Better notification for Hearthling rescue

Summary: No one hauls wounded Hearthlings to bed

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Hardmode settings
  2. Golem smashes Hearthlings
  3. wounded Hearthlings lie on ground

Expected Results: Someone, anyone runs and saves the poor dears. The cleric’s magic saves the day or the herbalist takes them home. Maybe this had to do with assigned beds being too far away. I don’t know. They were kiting that golem pretty hard.

Actual Results:
Cleric heals ineffectually. Then is demoted back to Herbalist to see if they haul bodies to beds. Bed is placed nearby.
They die cold and alone on the battlefield. A hero’s funeral is held in solemnity and fingers are soon pointed at everyone else. Why couldn’t they have just hauled them to bed to rest and recuperate? Why did they have to die? Hearthling society collapses due to infighting and monster dinner time.

Notes: Prior to this, the cleric I quickly drafted wasn’t healing my footmen until I let them go back to town to eat.

Attachments:

Version Number and Mods in use: Alpha 20

System Information:

Have to check - did you click on the injured Hearthling and click Rescue?

1 Like

Ohhhh… you have to do it manually? Dangit.

Maybe Someone could pop up and tell you “Oh no! Look one of your hearthlings has fallen in battle. Click on this icon to send someone to get him”

At any rate, the cleric shouldn’t be standing there healing them if it’s not going to work at all. Gave me false hope.

4 Likes

@Brackhar, thoughts?

Yeah, we opted to go with a manual approach here because there’s just too much risk around the action.

If a hearthling has become incapacitated, that usually means they’ve been attacked (yeah, they can also starve, but you’re properly feeding your hearthlings, aren’t you?). This means that there’s likely an enemy around the downed hearthling. If we automatically sent another hearthling to pick that one up, it’s entirely possible that new hearthling will also get attacked by the same monster. While we could try to read the situation and make some judgement on when things are “safe” it’s entirely possible we’d get it wrong in some cases, and it feels terrible when a game causes you to lose a character due to something you had no control over. So in this particular case we’ve shifted the onus over to the player to actually issue the rescue command, since the player will be the best to judge if it’s safe or not.

That said, if you’re not getting sufficient notification that an interaction is needed, that’s an entirely different matter and should be addressed.

6 Likes

I feel like I would naturally opt for this way too. However with all this great thought being put into our little towns ( keeping them safe and as noosance free as possible ) it is hard not to see a dedicated tooltip for simple things as many people fall over. Your playerbase exists of far more than those on the discourse and as such many will simply have the Trapper sleep in the Carpenters bed and be anoyyed. They might also never figure out how to loot a stomped village properly, restore terrains after clearing the area, using your fighting/defend in the right way and the newest addition would be the rescue of your wounded - but oh so precious - hearthlings.

Perhaps a simple ingame wikipedia constructed by the great amount of feedback giving people around here in lead of perhaps @jomaxro and @brad ? I’m not sure if this is the right moment to put this but I feel like many of the things that make this game great are the small “fidgetting” details that are snuck in oh so often.

Small list of things that might be unclear for people not dedicated to reading long posts twice a week.

Assigning beds
Rescueing hearthlings
Suspending workqueues
Use of millitary commands
Looting camps / enemy corpses / enemy drops
Restoring terrain near campsites previously inhabited but now cleared
Promoting an already assigned hearthling requires you to fill his create gap in the jobscheme

I’d be more than happy to respond to any further thoughts on this as I feel many of these well fleshed out details are currently wasted, yet all of them could be categorized under “easy of life”

Cheers

5 Likes

Thanks for the feedback, @MaddyGrand :slight_smile:
Paging @Sweet to check the list.

1 Like

No problem at all. I feel like a simple tooltip would also get less kickback opposed to even more ding-dongs, rings and bells over the screen. If you manage a town of individuals you quickly learn the basics and these should be included and kept up to date. I’m sure between Radiant and all the great contentcreators there’s room for improvement in the “informational purposes” department so to speak.

Slightly off topic it’s very nice to see an update right after the holidays ! Sweet job people.

1 Like

Right now you just get a “Mard Burlyhands is severely low on health!” message when a hearthling keels over.

It should say “Mard Burlyhands was incapacitated by a Kobold and needs to be rescued!”. It should probably also stick in your Notifications queue until you actually rescue them or they become dead. When you click on the notification, it would take you to the hearthling in question, but also open up a full notification that explains what rescuing is and what the dangers are.

5 Likes

I feel like the notification should indeed be kinda re-done to fit the command given but that’s about it.

I agree with @MaddyGrand on the need for more unfo for the player, although i do suspect this should be part of the tutorial, a tutorial should be done in a wide time frame(in-game time) to let the players know what’s what, the basics such as building and crafting, storage and trading should go first whilst the ‘Pioneer spirit’ mood is present, and after that, the player should probably either be taught how to rescue a hearthling(add a scinario where you send a hearthling and make the tutorial down him/her via monster pop-up) or town happiness than following up to the advanced content such as engineers and military composition

Thees all can be delivered in a engaging manner, and I suggest checking out Wildsar’s Tutorial, while bending towards the games genre, also manages to deliver a smooth and engaging tutorial, especially with the trada-skills/crafting

You just carry on your path and you stumble upon the crafting community/NPC’s and the tutorial is almost disguised as a quest, and it does it quite well since quests are one of the main attractions of the game, SH is a different game, and WildStar does have some advantages(such as all interactions being the F key, and quest abulities all being T, making it obvious how to do some of the actions) but i think there are some to be learned from their implications

Totally possible for the community to get punctual with information too, is there a stonehearth wiki already ?
I’ve been playing a lot and I stumble across small things all the time. Documentation could do a lot too.
Great idea on the queststuff, I believe the team at radiant has this on their agendas as well.

https://stonehearth.gamepedia.com/Stonehearth_Wiki

Could always use more hands keeping it up to date!

1 Like

Thanks a bunch for letting me know. Is there a chat of some kind perhaps for contentcreators/community supporters ?

Cheers

@TheDerpySupport made a Discord here: Discord, but I don’t know how active it is. You can also feel free to use on of the existing wiki topics here as a discussion system:

The invite seems expired, as for that I’d say making a new one wouldn’t be too hard. If need be I could get in up and running before the weekend ( if the demand is there )

Thanks a lot and I’ll see what I can do to help the wiki out.

Up to you. @TheDerpySupport was online 2 days ago, so my guess is he/she’ll see this soon and help out.

Feel free to drop in if need be, when Derpy reports on the probable cause of the issue I’ll switch around if need be.