A post was merged into an existing topic: Can’t promote second Farmer - or maybe error while mining
I get what you’re saying, but again I’d ask, why now? Why during the alphas? Shouldn’t players be pushing the game to its limits, and reporting those limits to devs? Don’t you benefit more from players doing weird and unexpected things instead of putting up artificial walls? Let’s not forget, when the game gets to its “1.0” release, the average player’s computer will be more powerful than it is today. It would seem to me that more testing is needed, now and well into the rest of the alpha process, before such limits “need” to be imposed.
I’m also a little trepidatious at the thought of devs dictating their game expectations in what was always described as a sort of sandbox game, where one can choose to play as one likes and pick objectives for themselves. Shouldn’t there be feedback from the Game Master, rather than arbitrary coded limits? If a player is hoarding stuff and not building anything, shouldn’t that be cause for giant monster hordes stealing that hoard by force, rather than the game just not letting you take that risk? That has always been my expectation, based on statements going back all the way to the Kickstarter, and reinforced since.
I will second @thedrgnrbrn that I’d rather prefer the game not rely on mods to eliminate or raise such limits when those limits are impacting players’ enjoyment of the game. When I heard that Alpha 15 was going to be a performance update, my assumption was that the game would be better optimized so that players could do more. I’m just concerned that it seems Radiant is heading in the direction of restricting players from doing more with these artificial limits, moddable or not, in order to hide the game’s limitations rather than fix them. I know better than most around here that code can only be optimized so much. If you can’t do better without prohibitive expense in coding time, and you’ve optimized these systems to the very best they’ll ever be, I’ll trust you guys, but the arbitrary stopping of players from reaching those limits in a number of different systems now is a troubling trend and I’m forced to wonder if you’re giving up too soon, or jumping ahead of yourselves in release-candidate-type restrictions of the game for the “average player” you’re trying to “message”. Personally, I think that sort of hand-holding is inappropriate with alpha testers who know they’re playing an unfinished game.
I just feel I must speak out, just as I did when Radiant was first considering Steam Early Access and the game was not ready for that. Radiant listened back then and it was really for the best. Agree with me or disagree with me, on this issue, but I’m worried again and have to say something.
Want to address these two comments, as they touch upon a sentiment that has come up elsewhere on the Discourse, in the website comments, Steam, etc. Lately I have been seeing more comments like @thedrgnrbrn’s above that mods are an “excuse” for the developers. I am having a hard time understanding where this concern is coming from. 3 builds ago (the second to last A14 build) a crafting queue limit was added, as multiple issues had been reported over the previous few Alphas of crafting queues simply not working. It was determined that this happened most often when there were many items in the queue, so a limit was implemented to prevent the queue from crashing. In A15, a scaling inventory cap was added. Almost immediately after both of these changes were announced, people came out against them. With the queue cap, it was made pretty clear that a number was picked that seemed to work well, and it would be adjusted as needed. I can only assume that the same thing would happen for the inventory queue.
With an in-development game, we get to see a lot more than one would normally when playing a game. Nearly every game out there has limits, even sandbox type games. Think about population limits in RTS games, limited inventory space in sandbox games like Minecraft. The difference there is that those limits existed when you first played the game. Launch a game of AoE and the population cap is front-and-center, and forces you to make decisions as you play the game. Because you never had an “unlimited” option, most people don’t think about it - it’s just part of the game. When the devs say you can “mod” the game if you don’t like it, that isn’t a cop-out, it is being open and transparent. The benefit we have with Stonehearth vs something like AoE or Minecraft is we can simply unzip a folder, change a few lines, and do whatever we want to any limits put in place. If those limits aren’t an issue for a majority of the players, and it helps ensure everything runs smoothly, then I am all for the limits. If when everyone is playing they find themselves bumping into the caps too quickly, then I am sure the devs will here it on the Discourse, and will take another look into the specific numbers.
To summarize: it seems the bigger issue isn’t the specific values of the limits, but that there are any limits whatsoever. No game is (or can be) truly unlimited, and to think Stonehearth would be is foolish. Making the game easy to mod isn’t a cop-out, it is letting the players make changes for themselves easily if they want to make a change.
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I’m not big on mods in general. But i can understand that it sometimes can be useful. In some cases even fun to be able to have something different, like a different texture on builds or tools. I’m not good on modding so when there are people that are good in it and a game that makes it easy to do then i say let them make it, and let me use the ones i think will add something to my game exeriance 
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You seem to have mis-interpreted a personal feeling on mods as a slight to the developers. I apologize if my intentions were not clear.
A specific, anecdotal example of what I am talking about is how a ga a like Space Engineers has developed. When players made suggestions about the game, or questioned the direction of development that players were actively encouraged to participate in, other people told people to ‘just mod it in’ instead of giving feedback to the developers. I take issue with this attitude, because, as I pointed out before, I want to play the game that the developer is making, not the final product after modding it a hundred times. Stonehearth, as a game and idea, is what I bought into, not the modding community.
For another example, Minecraft made billions, but how many people still play the vanilla version?
On topic, I think we may be having a bit of an issue with expectations vs. reality. From the outset, there wasn’t any real discussion on limits, and again, promotional material made it seem like we would be able to create without limits. Of course, as developers, you are more clued into reality than we the players are, so a little pushback is to be expected. Just an incident of expectation and reality realigning.
I do want to thank you guys for all your hard work, and I really appreciate all the effort that has gone into the game to make it moddable. You guys are awesome, and keep being awesome.
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