Are we going to see more needs?

I see in the roadmap we’re looking to get more monsters, classes, more construction bits, but right now the villagers’ needs are kinda shallow. Sleep, food and to not be killed seem to be the only needs right now, and I saw this thread: Villager “needs”

And the Q&A update cited better idle-time management, but little was said of needs beyond the productive drives: sleep, food & health.

Do you think we’ll see real needs? Talking Maslow here, and while I don’t expect a self-actualization level needs structure, at least something beyond food, sleep and health.

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But there’s so many…er…interesting…ways this can be expanded out!

We’ll likely be seeing more in the eventual future, like content with their surroundings which could tie into their morale. I believe temperature was one idea that was also thrown around earlier, especially in biomes like deserts, tundra, etc.

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Environmental issues would be interesting. Dying of frostbite without proper gear, etc. But that’s still a survivability need, and level 0 for Maslow.

I was hoping more social needs, like interaction, fun, romantic needs. A tribe’s more than a bunch of people living next to each other and all that.

My guess is this will all be umbrella’d under Morale. Each piece contributing to the score, instead of micromanaging a plethora of “Sim-Like” needs.

Makes sense to me, anyway. :smiley:

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Makes sense to me, too, assuming it’s explicit. Like if they have to interact and enjoy themselves outside of work and that gets lumped into a simplified “Morale” score. Presently, though, they take joy from just a hard day’s work and not having to sleep on the ground. Bit of a Catholic Sim, as it is.

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It’s funny how villagers want comfy beds, but they don’t care about roofs as of yet. There needs to be a longer progression of needs (and adding more bed types is not the way to go.) Water could do a great deal for this - lake water, closer water storage, clean water, water directly to homes… these steps don’t even need to be in order. Who says you can’t bring dirty water straight to your citizens’ homes? Choices that don’t have to be in order would make the game feel that much more nonlinear. @Franklin that might be going a bit too far; that was the general medieval attitude and this game seems sort of medieval. Although I think your average medieval European was still more picky than your average Hearthling :smile:

I like the idea of water as a need. But I rather the existing features all work at 100% than adding more buggy features.

Everyone says that in an alpha, but feature-filling is what an alpha is for. You want to be feature-complete going into the beta. Betas are for bug-squashing, performance tuning and polishing.

You’re correct in that I misspoke, I shouldn’t expect the beta to be bug free, let alone the alpha. Also, I have a bias as a dev-who-plays-games… I think it’s safe to assume that radiant is using an agile methodology. What I think is less safe to assume is that in rushing to get features in the alpha that they are laying down the proper metaphysics; that their models are correct. No one is perfect, and no one is going to get everything right on the first try, but as the game plays right now, it doesn’t feel like there is any metaphysics.

Obviously, I could go on a long digression about this, But I think getting buildings at even 50% before writing a line of code to handle flowing voxels or however they decide to implement large scale liquids, is a clear and important goal, even for the Alpha.

Also, there is a big difference between having the display engine support a feature and having that feature actually make sense and be usable in the context of the game; this is an extremely complex game, as is.