Auto Harversting Plants And Trees

Suggestions
#1

Auto Harvesting Regions

I’ve had a lot of fun playing this game but the one thing that is not fun to do is keep selecting to harvest things that regrow like berry bushes, plants on the ground, and things like that. It would be great if there was a region selector that allowed an easy was to auto harvest plants. Every 10-15 mins check and see if anything in that region needs to be harvested and make the Hearthlings if ready go harvest those plants or other things. This could act like the farming regions but with plants and other things. :grinning:

5 Likes
#2

Hey there @TinyTank800, welcome to the Discourse :smiley:! Great suggestion, I feel like I’ve seen this before, but search is failing me right now.

1 Like
#3

related
http://discourse.stonehearth.net/t/new-jobs-auto-mining-new-farming/21717

2 Likes
#4

I like the gatherer idea and I feel like it could be a good addition or just something added to all hearthlings. However, auto mining is less appealing, because your hearthlings will randomly strip the map of it’s beauty.

#5

I wouldn’t mind the option to mark veins for auto-mining. As-is they require a lot of babysitting if you don’t want to mine out more than necessary, like when they are located a fair distance from your village.

#6

Automining; nope

Autogathering; All of my yep. Being able to designate a zone that is ‘Auto harvest’, and then putting all my Berry Bushes, and wild plants in there would save a lot of time.

1 Like
#7

Hello there,

thumbs up … all i have ^^

#8

may depend on a more fundamental zone mechanics which may be reused for other purposes.

I am still used to DF’s system, where defining a zone itself is intent-neutral (you don’t know what it is going to used for yet), and later, allowed activities can be toggled (so the same zone can say be used for auto-harvesting plants, auto-chopping trees, and fishing all at once). The activity should just be (periodically) applied to the valid tiles in the zone. The nice thing is that it can be “extended” by just adding a new kind of zone activity (as opposed to say specialized zones for auto-chopping, another one for harvesting, yet another one for fishing)

On the other hand, this may go against the idea of stonehearth being simple. (DF is so detailed that we could offer a diploma course on how to play it). One balance guide I feel should be adopted always, is to keep the underlying engine/mechanics flexible, but offer a more simple UI over it (with default values that even when left alone, will “work”, but allow advanced players to tweak things at a higher level of detail)

#9

Hello,

mhmm, i don’t think that stonehearth would get to difficult when getting a few more autozones. I mean, the farmer is doing all his work by himself.
So perhaps for new autozones, we should use new jobs, like ranger, miner etc… So … we could have new autozones, and gaming keeps simple ^^

best regards

madda

#10

@madda
Think you may have misunderstood me. What I mean is that a single zone can encompass many different job types. There is nothing that says all the job types must be done by one “class”.

e.g. say my zone covers some water and land tiles. Why can’t workers gather berries from the trees while my fisherman fishes by the shore?

It is the other way around, declaring a zone that can ONLY be used by ONE class which feels totally unnatural to me.

#11

Hello sphr,

mhmm, sure, for RL it feels strange. In a game like SH it’s more some sort of keeping clear zones.
I’m not sure if the actual gaming mechanics are allowing to drop an farming zone into the hunter zone. If so, it would be like
mixed zones. Have to try it out today, after i brought my little kittens to the doc.

But for our thoughts, what would rly be the advantage of sorted harvesting zones? Perhaps there should be some jobs wich zones lay above zones like farming. So you determine your farming zones, keeps a bit space between’em for fences and perhaps trees, than you’ll determine the zone for the ranger (trees) withing your town walls, so the ranger will not enter dangerous zones by himself, but he know can plant trees between the farming zone fences. And it could be that he will plant trees where your animals are pasturing.

I would not declare classes to zones, i think it would be more neat to have different zones, wich are able to be layed over or something like.

best regards

madda

#12

hi

The compromise I was trying to describe is:

  • zones don’t overlap, and can be simple shape (like rectangles).
  • each zone allows more than one job to be enabled/disabled.

The end result can be similar though. the union of the shape of the above zones with a single job enabled is sort of equivalent to a single specialized zone for the job. and the corresponding unions for each job types basically form the different potentially overlapping zones in your description.

To use an analogy, assume we are looking at a digital image (made up of pixels of RGB).

One way of looking at it is to see each pixel as one cell, and each can have a value or no value for the colors Red, Green and Blue.
The other way is to look at the whole image as 3 overlapping planes, each plane consisting of only one corresponding colors of a pixel positions.

Your description above, is probably closer to the plane method. While my suggestion was the pixel method. But they could achieve similar thing in the end.

What is pivotal here is probably in the respective perspectives of each of the 2 ways of looking at it:

  • specialized zones: can zones overlap?
  • multi-function zone: can a zone supports more than one function simultaneously.

If the answer is no (same to both): it just means that some “zone space” will potentially be “wasted”.

#13

I think that is an awesome idea!

either than or have the farmers harvest them while doing their work since it is related, im always forgetting to harvest all that stuff.

#14

after discovering that I can move plants like this
image

decided to revive this thread and ask, is there a mod for auto farming moved plants?
or a way to designate this zone where the plants have been moved for farming?