Some of the Loading Screen tips are outdated or just messed up. “You can visually see ore veins” one, for example is redundant. “When revealed, ores are shown as colored veins in the side of mountains.” would be an improvement.
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Yeah, you’ve just reminded me about those too. Here are some others:
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the one about increasing town worth (suggesting you sell items to merchants) doesn’t have the full story – a simple change from “consider selling items to merchants” to “consider making some items to sell to merchants” would instead hint in making extra items as opposed to selling just what you have on hand.
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the “hearthlings with a high Mind stat will make good crafters” is true, but since that was written the inspiration chance was moved from Mind to Spirit. So perhaps a change to “Hearthlings with a high Mind will learn quickly, while Hearthlings with a high Spirit have an increased likelihood of crafting quality items. Consider both when assigning your crafters.”
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hints about traits, personal item appeal (i.e. loved, liked and disliked items), and appeal overall would probably help.
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For the “a well-fed town is a happy town”, again it’s only part of the story. Perhaps “Hearthlings like variety in their diet, nobody enjoys surviving on just berries forever. A well-fed town is a happy town!”
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A hint about buildings raising town worth may be too much of a hint or send the wrong message (the idea, after all, is to encourage players to build cozy houses and not just spam construction for arbitrary progression goals.) However, perhaps something like “the quickest way towards a flourishing town is to provide cozy homes for your Hearthlings” would put newbies on the right track?
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in the same vein, a hint about the relationship between town worth, military score, and invasion strength would probably be useful – something along the lines of “As your town grows, others may look upon it with jealousy. Be sure to guard your growing wealth from thieves and invaders” perhaps?
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If the artists have finished working on the main content, then I would like to ask for more varied templates. For example, double workshops, barracks, safe places of 2/3 tiers, a places for hearth.
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A couple more mid-range enemy camps would be nice – no new features, just new combinations. For example, a small graveyard (3 tombstones and a crypt with a few walls) with a couple of undead; or a single goblin tent with assorted goblins; more clusters of varanus (e.g. maybe a group of 3 big ones as a higher-level encounter?); or so on. Currently it’s just the same camps over and over in a fairly predictable arc, so more variety would go a long way to freshening up the daily encounters.
Of course this is something which can be done with modding if there’s no time for the team to work on it now; it all comes down to how busy you guys are and whether there’s time to spare for this stuff.
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I’d consider moving some recipes to the Engineer. Portcullis and vaults definitely need some more sophisticated mechanisms to work.
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It could even be done by holding a contest in the coming months and the best submissions of templates make it into the game
What a great idea 
but … but who will organize it? And who will evaluate? 
Depending on how the dev team look at the legalities of it, it could either be very simple to organise or else prohibitively complex.
It comes down to ownership/IP of the templates – if there’s the same issue as with modding (i.e. avoiding the use of others’ work), then it would be extremely difficult to organise such a contest.
On the other hand, if the templates were submitted with the expectation that they were to be freely used by Team Radiant (let’s call it an irrevocable, perpetual, commercial-use license that Team Radiant can do what they like with the ‘winning’/selected templates within the bounds of Stonehearth, in exchange for their designers being credited somewhere for their work), then it would be very simple – in fact we could run it as a community, with Team Radiant nominating a judge or group of judges. Team Radiant could pick a date somewhere before 1.1, giving plenty of time for submissions but no rush on the selection, and then all they have to do is pick the most fitting options to use. I highly doubt anyone in the community would have a problem with that format; again it all comes down to whether it’s acceptable from a business/legal standpoint.
With all of that said, there’s another alternative: we’ve already talked about the possibility of ubiquitous/“must have” mods being packed with the game, so the community could work together form a curated template set taken from community submissions as one of the “recommended mods” to be included that way. There might even be several smaller packs rather than one big one – “Rayya’s Children Extra Templates”, “Fortress Walls”, and so on. We have dozens of such template packs already available (which is awesome!), so the tricky part would be not stepping on anyone’s toes; but I feel that if they put the call out for templates expressly imitating the base game’s style then an army of designers would step forward with submissions.
The down-side is that such a pack would need to be limited to early-game templates, since we can’t have them unlock along with town progression. Any such templates would have to be specifically designed to match the templates already included – we’re talking about imitating both the style and function of the base templates, keeping everything pretty basic so anyone just starting out can build them, providing a backdrop which players can build off of. There might be some larger buildings, or some designed with a basis in utility (e.g. storage barn, early-game watchtower, a “blank” town/market square with space for decoration later), but generally they’d have to be kinda vague as well as basic to be really useful. Almost like “templates of templates”, or “primitives” like you’d get in a design program. Anything more advanced would cause issues of players not being able to build them immediately, and no matter how well we label such a pack (e.g. even if it was clearly “Tier 3 advanced buildings”), we can unfortunately guarantee that not everyone will read the instructions. And if the templates don’t work intuitively straight off the rack, then they miss the point of being a starter template.
So yeah, it’s either extremely complex or extremely simple, depending on the answers to two key questions. If it can be done through official channels with the backing of both the devs and the community, I’m sure that the community can step up and do amazing work to help out and really expand the way we think about tier 2/3 town design. If it has to be done as a mod, though, it comes down to what we can achieve without requiring the advanced components.
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I haven’t read the whole list yet so sorry if this has already been mentioned, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it mentioned before.
There is a lot of things that could be improved about mining but one thing that might be small enough to still fix is to make hearthlings go to the mining area before they reserve a block to mine. The way it is now miners sometime stop and wait for another hearthling to run from the other side of town to hit one block.
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I would think that we could include templates as part of ACE, and then we’d have more control over them to limit them to certain tiers/civilizations in the same way the base templates are restricted.
As part of the agreement we’ve made with Radiant, they’re free to do whatever they want with Frostfeast. I imagine it’s similar with Candledark.
The heating mechanic could be majorly improved now that we have a definition of “rooms” (assuming it’s usable), and the chimneys are a super evil, dirty hack (“shapeshifter”) that I would not recommend using, especially if performance is an issue. Although I’ve been told that it isn’t an issue, part of me thinks it’s begging to cause some.
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If I could… is it possible to get hearthlings depositing items in the same location to get them to drop all of those items at once instead of one at a time?
This would speed up production and hauling considerably.
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Thank you guys for all the ideas ; ). Some of these are large, some are smaller but still not super quick work, some I have no idea, but I’ll address a few that I feel I can respond to:
These collision issues should be much better already - just did a push last week that updated these. Also fixed a lot of rotation issues which we had no idea were happening. I removed collision from most stages of plant growth too, so hopefully that’s better.
Which plants are you noticing inconsistency issues with picking up? All should be the same, which is: you cannot move them while they are growing (but you can destroy them), and once fully grown you can move them. I think the only exception to this is carrots/tumbleweed/wintermoss (maybe a few others) which must be harvested - they have a slightly different model because they are annuals (instead of perennials).
This is intentional, though also unfinished. The goal here is to make sugarbells very hard to acquire/grow unless you have an herbalist who produces more seeds for you (so not impossible, just takes a while). Its unfinished because we had originally intended to add a lot of desserts. If we get to making more deserts we can look again at making them farmer plants, but since there is only one desert (cake) then there isn’t much point atm. This is definitely something that modders could take over on if we don’t get to it ; ).
This is a funny story - @sdee made these because she was really hungry for soup one day (as I recall the story), but then felt bad because ogres are sentient creatures. The bone stayed, but the soup was never made : D. We could make them into something, but honestly this is something the community can do as well. I have actually added a resource called “ancient bone” or something which you get when you mine the giant caribou from the arctic landscape which also does nothing (except for selling). The goal here was to create interest but not necessarily pull something out of it - but it does provide a “hook” for modders to do something interesting with : ).
Hmm, that’s a good point, though I don’t know if we have a good solution for that existing in game already. I’ll asked Max and he suggested some sort of encounter that is called similar to the titan gong or orc gongs, that way you could bring varanus whenever you wanted. This is a great opportunity for modders to add unique and useful content easily : ).
I totally agree, however this is actually a large amount of work. Lots of other lower hanging fruit that we can tackle. The reason we kinda paused engineer anyway was because it was somewhat lacking in design direction - which still hasn’t been addressed. This is a good place for modders to come in : ).
I looked at doing this quickly (like right now) but wasn’t able to instantly understand the system to do so : /. I’ll stick it on my list, but no promises.
I would suggest saving before embarking and just reloading if you need to : ).
I believe this works already - just gotta keep playing through the game and re-embark each time.
Nice to know they found a place!
Retook all the tonic/bandage pictures : ).
Yup! I’ve got a note on my ‘wall of things’ to make a “fence pile” (like a stone or dirt pile) that becomes a set of 10 of whatever fence type you’re wanting. Unfortunately other things jumped above this in terms of priority, maybe I’ll get to it - but if not, modders can easily make this.
We made a Water Well as well as buckets - they are in the game - but haven’t been implemented in anyway. Please feel free to use these in a mod ; ).
Done did it last night ; ).
You want input bins to have a filter to input bins? O.o
Ah shoot… I forgot an animal feed filter : /, goin on my list.
That vfx is just a nightmare because we have major zfighting issues. It looks the way it does to try to hide the zfigthing as much as possible, and then I just stuck a fork in it.
Heh, its on the list, but honestly prolly wont be done any time soon.
I’d love to do this, but other things are taking precedence. Maybe post 1.0? If not, modders for sure should do this ; ).
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Sorry for the confusion, just meant making sure clay bricks had their filter in input bins as well. Sounds like you’ve already done that, thanks!
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Ah! I only messed with input bins - so your requests are still valid for stockpiles : ). Sorry for the confusion.
Sounds weird, but could you guys pick your personal favorite factions and add yourselves to the name rosters?
That way you’ll always be with us! 
And we can always send Max alone to the goblin camp since he didn’t get that last fix in… 
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I’d hope the names were changed/spelled differently just enough to make them fit in, but it seems like a fitting touch. There’s tons of corruptions of players’ names, after all.
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Stephanie’s way ahead of you.
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@max99x is there something being done about stock not getting put away at all, or loot being picked up
this is just and example, even if i remove stockarea and replace it or storage boxes they wont put stock away
Side note: only way to fix this is to reload game
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