Not sure how many times this has been reported recently or if it’s been acknowledged by you guys, but I have two main issues in my current Ascendancy game (currently 31 Hearthlings so I know it started to break down in quality a while ago ).
My last game hit a point around 20 Hearthlings where restocking just took forever and was generally not handled well, and for some reason it carried over into my newest save. I don’t know if it’s a priority thing, but oftentimes it takes way too long for wheat to be picked up off the fields or loot items to be looted.
Second thing is, for some reason, my workers refuse to restock drink items. I have two wooden tuns, set to store simple and prepared drinks, but nothing gets placed in them at all. My brewery has four wooden supply kegs set to store ale, beer, and both types of mead - these get stocked, but any other drinks will not get stored. I don’t know if I’m just misinterpreting the function of tuns or if there’s a problem with them, but currently I have about 30 drinks of various types sitting out in the town square!
Tuns are equivalent to “Finished Work Shelves” - only crafters will place things on them, right after they are crafted!
That means that only the cook, after brewing a drink, will place something in a tun - and then workers will move them from the tun to barrels and casks.
For storing drinks, use the Supply Casks (priority) or the barrels/tanks/amphorae (non-priority)
As for the issues you’re facing, they seem to be the (unfortunately) normal performance degrading issues that SH presents after a while depending on your hardware, etc…
You can try optimizing it as much as you can (use small map from Bruno’s “Extra Map Options”, etc…) and try to keep things always clean, make containers and input bins for everything, don’t overproduce (massive farms, etc…) to try to alleviate it, but unfortunately it is an issue that plagues everyone in SH, sooner or later You have to find your sweet spot (the best amount of lings you can have before performance starts degrading) and lock yourself to that number
Oh man, that makes so much more sense - thank you for the guidance on tuns. I wondered why I was noticing some fluids being stacked “on top” of them instead of “inside.” I’ve tried to avoid having barrels for each drink, because I feel like if you produce at least a bit of all of them it would take a lot of space, but I suppose that lends some credence to building two breweries.
On the note of the smaller supply casks, I have four of them set on a small bar counter, but they never get filled - the casks themselves can be picked up by the Hearthlings, but for some reason they never stock them. I haven’t watched yet to see if they’ll be filled when all other restocking tasks have been completed, so I don’t know the cause - I had this problem on the aforementioned last save, and what finally fixed it was undeploying and moving around the bars and the casks. In the end, it was all exactly the way I had it before, but maybe moved over one space.
I sort of figured that it was just late-game performance for the restocking issues, but it seemed to be a little inefficient even at the beginning of the game. It’s not terribly game-breaking, but if I want everything to end up put away, it takes about a day or two in-game for them to finally be finished.
I’m in the middle of a Northern Alliance gameplay - started from scratch, no reembarkation. So far I feel the improvements done up to now are very, very good ones. I feel the game is stabler now, i got perhaps one or two erros (black messages), as opposed to previous gameplays.
I liked NA animal shelters (building templates) ! And overall i liked the other NA building templates - some are very similar to one another on the outside, but i guess it`s ok.
One small issue: i`m getting animal loot on the roof. Yes, on the roof. Not a big problem though, i built alternating custom blocks + a ladder so that hearthlings could reach stuff.
Yeah, the few last updates added quite a bit of new stuff; thanks guys, thanks so much, some of these additions were great ones.
One small issue: when i tried to use a second military party (green banner), hearthlings started to move forward and backward while ignoring enemies.
The game could use a bit more of information on different types of storage and fish traps.
I feel the usage of pelts from NA recipes is currently a bit too high, at least until you have wool available which takes quite a bit of time.
As NA, as a faction that is meant for exploration of it`s enviroment, i feel there is a need for a way to hasten activities to far away places. If i try to kill a group of enemies in a far away place, two things happen: first, the military group takes a while to arrive there (and return) and sometimes they arrive at diffrent moments, second the dropped loot takes a while to be gathered - and if it is late game, there is a chance your hearthling might be intercepted by an enemy. This problem increased because hearthlings now drink and pass out, thus they have to return home more often. Perhaps we could add a kind of vehicle produced by the engineer, a minecart with rails, horses for hearthlings; or even a wagon so that they can sleep in, have food/water on the wagon and even store loot on it (by a designated hearthling). This last idea could give an easier time building at far away places. Imagine wagons from farwest cartoons (those with cover on it).
As you progress in the game, I find that food, both uncooked and prepared, starts to really stockpile and you never decrease the amount that you have. What I’ve taken to doing is turning all of my fields to fallow and eliminating trapper fields and stopping my shepherds from autoharvesting extra animals. It’s add to the challenge and clears out a tonne of items from your inventory, and most importantly, frees up hearthlings to do other tasks. This would be nice to have built in…
Yeah sorry folks I was just throwing ideas out there.
I know it may not look as polished, but would it be possible to use particle effects to mask their form and represent some of the actions? When a critter starts to dig/mine they get a dust cloud around them with an occasional pebble rolling out, a lighter cloud with wood chips and/or leaves for chopping trees, or for fishing maybe a pool of bubbles with a shadow circling under the water? Not sure if that would make things easier or more complicated.
Yeah, there are solutions We can use existing rigs/animations, or make effects, etc… It’s not about not knowing what to do, more about just having a lot to do for it to be good (and hence it goes down on current priorities)
Never say sorry for throwing ideas and such, these are always welcome
Oh yeah, wasn’t expecting it anytime soon lol. You folks have a lot on your plates as is. Plus the world seems to be on fire, literally and figuratively, so that can cause other issues.
Speaking of, here’s hoping everyone is well!! Wishing you all the best!
I managed to make fish traps work however, after a long time, i checked them and “they have been trigered, but failed to catch fish” . Previously they were working normaly, but now many of them are closed AND empty; and the trapper doesn t go there to re open the fish traps.
I m using ACE only.
Note: i can t remove them either.
Edit : As soon as i promoted a new hearthling to trapper, he re activated the closed fish traps.
Edit 2 : i have discovered the reason, it seems you must have hauling and building activated in the Jobs panel.
About walnut trees while playing as Northern Alliance in Arctic Biome : early spread is very limited right now. The fact that it only bear “fruits” in autumn does add a very nice flavor to gameplay; however, in the beggining i can only find a handful few walnut trees, and i end up limited in the ammount of walnut trees i can spread right away, even if i start in spring. The result is that i have to wait more then an in-game year in order to both have a nice amount of walnut trees AND produce nice quantities of nut flour.
Edit: Let me better explain.
Playing as Northern Alliance in Arctic Biome, i could find few walnut trees (something like 6), even searching far, and they only bear fruits during autumn , which in Arctic Biome lasts around seven days - so you don`t have the chance to get lots of walnuts like Ascendancy in Temperate Biome. A herbalist can only make around tree seeds from each basket, and FULLY GROWN walnut trees (the majority i found were small) yield around three baskets at each harvest (small ones yield one basket); thus, it is very hard to have lots of producing walnut trees in the FIRST YEAR.
And remember, if you want to use “nut flour”/“nut baskets” throughout the entire year, you need to stock lots of them while they are still producing - autumn only, very short in Arctic Biome.
The result is that you have to wait a full in-game year, which for many players is very long time; and all recipes that involve either basket of nuts or nut flour end up being under utilized.
Now that we have drinking as well - and hearthlings drink twice a day -, basicaly the cook spends a lot more wood then before. It would be a very welcome change, but i fear it might bring its own share of “ai related” problems, while giving ACE Team quite a complex and long job. I think there are simpler options to deal with the problem, for example:
increasing the “log of wood” x “bundle of firewood” rate , from three to 8 (i mean, come on, Carpenters can make entire furniture out of just a few pieces of wood);
in food recipes, increasing the amount of input raw food and output prepared food (i mean the number of servings), while mantaining the required amount of bundle of firewood. In a similar fashion, this can be done with drinkings as well.
Not really, a simple “need to refuel this” AI call is quite simple - and if done on a higher than 0 threshold (before the fuel has run out) it is likely that the crafter won’t ever stop crafting unless your town is really busy with too many simultaneous orders and such.
Technically speaking, this alleviates the AI because it’s simply a go get fuel action and then take it to the station, the current implementation does exactly that but on each crafting, since fuel is an ingredient, going after it and taking it to the station is effectively the same logic but done many, many more times. So there is already an included amount of time optimization on the new implementation.
More than the fuel matter, what you’re actually referring to is a matter of game balance, and although you’re right about the drinks being an extra chore for the cook, that is also being mitigated by the upcoming brewer job voted by the community a couple of months ago, so before we change anything on the balance of servings and crafted fuel, we’ll probably prefer to see how the balance will be with these changes
Oh, i`m glad to know that the solution to the fuel problem is simpler than i had thought. Actually, i would not have proposed anything if i knew that.
About the brewer class: yeah, nowadays it is a need, though in the past i was against this idea. Even before the drinking update i was already using two cooks often.
Is there any chance one day we will be able to harvest nuts from pine trees? That would solve the walnut tree problem (i described above) for NA in Arctic Biome, while greatly contributing to imersion - making NA even more an unique experience.
pinecones, acorns, and a few other tree seeds can be crafted into “basket of edible nuts” (or something very similar) already, which is a great way to get some extra food in the early-game while clearing space for buildings. Because of how quickly these trees grow, and the fact that you’ll often get 2+ seeds per tree (at least for large sized ones), this can be a good interim supply of nuts while you’re cultivating actual nut trees.
The nut and fruit trees are intended to work as long-term food sources, unlike say berry bushes which will start producing quickly. They take a lot of time and “investment” to get going; but once you have them fully established after a couple of in-game years they’ll produce nuts every 1-2 days for 2 or in some cases 3 seasons, which results in a LOT of nuts and fruit hahah.
).
You have to find your sweet spot (the best amount of lings you can have before performance starts degrading) and lock yourself to that number 
