Hearthlings currrently have conversations instead of doing important tasks. If I have every hearthling set to haul and there are a bunch of items to haul, I shouldn’t see hearthlings petting squirrels or talking about food. It takes forever to get anything done right now because hearthlings are constantly giving up on their current actions to chase chickens.
I don’t see why conversations aren’t strictly passive - two people work next to each other, so they converse while they’re working. Or converse during meals. Or converse only when otherwise idle.
This has really hurt my ability to get things done.
The entire problem is that they don’t work while they talk. They ignore tasks to pet squirrels.
The “reality” is that this type of game attracts different types of players. Some like watching the social activities of their town, some enjoy the fighting, some want to make an organized little town, and some want to build giant things.
These conversations certainly add character to the town, but at the expense of productivity. If I want to build a massive project I don’t want to see changes that hinder them. Even chopping down a bunch of trees takes way longer because of conversations.
Conversations need to be passive instead of actions that insert themselves into the middle of your work day beyond your control.
i can see them every once in awhile holding a conversation in detail, (stopping their current action and having a conversation)
But also i can see your point it being passive too. where as 2 hearths are working side by side and talking while they work (not stopping their action they currently on)
A suggestion would be that make it less of a action and more of a passive or both
If a hearthling is in idle mode, then it should be 1 of the top actions till they give enjoyments
But if a hearth is in a work mode then is should drop off, getting a low priority chance of them to stop and talk (passive)
We originally set conversations to be exactly this; an extremely low priority action that would only occur when hearthlings were idle. However, in testing we saw that hearthlings were never actually having conversations, because there was always something to do. Unlike some other games in the genre we currently don’t force a “non-working time” on the hearthlings, so an active town doesn’t produce an opportunity for chat.
That said, we haven’t yet hit the final tuning on how often conversations occur, and feedback like this is quite useful. I’m currently taking a deeper look into where and how tasks can get interrupted by conversations (and by other things too).
Well that’s the problem. There’s stuff to do. Conversations are really disruptive. A gameplay option to disable them would be a godsend. I doubt that’s what you want to hear about a new part of the game but in their current implementation, they’re extremely frustrating. Building stuff and collecting resources takes way longer than before.
There are alternative implementations that we can pursue, including tuning how often they occur and when. I was merely pointing out that a static low priority isn’t a silver bullet. For instance, one of the things I’m currently researching is the possibility of having hearthlings resume their previous activity after a conversation finishes, or alternatively having hearthlings only pursue a conversation after their current task is complete. Both would require changes in the AI system to support those approaches, but that’s where we’re looking at the moment in terms of broader changes.
Both of those sound like solid solutions IMO, after watching them drop stuff or stop as they’re running back to get supplies and then just wandering off to something else.
In the game, Oxygen Not Included, there is an emergency feature where all your citizens forget their basic needs and recreation to perform their tasks quickly. Though it has the consequence of dropping morale. This game could implement a similar feature. It already has a red alert. It just needs a yellow alert now, where hearthlings do their tasks and ignore everything else, including food and sleep, with the result of decreasing morale.
While I agree that conversations shouldn’t interrupt an ongoing task, I do like that the hearthlings have conversations. I see that some things take a little longer to complete, but I don’t see this game as a race anyway. The frequency of conversations could be turned down a little bit, maybe. I don’t want them to go away or be minimized into absurdity. I also like that some hearthlings lose contentment if they don’t get at least some talk with another.
I completely agree with you that I don’t want them to go away; however I must say that though the game right now isn’t a race once PVP is implemented it would be. Now they could definitely just disable conversations for PVP, but I just wanted to throw that out there.
I just want to reiterate one more time how awful these conversations are for productivity and how frustrating it is trying to get something as simple as hauling done. These tasks takes DAYS longer in game now. Please add an option to disable these until they no longer destroy the productivity of a town.
I only made an account on this site so I could give my opinion on this specific change because it’s the first one that I have thought hurts the game and it hurts it a lot.
I think it adds a bit of difficulty to the game. I mean it’s not hard to get your first new hearthling at your 2nd day, but with conversation you need to cut down on task you give your hearthlings to get the new one on the 2nd day.
Before conversation I just told my hearthlings to cut down 5 - 10 trees or designate a big mine to get recourses for the first building now I have to designate just what I need or set preferences in the villager tab so that 1 or 2 focus on mining/harvesting and the rest on building.
I also had the first instance of “loosing” the game because I mismanaged my time and recourses.
Conversations take up a lot of time right now, but I think if they make it that they happen passive they need to give hearthlings that talk to each other during work to get reduced work speed or something (I mean I am not 100% productive when I talk to someone during working or stop to do work altogether while talking).
Personally I would like to see the 2 kinds of conversation, an active and a passive conversation. The active conversation is what we have now and the passive conversation would be while doing work BUT hearthlings would get a work speed debuff like working/moving slower or placing only 1 to 2 blocks instead of 3. It would be nice if this passive conversation could evolve to an active conversation if the 2 hearthlings are disagreeing with each other or the topic is super important for one of them. Sadly I don’t know how hard it would be to implement.
As of now I am happy with the conversation feature and I think that everyone who doesn’t like it is just spoiled from the time without it.
You guys must understand that the majority of conversations are not stopping their work, they were already idle, mainly by performance reasons. The game just detects they are idle (but is not powerful enough to assign a real task) so it makes them start a conversation. Remove the conversations and you will have a bunch of idle people, like in previous versions.
Or they could go on with two Hearthlings who are engaged in the same task, while they are working. For example, three dudes mining out a quarry, talking (in between pickaxe strikes) about how much that they, in fact, prefer cooked food to berries. Or something like that.
How about conversation task only every 4-5th task in a row. You could set an option 2-3th; 4-5th; 8-9th (for those players that like it quiet )
Does not sound too complicated to program for me and this way Hearthlings actually finish their current task.
The frequency of conversations could be turned down a little bit, maybe. I don’t want them to go away or be minimized into absurdity. I also like that some hearthlings lose contentment if they don’t get at least some talk with another.
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