Crafters automatically crafting lower tier items for higher tier items

I honestly have no idea if this has already been suggested, if so, just move the topic, delete it or whatever.

context:
Anyway so what I’d like to basically suggest is something I’d like to state with an example.
Say you want to craft leather armor for your footman. Right now you have to make your weaver go trough every step to get them to create the leather armor. This works fine, well for 90% of the time at least.

Now here’s the ‘problem’:
I’m often not able to keep track of how much I got from every resource available in my stockpile. Now when I try to craft that leather armor the crafter has to make thread resources, than bundles of wool, than leather (with some animal hide) and than finally the leather armor. Now when the weaver runs out of thread to craft the last wool bundle, he just stops working.
When you try to add it as a next crafting task he still doesn’t continue. You have to manually remove the task and put it back. Something I often don’t feel like keeping an eye one xD

Suggestion:
What I’d suggest to solve the problem is:

  1. Perhaps you can make it so that any crafter just goes down to it’s base materials and just crafts up accordingly to what you will require for the higher tier item you plan on crafitng.
  2. Why don’t you let the crafters ‘talk’ to eachother for example: the carpenter telling the weaver it needs wool for a comfortable bed and than the weaver will craft it so the carpenter can use it.
  3. Make the crafters move on to the next job if one of the jobs in the list currently can’t be completed. This will allow you to que up any missing materials without haveing to clear the que first. Since atm this often buggs out your crafters…

Feel free to correct me where wrong or add any suggestions of your own!

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overall, I like the basic idea of improving the crafting “flow”… this however starts to bleed into the game “playing itself”…

I definitely agree, and it has been discussed to some extent before, that the units should reshuffle their jobs according to what they can accomplish, given the available materials…

one of the ideas that I believe has been tossed around a bit, is to either show the number of materials available in the crafting UI, so the player knows then what can (and cannot) be crafted… meaning, the recipe lists 4 wood, 1 bolt of cloth, and subsequently shows that you have 21 wood and 3 bolts, etc.

alternatively, the recipes can simply be grayed out for those where the unit doesn’t have the necessary materials (or disable the craft button, etc)…

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Yeah, this would be great. Currently, a lot of the crafting interface feels like tedious counting of materials and busywork queueing up all the components you need to make the final item (and making sure you aren’t crafting something else on another crafter that will use up some of those materials!).

There are three issues we are talking about here. At least according to how I see it. I’ll list them in the order that I think would solve the overall problem with the least amount of work under the hood.

  1. No ability for crafters to gracefully fail at crafting an item in their queue

Currently, a crafter will never stop trying to craft an item it does not have all the materials for unless you explicitly remove it from the list. Even if you change the priority of the item by dragging it lower on the list, the crafter will still try and craft it.

The crafter should craft the first item on its list that it can actually get all materials for and if the priority of that item is lowered (a new item is placed higher in the list or the currently crafted item is dragged lower on the list), then the crafter should look and see if there is a higher priority item it can craft instead.

If there is no longer enough items in the stockpile, in the crafters hands or on the crafters workbench then the crafter should check to see if there is another item it can craft in its entirety with current stocks. If yes, then it crafts that instead. If no, it waits until materials become available.

One of the major benefits here is that “maintain x of item” can be left in the queue without blocking crafting when it reaches the top of the list.

  1. No stockpile management system, so keeping track of what you have is extra fiddly

It would be good to see how much of each item you have in a stockpile (ignores items that are placed in the world or not yet in a stockpile).

This could be made similarly to the “place item” window, but as a simple list for all stockpile items. If you wanted to make it particularly robust, you could have the ability to list the number of items in each stockpile or drill down to show items in each stockpile.

It would also be very handy to color the number of Ingredients needed to craft an item in the crafters window. For instance, a Bundle of Leather requires 1 thread resource and 2 pelt resource. Say you had 1 thread resource, but only 1 pelt resource. 1 thread resource would be written green and 1 pelt resource would be written red. In addition, if you change the option to craft 3 items instead of 1, it would say 3 thread resource and 6 pelt resource and both resource lines would now be in red. Ultimately, it might also remove from consideration items that are in going to be used in crafting by items already in the queue by that crafter (and possibly other crafters too!).

Failing most of that, it would be quite nice to be able to click on a resource that is insufficient and have the crafting window give you a list of the crafters who can make that and then add the needed items to the bottom of their crafting queue.

A side comment here is that you should be able to directly type in the number of an item you want to craft or otherwise have a more elegant system for telling it how much you want to craft of something. It’s going to get really tedious clicking an arrow 49 times to tell a guy to craft 50 of something.

  1. No ability for crafters to work together to craft subcomponents for a major component

This breaks down into two parts. First, you need the crafter you’ve given the job to be able to create a sub-queue that makes resources (if they can be crafted) until the crafter has enough to do the job. Secondly, you would need the crafter to be able to subcontract on resources that can only be crafted by another profession.

Honestly, I think both of these things become much less noticeable problems if “maintain x of item” is functional enough that it doesn’t break the queue in the ways I mentioned above. By the time the UI is upgraded with extra information about your stockpiles, you probably don’t need to do anything here at all.

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Well I get what you mean, but we gotta look further than the current build of the game. I mean atm we still have ‘time’ to keep a close look at the crafter’s ques etc. BUT as team radiant anounced, they still plan on going with their original idea! So keeping this in mind and assumeing that we will be able to build a city like the pictures they showed us.
Honestly if my city would expand that big, I wouldn’t be able to keep track of how much my weaver still needs to craft so my caprenter can get the beds for my citizens going…
You’ll have a lot more to think about when you get that far, so if the crafters would keep ‘talking’ the que will kinda keep going without you haveing to do all of the micro management xD

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I think part of the issue using maintain with leather is that it requires 3 items to craft and pelts aren’t something you have a steady access to. For example, maintaining 3 thread and 3 cloth can’t get stuck since one thread only requires one Silkweed, so if you’re low on Silkweed you won’t get stuck in the middle of crafting. Also it’s easy to have a surplus of Silkweed with even a small farm. Then you’ll always have enough thread to make a bolt of cloth.

You never really have that many pelts that you can be sure you’ll always have 2 to make into leather so it’s at least better in my opinion to craft it explicitly as needed. That said an inventory of the items you have would help a lot here so you’re not having to hunt around your stockpiles looking for pelts

Well even with the cloth it already is something where you will get stuck upon. When you want some cloth you’ll always have to wait for quite some time to complete it even if you want to maintain the cloth. They’ll get stuck on almost anything…

But this is just an example I’m putting up. There will probably be moe suitable examples once the game progresses. That’s why now is a good moment to already point out issues in the future :slight_smile:

Yeah that’s true that perhaps at scale keeping track of all of it could get tedious. I guess the concern I would have is that if we automate all the middle steps to producing an item then why have those intermediate resources? We could just make leather armor cost two Silkweed and four pelts and simply increase the craft time.

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well because they like to work throughly. In any case it doesn’t mean that the items get useless. They might seem now but you gotta look ahead. There’s so many things you can do with the ‘in between’ resources. Things that aren’t in the game (yet). That’s why I pointed out that you have to look at the bigger picture and keep team radiant’s big picture close when considering sutff :slight_smile:

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It’d be nice to have an option for crafters to use up every single resource available to them if told to max out a certain item. For example, telling the Blacksmith to max out gold ingots would cause him to use up every single bit of gold ore available. Same goes for maxing out bundle of thread with the weaver.

One problem might be the Blacksmith getting stuck when only one gold ore remains in the stockpile. Maybe have a check that in order to start crafting an order for a “max out” item, all the necessary resources must be available in the stockpile.

I’m fairly certain this suggestion has come up before (and I would agree with the idea)… someone point me to the thread please!

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I personally don’t recall this suggestion before. But I am no discourse wizard so could be wrong. @SteveAdamo

Two things are needed here: OPs idea and also some indication whether or not you have enough supplies to make something in the craft window. As it is now, I have to go over and manual count what I’ve got so I don’t give my crafter more to build then he has supplies for - thus freezing his crafting process and not letting him go on to objects he does have supplies for.

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Agreed! It’s annoying to have to keep checking the town inventory every time I use the blacksmith.

@SteveAdamo [MOD] Smart Crafter

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