I’ll take a look 
thanks!
3 Likes
Currently having a bug with the new blacksmith recipe using gold coins to make a gold ingot. I told my Blacksmith to make 1 gold ingot. She kept picking up all gold coins that were in existence (~17K) and never could craft the gold ingot. It was weird how hearthlings only have 4 inventory slots yet this lady can horde all of the town’s gold coins like a leprechaun… and with no engine errors.
I did have my blacksmith level max, all workbenches, and completed the Tire 3 for Guildmaster. I think It might because a "chest_of_gold_coins" is 1,000 coins and not 100; it would not be able to separate the amount needed per gold ingot queued for crafting.
SH version 1.1.0 (release 949) x64 build
EDIT: I looked closer at the recipe and it appears that it calls for the use of 100 "chest_of_gold_coins" which equals a total of 100k coins per gold ingot!!! Also, the recipe shows the total amount of coins, not the amount of "chest_of_gold_coins".
Suggestion: Fix recipe to use one (1) stonehearth:loot:gold in exchange for 10 gold ingots. Also fix value to display amount of coin chests and not total coins.
Alternative: Create new gold_coin objects with different increments (1, 10, 100, 1K, ect…) and implement into existing recipe.
2 Likes
I didn’t get to play as much as I had hoped this week, but here are a few points of feedback. I also encountered a few issues that have been fixed since (e.g. upgrading beds in the corner not working, chionophile icon looking out of place, etc.).
Feedback:
- The option to add thatch to beds through their unit frame is awesome!
- All the crop options are really cool, though a bit overwhelming. I also can’t shake the inclination to go quantity over quality and just make more fields (and maybe even farmers) rather than minmax all the details per field. As a player, I would like some reason to discourage that approach.
- The crop growth rate tooltip expresses the improvement in growth rate by reducing the growth time number. It feels bad to try to reduce a large number. It usually feels a lot better trying to increase a small number. I would suggest inverting it so that e.g. instead of “takes 70% of normal time to grow” it says “grows at 1.4x the normal rate”.
- With this update there’s a slight but definite shift in the feeling of the game from a more black box, squishy experience to a min-maxing management simulation. I’m Ok with it, but it’s different from the stated SH vision, so you guys should keep in mind whether you want to take the game in that direction.
- The RC herbalist outfit seems odd. Loks more like a priest.
- Should firewood sheds be input bins? Otherwise they are unlikely to be filled.
Bugs:
- [Archipelago biome bug?] When I try to plant watermelons as RC in the archipelago, the season icon in the crop properties dialog is a broken image.
- The ingredient rechability check fired once for me and it was clearly a false positive. A herbalist had a tonic just queued, which only uses herbs, and I had 40+ herbs in a stockpile right next to the bench. At the time the herbalist went to have a meal. As soon as she finished eating she crafted the item successfully.
Polish:
- The Heliophile trait icon is a bit too detailed with the thin rays.
- Heliophile tooltip grammar mistake: “one” in “Its light and rays are one of their favorite things”.
- The tooltips for the fertilizer options in the settings menu refer to “this field” several times.
- The starting resources details pane has its layout broken if there are too many items (e.g. try RC Food for Days with Archipelago enabled).
- When I click on the [i] icon on my pet’s unit frame, it tells me that it will drop loot when killed. True, but oof. T_T
- [Archipelago biome bug?] Archipelago tree stumps have messed up unit frame title/info.
- The thatch animal sleeping spot changes position/offset when rotated while being placed.
- The unit frame extra details window and the farm plot details window intersect and neither of them is movable.
- Typo: “Red Alga Stub”. Also in its description.
7 Likes
I would like to report two bugs I’ve discovered, the first happened when I place the manger and got this error:
release-949 (x64)[M]
stonehearth/services/server/ai/ai_service.lua:559: table index is nil
stack traceback: [C]: ? stonehearth/services/server/ai/ai_service.lua:559: in function ‘filter_from_key’ …/ai/actions/wait_for_empty_pasture_trough_action.lua:58: in function ‘_on_feed_changed’ …/ai/actions/wait_for_empty_pasture_trough_action.lua:44: in function <…/ai/actions/wait_for_empty_pasture_trough_action.lua:37> [C]: in function ‘start_thinking’ stonehearth/services/server/tasks/task_action.lua:102: in function ‘_start_stop_thinking’ stonehearth/services/server/tasks/task_action.lua:175: in function <stonehearth/services/server/tasks/task_action.lua:174> [C]: ? [C]: in function ‘trigger’ radiant/modules/events.lua:63: in function ‘_update’ radiant/server.lua:67: in function <radiant/server.lua:64>
Then the shepherd basically ignore its existence, reloading my save doesn’t seem to work.
The second bug is when any of my combat unit gets a title. Their titles work perfectly fine, but for the weapon I have instead a long string of code rather than its name and then the weapon became unavailable to rename. This seems to happen to every of my playthrough so far which is weird because I remember the title system works perfectly fine for both hearthlings AND weapons in my first playthrough for this update.
I have included my savefile in case anybody want to take a look:
I know it is not easy to update this much contents in such a short time so I would like to make it clear that I am extremely grateful to the ACE team for their efforts to keep this game alive. I hope that by reporting these bugs I am contributing my part.
Please let me know if you need anything from me.
2 Likes
valid sollution to the problem. which honestly isnt that odd concidering that was also a solution-and a problem- in base stonehearth. people used to make 4-6 full fields anyway, and were drowning in messy crops. now if they dont manage it well, that turns out the balance out the imput of crops.
and if you have my MRF mod, you actually to manage the fields AND have more of them to subsist on farming. i have been playing it multiplayer, it gives a good incentive for some inventive ditch digging and even an aquaduct wouldnt be a bad plan to get it to work.
they are i think? they get filled pretymuch all the time?
2 Likes
I agree that making more farms is a valid strategy in base SH. My point is that when you give up simplicity and add a complex new system, there should be incentives for the player to interact with that system, rather than ignore it and brute force the solution.
Ah! I hadn’t realized they take bundles of firewood, not just wood objects! That’s a little unintuitive. Maybe it’ll be more intuitive once I’ve interacted with the fuel system some more. So far I’ve been kinda ignoring it.
3 Likes
Have you not read the flavor text on the firewood one :p?
2 Likes
Ha! Yes. Personally, I’m also ignoring both the fuels and farms 
2 Likes
I like my berry bush farms, they’re cute, shut up! 
I mean, I place down the farms and then just stop caring basically 
And when I figure out I’m out of wood (because fuel) I just go and cut/replant a few trees.
3 Likes
The tricky thing here is that we didn’t want to force players to play in a new and more complex way, but we wanted to reward those who do want to min/max a bit more.
You certainly can just plop down more farms… aside from the initial extra tilling time, the only extra game resource you’re using is ground space, which is generally very abundant. Perhaps tilling and planting speeds could be affected by the soil quality (the overall growth modifier), but that seems messy. Ultimately it comes down to the base game’s implementation of farms being incredibly generous to the player with virtually no cost, and trying to add nuance without discouraging casual players (from using that system or even ACE entirely).
Same with the fuel: I pushed for the early and mid-game fuel usage to be purely adding options, not taking away options, so you can still use regular wood logs for all the pre-steel blacksmith things (as well as lighting firepits), but you can additionally turn wood into firewood to be more efficient about anything that required wood as a fuel source (firepits and smelting up through iron); this is mostly a huge boon to players in the desert who don’t have a level 5 farmer yet, as wood is extremely common in other biomes. Then you can also craft a charcoal oven to essentially convert wood into coal if you’re having trouble finding a coal vein, so you don’t get shut out from steel production by unlucky ore veins.
Basically, we didn’t want to scare people away by forcing them to play the game differently, rather than simply enabling more options for how they play, since ultimately it’s entirely their choice whether to enable or disable ACE.
4 Likes
Completely random thought but I think it should be mentioned in the modding guide or somewhere that adding new tier-unlocked recipes should be done via GM encounter like in ACE to keep everything compatible and not by tinkering with town bonus Lua.
3 Likes
That is weird! They are supposed to use 100 coins of a stack (however they are not able to combine stacks, so if you have, for example, two items with 50 coins each - it won’t work) but not use the items nor anything like that. They use a script - and it seemed to work during testing, so we’ll take a look! The savegame could help too, as it might be something else broken causing it 
True, we had the “guide” idea not long before publishing the update so we did forget to include a lot of things! Thanks
Mostly welcome, as always! 
I’ll try to cover most points like before! But I’ll leave that one larger discussion for the end ;D
It’s the new Transform component, we love it! It has a lot of cool potential. Just as an example, try clicking fallen tree trunks or marble boulders when you play next…
That is a cool idea. Initially we didn’t show any numbers at all - just positive or negative (or neutral) texts. But maybe this would be cool indeed! Might not be ready for a hotfix but we might do it soon!
If @gonzalandau has the time and wishes to try another model or improve upon it, he’d be most welcome, as always 
Otherwise, I could try it myself! I imagine that it doesn’t have the same wild/nature feel of the others with their bones and twigs and flowers, right? Maybe something along those lines could be attempted!
They are, but they just accept firewood, as their name suggests
Yep, looks like an Archipelago Biome issue (not really a bug, it has custom seasons however and these must have their icons supplied. But it gives me an idea nonetheless - ACE should probably have a “generic” image for no-image seasons! Thanks for the idea/report!
I think that is addressed for the next hotfix but other issues with the new logic for ingredients might arise. Thanks for the report nonetheless
Oops! I’ll try to improve the icon a bit!
Edit: Paul has already fixed this typo in the unstable version! Thanks!
I think that is because they “grab” their tooltips from the same options used in the fields. I’ll check with Paul if it can be fixed!
Edit: Paul got this one too!
Ahh yes, noticed that. I even wanted to make slightly bigger loadouts but couldn’t due to that display/UI issue. We might have to patch that at some point so super-custom loadouts can be made…
The worst part is that sometimes the loot is… edible… food… 
I think these work properly if you get Bruno’s separate version of the tree stump mod? Not sure now…
Ohhh, will fix! Thanks!
Ohh, farm plot windows can’t be moved? 
I don’t think I’ve ever noticed that. Hmmm, will check out what to do about it…
Alga is the singular form of algae; water weeds are usually macroscopic, multicellular individuals (as opposed to the common “floating” algae which are basically tons of very small individuals) so it’s not really a typo!
Alright, and this very important bit of feedback!
Yes, indeed there is - sort of. In a way, we (of course) want to preserve the SH feel and essence - even though the SH vision itself has also shifted some through the years. It is that vision, the resulting one after all those years, that we all love today but we’re also interested in the untapped potential of the “what could’ve been” should the black box aspect of it was, well, less black box. In summary, I’d say that we don’t want to really change the level of complexity or management of the game in a drastic way but we definitely want to expose it for mainly two reasons: so that it can be refined and tweaked with new tools to improve even more the modding capabilities and to also cater to that other half of the audience that desires more depth/min-maxing/etc… in a rewarding way. But that can’t ever mean “punishing” strategies or ways to play that were adequate or fairly functional before, at least not so much (we did remove underground farming… 
) But that’s why the encouragement for investing in optimized farms rather than spamming farm must be just that, optimization - versus having extra farmers and tons of work/fields to work on. We can’t really say “No” to that since this has been done for years and it is a viable way to play.
There is balance to strive for, however. It’s not really a choice of one or the other but how to better extract the foundations of both worlds. I like Paul’s example above because it highlights this a bit: it’s about getting things that were already in the game (like the very abstract “Growth multiplier”) and breaking it up into slightly less abstract things that can be better understood and controlled should you desire to do so - but they should always behave more or less like you expected or wanted them to be before/without ACE - and that is the real challenge, finding this balance. Hence why a lot of the things during those releases are mostly experimental, or attempts to tweak existing mechanics and ideas already in the game and see how they are received by the community. (as an example: the resulting multipliers of all the new farming things (humidity, sunlight, climates, etc…) ends up being very similar to “vanilla” multiplier for certain weathers; like Blizzards, that had a 10x multiplier - the value most crops get from blizzards is now basically the same, but obtained through a new and more complex (but also controllable) logic rather than an absolute multiplier. Don’t care about it and the results should be similar to what you had before - but should you choose to care about it, you have options to mitigate or improve certain things. That’s the logic we’re going for, more or less)
It’s fairly common after every ACE release that we get mixed reactions on some features and we consider this to be healthy. Ideally we’ll reach a point where we’ll have things working more or less like they did before but also offer the possibilities and mechanics for - those that want it - to optimize and dominate them with powerful organization and micromanagement. But we don’t really want to hinder casual town builders and such along the way. So the balance between reward and punishment is not easy but I gotta say it is somewhat fun. For example, one of the features that I loved to work on for this release was the new weather system and its new effects. And I was sure the new, harsher winter for 'lings would be reason for a lot of criticism… needing coats, freezing water, heat sources, etc. - however, to my own surprise, a lot of people really liked and appreciated having more options and interesting gameplay mechanics to deal with when it gets cold, they can relate to it since “dealing” with the winter and such is something that has a lot of novelty. So it was surprisingly well received by many people. Other things that we don’t think will be an issue sometimes are not well seen, and so on. So finding this interesting balance between staying true to the vision while also “opening up” the game and its mechanics to lots of new potential uses is definitely something that will always be work in progress but also a fun challenge. Nothing is ever lost, anything can always become its own mod and so on – but it’s fun nonetheless!
We love that vision (of course) and we respect it and try to be as true to it as we can but I guess ACE is also its own thing, sort of. It has evolved to a dimension that I don’t think any of the people initially involved expect (I mean, how naive we were, thinking that we would be done by December? )
So this type of feedback is always important and nice to read. It helps us stay within those guidelines! Sometimes reading something like that means it is time to stop for a second and re-evaluate or re-balance what was left behind, and so on and so on.
Anyway, sorry for the huge wall of text but this has been the subject of other conversations before and I’ve always wanted to take the time to explain a bit of how this “process” of creating for ACE happens, how it is as experimental as it is important, etc. Everything can change, basically - a lot of what was done on the last update was “undone” for this update (or remade) and we’re in a fortunate situation where we can afford that. It’s a great community to be part of and work with 
5 Likes
TL;DR: Either support separate casual and pro player playstyles, or provide a gradual transition from casual to pro. Own and evolve the SH vision, rather than letting it hold you back.
Thanks for the detailed reasoning, Dani!
I see how you’re trying to leave this duality of being able to go the simple or the complex route. I think that’s one reasonable way to go, but it’s a hard one. Fully supporting multiple play modes without half-baking any of them means that you need to deal with the parts where they conflict without making the game worse for any of the player types, which is really hard.
The independent approach
If you really want to make the two alternatives modes be equally viable player experiences, the micro-management features should be less in-your face. For example, when I click a field as a casual player, I feel overwhelmed and confused. What are all these buttons? How am I gonna get water in the middle of the desert? Am I doomed to never get perfect crops? And so on. One way to address that is to hide the detailed view behind an Advanced button in the crop menu by default, but if you expand it, remember its expansion state. That way a casual player can ignore it without feeling the pressure to engage, and a pro player who does want to micro-manage needs to click once and will then have all the knobs exposed to them from then on.
The integrated approach
On the other hand, the approach that I think is more promising is to have a gradual transition. I.e. support casual players just long enough for them to become comfortable with advanced features. This is a bit like what you have with the fuel, where you can ignore it at the beginning but will need to engage with the system more and more as you try to get further through the game. The key here is that the advanced features are not required or even revealed at the start, but then gradually come into play, and the player has incentives and rewards for engaging with the advanced features. The vast majority of games use this approach to manage player learning and experience complexity.
For example, in the case of farming, I would expect entry level crops to not be affected by fertilizers/temperature/water at all. Then mid level crops would have one or two requirements - e.g. some require consistent sun and some require some amount of water. Then high level crops require more and more, including fertilizers, flooding, and so on.
A very important aspect of the experience here would be that the crop UI only shows the requirement of the currently selected crop type, so you introduce the new features gradually and let the player get used to each as they encounter them.
Additionally, I would expect high level crops to be more rewarding than they are in base SH (e.g. foods cooked from them give buffs, etc.), so the player has more incentives to engage with the system.
Yes, this is not realistic, but games are about crafting a player experience, not about matching reality. Too often simulation games fall into the trap of being super consistent and precise replicas of reality, even at the cost of player enjoyment or implementation complexity. Although other ex-SH devs might disagree, IMO base SH suffers from this in some cases, like block-by-block building with true reachability checks, or independent agent based AI.
And yes, this does change the balance of the game vs base SH, but I think you’re already too deep in to worry about that.
On the topic of vision
The SH dev team composition changed over time, and even during periods of personnel consistency the vision continuously evolved. You guys are the SH dev team now, and I say that literally, which means that you have taken the vision that you got from base SH and are now evolving it into what you think makes for a better game. Realistically, ACE is the only future SH has, and it’s your vision, as informed by your interaction with the rest of the community, that matters.
Making a great experience comes first, and that is probably best achieved by being consistent within the ACE version of SH rather than trying to be 100% compatible with base SH. As a player, my enjoyment is impacted worst when some element of the game feels out of place within the current experience, much more so than when an element isn’t fully consistent with the base game.
Alga is the singular form of algae
Huh, the more you know! That said, “algae” is used for many of the other objects, and since “alga” is used very uncommonly, a player is likely to think it’s a typo. Just another case of player experience vs matching reality.
7 Likes
Indeed it is, but it does feel like an interesting journey. That just gives me an idea, actually. Even though with all the feedback we get, it only represents a tiny bit of all the actual players and experiences out there. Makes me think that maybe we could try something for a next release, like creating a survey to get a nicer map of the player base and release a link to it (maybe even a small button for it on the title screen, like the old “Patch Notes” button). Anyway… Just a thought But could be nice!
This is what we’ve been trying for some things but sometimes it can be obscure (to us, as devs of the mod) what is really necessary or really confusing for new players, etc. It’s always a bit of a challenge to remind ourselves of that all the time when you know the mechanics/how things work and that becomes sort of natural. But we’ve been trying to increase the amount of things that can be “toggled” or hidden, for example. One of the ideas behind the Information component was that (the new Info button on some entities), though it still needs refining and greater customization for different types of entities, we wanted to have it as some sort of “Help” or “what is this?” button. Needs some work still, for now it will just shock pet owners
This is probably what would be the optimal experience, if we manage to create this sort of gradual evolution of the experience. But I think that before we can get there, we first need to “hit the hard road” a bit - if that makes sense. See what really fails, what really works, etc. And of course, get more or less feature-complete (or at least the features needed for each other). But it’s definitely a nice approach! In the end, even if we do dramatically change or remove some things, for example, we can always leave their foundations “sleeping” inside ACE, effectively creating the more complex base that we aimed for even though it’s not itself used by ACE.
Aww Some very kind and nice words here, but also huge responsibilities! An honor nonetheless - I think that regardless of vision, if there is one thing that you guys (as a team) and everyone now working and playing in SH have in common is that we do love this project as what it is: a project, a dream and a sandbox unlike any other (even though we have an ocean of games like that nowadays). So we’ll do our best to always stay true to that if nothing else
Thank you for the valuable input, as usual!
And I hope we can continue to bring nice things and surprises through ACE and beyond!
4 Likes
I’ve encountered a bug where I’ll be playing the game will save or autosave and crash because of it and it deletes the save entirely.
Just using ACE and Stonehearth, nothing else.
1 Like
@Omegasa it is a known issue and they are working on a fix.
I think this is a very good idea.
1 Like
Hey, thanks for this mod!
The issue I’m dealing with is that Rayya’s Children can no longer grow carrots at any level but the level one shepherd can only keep rabbits, which seem to refuse to eat anything except feed made with carrots, so I can’t feed them and my shepherd can’t level up to something I can feed. I tried buying carrots from a traveling merchant but it wasn’t enough, and my clerics were dying because they were spending all of their time healing the starving rabbits and refused to eat unless I turned off their job. Am I missing something obvious?
This is fixed for the next push too
We made a golden gourd based rabbit feed 
Should be up soon 
But for now you should be able to feed them with “Fodder” - it’s crafted by cooks as well!
Nice looking forward to try new things out