Summary: This has happened to me on all of the last 4 buildings I placed in my town. I’m not sure why, but the hearthlings build incomplete scaffolding and then either get stuck, or are unable to finish construction. In the attached screenshot you will see 3 hearthlings stuck on top of a building with no way to go anywhere. My other workers will perform other tasks but seem completely uninterested in helping their fellows down. Even after I manually placed ladders. The ladders remain unbuilt.
Steps to reproduce:
- Start a new building
- Watch as Hearthlings work themselves into corners or inaccessible areas.
3)Pray my other hearthlings will save them before they starve to death.
Expected Results: A nice new building for my town
Actual Results: A hodgepodge mess of scaffolding and stuck hearthlings.
Notes: This town is a carryover from the unstable building into alpha 16. I’m honestly not sure if that is a contributing factor or not, but I had this problem with one building before the alpha 16 update and with every building since. My other workers do nothing to help the stuck hearthlings.
Attachments:
Version Number and Mods in use: Alpha 16 with no mods
System Information: system info.txt (823.0 KB)
ok, so even though there was tons of wood in my inventory. I decided to try moving a few wood piles close to this building and farm them. after a few minutes one of my workers decided to use the wood to rescue the stuck hearthlings. This didn’t really make sense though since all my resources are stored in an area just to the bottom left of my screen shot. All i did was cut about 20 squares out of the travel distance by moving in the wood piles. So basically, my remaining workers just stood there because they didn’t want to carry the wood those extra paces until I moved wood closer. Seems like bad AI in the workers.
Does the structure build in a flat plain with nothing around it, or is it just when it’s in that spot?
Most of the scaffolding errors I run into aren’t so much due to the design as they are to placement of the design – hearthlings need a space 2 block wide and 3 blocks high, minimum (actually slightly more – a 3-high staircase can sometimes result in stuck hearthlings) and if they can’t path to a spot where scaffolding needs to go, they’ll stop work.
You can usually fix those problems though at least temporarily by building a ladder to the stuck spot.
If it is the design itself, that won’t build, it’s usually because there’s some interior section that is either unpathable or walled off such that Hearthlings build themselves locked inside it or wall off a portion before it’s finished. So it’s important to make sure every internal part of a structure is pathable/walkable to help it get built.
Looking at the screenshot, it might be the kinda weird way the scaffolding there has been built on either side of that wall – it looks like there’s a single tile wide empty area between two walls. That’s looks like it’s unpathable so it might be the source of the problem.
EDIT: oh it was just AI, well now I feel silly 
If you’re starting to get close to the performance point for your PC then yeah the hearthling AI can get delayed. Pausing the game to let the AI catch up can help that out.
