for ‘fine’ products both have motivations for more control. If they kept the main queue, but /also/ gave crafters their own personal queues (that we could add to through some more convoluted mechanism), that’d be ideal imo.

At the moment, it seems like once an individual crafter starts a line item, it’s “reserved” for them (their face stays on it, even when not working on it, and others don’t seem to take it over, at least when I’ve experimented). So to skillup low level crafters, I create some production for the high level to grab, then add a large-quantity order afterward for the low-skill crafter to claim. That way, once the high level finishes their distraction, the lowbie will still have their order ‘claimed’, and will get to leave it and come back to it as needed. Means you have to mass-produce a single thing rather than diversify, but at least it takes (relatively) little micromanagement - just have to make sure the right people initially claim the orders, and trash them & do it over if they don’t.

Alternatively, the high level can be given one huge order to handle, and hope it keeps them busy while the low levels complete the rest, but if the high level can’t do that single big order for any reason (runs out of supplies, etc), they’ll chew through the lowbie’s stuff.

The biggest issue for this (for me) was when I needed to train up a L2 blacksmith to become an engineer. I have to tell my main L6 blacksmith to do NO jobs while getting the other smith to endlessly make useless brass and copper ingots until she trained up to l2 (because otherwise my L6 would keep doing the work). Only after the new smith got to L2 and became an engineer could I could let my “real” smith go back to work. I disagree with having multiple panels, but it might be nice to be able to manage which items in the queue would be handled by which crafter (perhaps via the “orders” screen?). Any chance of something like that, @sdee?

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In this case, the copper ignots are not useless because you need them for the engeneer to make many many gears to level up :smiley:

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Well, yes, ok, fair point :slight_smile:

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That seems like it would be a good fit, since that’s the screen where we go to see who’s doing the orders anyhow, and is the closest we have to an ‘advanced orders view’ so far. Not just see which head, but pick which head.

Alternatively they could share XP like fighters do … so young newcomers could profit by high level crafting … in lore this would be the young guy watching the master and learning from him … but then they should need to be at least close to the workplace

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As DF’s military “Training/demonstration” sessions have shown, trying to coordinate multi-actor activities can be a pain. One half starts halfway across the map, the second’s right at the site … by the time the distant one shows up, the first one’s hungry or sleepy and leaves, etc :confused:

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I like Thomas’s idea because the way monster spawning works atm encourages players to build a small town that expands outward in a circular fashion or you will get mobs spawning within your boundaries. this seems to make sense with that, most of your hearthlings should benefit greatly from this

A central crafting district, imagine that

That’s what I build most of the time :smiley:
All the Materials close to each other, short distribution paths … workshops at the ground level, sleeping quaters at the top and all that next to the kitchen and dining hall/tavern :slight_smile:
On the ther side of the tavern is the farmin district, food storage, farmhouse and fields and somewhere in between I usually put a military district near the city walls :stuck_out_tongue:

So as long as the hearthlings don’t run across the map for some weird dropped loot, they are usually pretty close to each other in their distinctive districts…

I usually fix the problem of high level vs. low level crafter by putting high level stuff on top of the list and all low level stuff to the bottom (as long it is not urgent to get that new door to replace the smashed one :smiley: )

If sharing crafting XP isn’t a good idea in the end, perhaps we can have a checkbox for each workshop for training mode: “always craft the object with the highest possible requirements first for each crafter” so Master would automatically craft the Platemail, even if it was queued last and let the trainee take the simple tasks … no micro, just a checkbox to auto priorize orders in an other way

I came from games like Dwarf Fortress and Gnomoria, where each workstation has its own queue of tasks, its own priority, and can be restricted to a specific crafter; and where stockpile filters have a checkbox for each individual type of item (and “meta-checkboxes” for entire categories - e.g. one for the “food” category, then one for bread, one for omelettes, one for sausages, one for sandwiches, etc); and where you can push/pull items from one stockpile to another.

This system allows you to setup highly efficient factories. For example:

  • A kitchen near an raw meat stockpile that makes “infinite sausages” and nothing else, which is set so that only your apprentice cook can use it and is at “low priority”
  • A kitchen near a grain stockpile that’s set to “maintain 100 loaves of bread” and nothing else, which is set so that any cook can use it and is at “medium priority”
  • A stockpile for bread and sausages near both of the kitchens mentioned above, to minimise travelling time for both of those kitchens
  • A third kitchen near the “bread and sausages” stockpile that makes “infinite sandwiches” and nothing else, which is set so that one your master cook can use it and is at “high priority” (to ensure you get more higher quality food, not low quality stuff from the apprentice)
  • A master “sandwiches” stockpile near the third kitchen, to minimise travelling time
  • Several stockpiles scattered through the fort/town (one in a grand hall, one in a dining room near the military training areas, one near the wood crafting area, etc) which pull items from the “master sandwiches” stockpile

In this case; your master cook will make sandwiches whenever ingredients are available and try to make bread if they can’t make sandwiches (and if there’s less than 100 loaves of bread); and your apprentice cook will make bread whenever ingredients are available and there’s less than 100 loaves, and try to make sausages if they can’t make bread. Typically there’s an excess of raw meat (from butchers, livestock and enemies) so your apprentice is always busy training their skill making something, but will switch to baking break when the master cook uses some for sandwiches.

This flexibility adds a whole new element to gameplay - the challenge/fun of being able to maximise the efficiency of your town (and the pride/sense of accomplishment you get from succeeding).

Compared to the rich and highly customisable system these games offer, Stonehearth is currently “depressingly over-simplistic”. Initially it’s very easy to learn and is fine for small settlements; but that simplicity quickly becomes patronising as your settlement grows - it’s like the game thinks you’re a small child with a learning disability (and not some hairy faced middle-aged man taking a break from software development by attempting to get 50 hearthlings to terraform a mountainous map into a flat lake surrounding a small fort over an expansive underground city :sweat:).

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related discussion
http://discourse.stonehearth.net/t/improving-the-storage-system-with-a-single-feature-with-a-big-effect/23170