It seems in order for my hearthlings to start placing windows and doors into my own designed buildings, I am forced to Pause Construction… at that point the hearthlings, who moments ago, were lazing about the camp fire are now jumping up and hopping to. Scaffolding comes down, windows and doors go up…
Just wondering if it was just me 
There are a few bugs concerning the building such as invisible walls. Don’t worry 
As long as you are still able to build, that’s good.
Sometimes the AI needs a second to catch up, especially if these is a lot of building going on and the pathing calculations are complicated.
Yeah, I tend to only build 1 thing at a time due to this as well as make sure I have all the materials needed but when I verify and they sit around the campfire until you pause the construction…
2 questions,
As long as you don’t have any “engine error” or “UI error” message, it’s not a bug.
Pause/Unpause the building may change something to the building construction. I used this method to unstuck the building construction but now it seems stable.
It’s an issue they’re working on but there’s no single fixed solution. It gets referred to as the “idle hearthlings” bug and a few months ago it would permanently shut down my whole fort as soon as I had more than ten hearthlings. They spent the past month working on optimization and now I can go up to 20 hearthlings and only have momentary pauses on big projects.
The long term fix is just further code optimization and/or everyone gets faster computers. I’m sure they’ll keep working on it.
I’m not sure faster/better computers are the answer here (not that I’d mind a new machine!) but pathing, task queue order etc.
But who knows? I do know these guys are busting their butts and I hope they know how appreciative, I and I’m sure a number of others are!
There’s a good Desktop Tuesday on the problem here:
http://stonehearth.net/desktop-tuesday-idle-musings/
They’ve made a LOT of progress on it in the past few months.
Thanks, that was a good read. So, I don’t get so much the ‘Idle’ hearthling. My hearthlings continue to eat sleep, they will do other work if I assign it, but due to the fact they can no longer continue building, mostly sit around the campfire or help the farmers out (I think, they could just be eating lol).
Yup. I could be wrong, but I think what you’re seeing is what the “idle” hearthling bug is now, after all the fixes they’ve put in – basically, if you’re running in fast mode, sometimes the game runs ahead of the AI calculations, and some of your hearthlings can’t figure out what to do and go into “idle,” and that defaults to hanging out around the campfire. If you pause it (or run the game at a slower pace) they have time to figure out what to do.
Ok, hey I really appreciate it, but I did think the idle bug was when they just stood around random places… sounds like campfire sitting is the same thing. Thanks again!
I do know that they changed how Hearthling build, by having them place the doors and windows last. Pausing the building will let them put in doors and windows that are ready to be placed. In your case it may have been an issues where they did not receive a building completion notice.
I have seen this behavior when running at x2 speed, so I just keep an eye on the camp fire, kind of like its a job posting board (lol)
don’t have much to add to the convo about the pause/unpause but,
thats not actually true, there are many times where the game bugs out but doesnt throw an engine/UI error.
for example, there’s this report,
even though no UI errors were thrown, it is a problem with the UI, which is considered a bug.
I consider that as an optimization problem, not a bug.
It is a personal opinion though
ah, thanks for the clarification…
i hope this doesnt sound rude, but in some ways i think it might be best if you refer to them as bugs, just to keep from confusion and such between mods and users…
again, not trying to be rude, just trying to prevent confusion… 
Bugs, optimization problems, just whatever.
Every single problem should be posted, so the type of the problem doesn’t matter anyway 
As long as the problem can be solved there’s no reason to think of its type
An optimization bug! Best of both worlds!
Thanks for the good discussion, everyone!
If you save the building you’re trying to build as a template, and then plop it down in a fresh world with all the required supplies (cheat if necessary), does it build? If it does not build, and everyone is standing around staring, it’s possible that the hearthlings cannot figure out HOW to build it. In this case, head over to this thread and post your template: [A14/A15] The buildings my hearthling will not build Thread
If they can build the building in a fresh world, but not in THIS one, then it may be a memory/gamestate/performance problem. In that case, make a new bug and upload your save.
Thanks!