Construction management: Building stockpiles, better crafting control

Suggestions
1

After you finish designing a building, there should be a few more options before you start building it. These could easily be skipped, so they wouldn’t hurt the current workflow, but they’d make other related tasks easier.

Disable/enable auto-queuing

The current resources tab should have a “Queue crafting” checkbox for each item that’s not just a raw resource. With auto-queuing off in your game settings, these will all be unchecked by default. With auto-queuing on in your game settings, these should all be checked by default (except if it’s not craftable, maybe even if you don’t have the right crafter. In which case, it should also tell the player they won’t be able to craft them. If it’s just a higher level item, it should still be able to queue.)

Example uses: When I play as the Ascendancy, I start by crafting beds to level up my carpenter. At this point, I can’t play without most items being auto-queued, but I have to navigate to my carpenters’ queue and remove orders for extra beds if I don’t want them to waste time/space/material. When I play as Rayya’s children, I order my potter to maintain bricks in storage, and the separate craft jobs from each building clog up the queue, making it hard to order items I need for quests and trading.

Building Stockpiles/Construction Bins

After selecting that, and before Hearthlings start building, you’d have the option to create temporary storage for some of the building materials. This could either involve dragging out a stockpile, or placing bins (which might be a little more streamlined, but it wouldn’t look quite as cool.) Once construction started, some Hearthlings would prioritize moving items to this storage, sort of like the crafter supply bins. But rather than setting an item filter, they would automatically be filled with the as many raw materials and then items needed for the building as possible. After the building’s finished, this temporary storage would go away. Stockpiles would be unmarked, or if this feature uses bins, they’d be undeployed if you had to place actual bins, or destroyed if they were just placeholders automatically summoned in.

Example: While Payten is busy digging the foundation of the new stone keep, other workers are busy hauling stone to the construction site so the builders won’t have to go far. This also gives the player a better look at what’s going into the building. Storage emptying as the building completes shows progress, while empty storage earlier on is a further indication of a problem.

While this should be easily skippable, it does add a workflow between building design and construction. So are there any other options that could be added to this workflow, making it more useful and powerful for your own playstyles without overcomplicating it?

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2

This could also be a good window to specify what quality type of items you use in your buildings:

  • Do you not care
  • Do you want what you specified of higher
  • Or does it need to be excactly of the quality you specified
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  1. Temporary stockpiles are better for buildings than bins. You shouldn’t have to craft a bin and move it to the building site to get this behavior. Also, building materials should (realistically) be more suited to be placed in a stockpile than in a bin.
  2. Temporary stockpiles would be nice to have for output as well. Mining, woodcutting, foraging.
  3. With stockpiles and bins that are supposed to be emptied or filled it would be nice to have wheelbarrows (or crates assigned for hauling or something like that) to automatically move a lot of things from one storage to another.
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Mwa, maybe. It depends, really. If I have a permanent mining outpost, then output stockpiles which delete themselves after they’ve been emptied doesn’t sound like a thing I’d want to keep replenishing.

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whereas i understand that this would (maybe) streamline a lot of stockpiling/crafting… is it really needed? i am happy to just throw down 3 starting stockpiles (which accept all) and when building/designing a house, it auto-queues the crafter anyway… yes the optional option of higher quality crafts is good, but they make higher quality automatically as and when they know how to :wink: (as far as i remember)

the only thing i would use this method for is… if i was building a village 2 miles away from my main village… only then would i care about stock bins to be carried over to the build site :slight_smile:
nnot being sarcastic or anything - it is a good idea… im just asking how many people would do it this way? as i for one do not mind either :wink:

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The will make higher quality automatically, but will they put those into a building that asks for the same items with a different value. That is what the variable_quality option in the building template is for.

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ohhh i see now… its all bout quality controll by the OP… sorry i missed the context :slight_smile:

1 Like