Clay pile cheating

I say “clay” but I suppose the same applies to wood and stone.

  • Get enough clay
  • Craft a clay pile
  • Place a clay pile
  • Harvest come clay from it, then cancel harvesting
  • Order to pick the pile up and return to your stockpile

In the end the selling price of your clay pile remains unchanged, and it’s no big wonder. As far as I know items in SH have static value in coins and “partially used” resource like this has no special treatment.
The result is not particularly good because:

  • Logically, a “used” or “incomplete” resource should cost less
  • I can abuse the system by harvesting 17 clay from the pile (it contains 18), then selling the pile and buying more clay from the merchant.

While it’s not a bug, it would be nice to handle this oversight somehow. I see two ways:

  • The complex one: make prices “dynamic” based on a new property of items called “durability” or something like that. (can also prove useful later if we want to make equipment breakable)

  • The easy one: make “incomplete” resources unsellable. (doesn’t resolve some “wrong” impact on the “total gold value” of the town)

It would be useful for both options to see the remaining amount of clay in a pile. In this way in option 1 we will be able to see why are our used piles cheaper than we would expect, and in option 2 we will be able to see which piles are sellable and which aren’t.

PS. Obviously it’s not a No.1 priority issue, but handling it would be a nice touch.

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I agree this should definitely be addressed, and at the very least a used pile should denote how much is left.

Hey, thanks for letting us know about this! We’ll go ahead and put this in our backlog. There’s been talk about potentially implementing real stacks in the game, so we may end up removing piles in the future. But we’ll address more of this when we start on our economy improvements.

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This game is full of exploits :sweat_smile:
You don’t even need debug tools for this.

Edit: moving to bug reports to keep track of it.

Well, it’s not a critical exploit. The game is still in Alpha, and this thing is not very convenient to abuse. Still, there’s room for improvement :slight_smile:
I was also going to suggest removing Exp gains for crafting piles (since you can abuse it by cyclic crafting/harvesting to train your crafter - I myself have done it many times) . Then I thought that

  1. Piles as they are now don’t give much Exp anyway, and gains decrease further with every new crafter level, making this abuse highly impractical late in the game.
  2. To craft a pile you need 18 pieces of resource. Early on it’s quite a big number, so we more or less have a “price border” to cross to start using this. We need to invest either time and hearthlings to mine resources or get enough money to buy them.

Considering this, it’s more a question of possible (re)balance that will happen anyway at some point than an important issue.
And seeing what @linda said about reworking the whole “pile” idea, the “problem” with Exp may become entirely irrelevant. Writing it down here just as a reminder.

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