Furniture and Decorations: Expanding preexisting catalogs, continuous trickle of new options?

Suggestions
1

Hello, everyone! I’ve been working on a smaller project recently, and I was thinking back to previous builds released over the past several months. Looking back at the units and professions we have, I noticed something particular:

Almost all of the decorations and furniture we’ve gotten so far has been limited to sudden bursts in just a few builds. The majority of the recipes for the Carpenter, Weaver, and Mason come from their respective Alpha release (where they’re ‘featured’), and not too much has been added since then.

What I’d like to discuss is, with the current progression of stable releases, if it would be possible to incorporate a handful of new decorations for preexisting Crafter classes each new release. Obviously, Radiant has been including several new and important features in the more recent builds (such as water, multistory structures, and currently, ranged combat and party tactics/commands), but while we look forward to these new functions, the rest of the game world has begun to feel stagnant and repetitive.

Now, the only reason I ask this in particular is that I assume that creating basic furniture/decorations is something that shouldn’t take too much additional coding than the current game engine already has (@RepeatPan, I’m relying on you to prove me wrong; if so, I apologize in advance for the assumption). Simple color or design variations on the curtains, banners, or wall tapestry would be nice little surprises in each update (as well as building materials, but I’ve already discussed my hopes for that previously!). Something like @chimeforest’s Colors Mod is a perfect example–simple, but introduces a lot more for the player to look at and use! (Apologies for the unintended marketing, you just happened to be a example that came to mind at the time!)

I don’t want to come off as ungrateful or over-demanding–mainly, I’m just considering how the game might look to someone on the outside, watching playthroughs and update videos. A little bit of eye candy can go a long way! If the basic, preexisting functions of the game seem to be continuously expanding and developing, the new features will subsequently look more impressive, as well as the game overall. I think just the potential of decorations possible to the game can be a huge aesthetic selling point, and while mods will of course be highly welcome (and encouraged) to expand the vanilla catalog in the future, having more sooner could be that push to get more potential modders, seeing what they have to work with.

Apologies for the spiel! And with that I’m back to my little mini project–it’ll hopefully be done sometime this weekend. Expect something nostalgic and slightly obscure!

6 Likes
2

I’m a little concerned in this regard myself. Now that the game is in early access, I think it’s important for new players to be able to see new toys to play with in each major update. Both in terms of new craftables and in terms of new enemies to fight. It’s just good for keeping steam reviews positive if bugs are being stomped and content is being added constantly rather than being bogged down in big new features.

From the latest Desktop Tuesday it appears that some new crafting/building stuff is coming (stairs, new crafting stations, cooks, stockpile control), but the only thing I know about new campaign stuff is that “someone is working on it right now” according to the green card over on Trello. I suppose we can guess that some orcs will turn up next in the campaign since Tom was working on those in a stream(~40 min in) a while back.

Anyway, from what I can tell we do seem to be getting some of the stuff I’m hoping for, I’m just not sure if it will be enough for those of us that have been playing for longer.

1 Like
3

On top of this, I wouldn’t mind of the furniture got shown a little bit more love. Trying to fit some of those pieces in a home don’t really correlate well. I’ve also noticed some of the furniture is almost 1.5 or 1.3 blocks wide/long. Kind of irritating to not fill up the whole space.

I think they’re trying to dish out ( ya see what I did there?) as many classes as they can then worry about adding in extras, but it wouldn’t be too bad to see some lovin on the classes.

1 Like
4

I tend to disagree, based on a few points:

  • Adding decoration is a piece of cake, code-wise, but don’t forget that actually creating the models does take some time.
  • If they add too much decoration, people could get the wrong idea (“The only thing they do these days is stupid carpets! Where is my multiplayer???”)
  • At some point, there’s still going to be the color update which will make most, if not all, color variations of items obsolete. We’re talking about wasted work for some short to mid term gain.
  • The current crafting menus might not be optimal for too many items.
5 Likes
5

I fully agree with this point, though it is a bit of a hassle to have to open a handful of .jsons to code in each item. Then again… this is coming from somebody quite lazy!

I think modders would benefit from a tool to generate all of the relevant code for items, including recipes and the finicky stuff like collision boxes and model origins that need a couple of tweak-and-reloads to get right. A lot more custom items might pop up, which would then exacerbate the problem of…

The vanilla carpenter’s menu is lengthy enough, when you start adding to it it becomes a hassle to scroll through a dozen more rows. Collapsible groups would be nice for this, but I’m waiting to see if TR have any better ideas in the works.

In any case, I might be putting out a neat little mod if I can get the effects working right. I’d say the team have their hands tied atm with more important stuff, but I do see the importance of content with all the new players joining in with the EA release.

3 Likes
6

I’d love to see some furniture for the blacksmith. It’s not if all metal stuff in real life is weapons or armor, right?

2 Likes
7

It depends. We’ve seen Tom crank off several set pieces in a single stream, so if the new item in question is based off a similarly-sized or -shaped preexisting model, two or three objects hopefully wouldn’t be too demanding.

This is something that I could agree with–eventually. I don’t think the menus are that cluttered at the moment. Tom’s created a fairly decent GUI system to split the lists up for the Big Three decorators so far (Carpenter, Weaver, Mason), and perhaps most important for these sorts of lists, there’s a Search function already available and working. Maybe it’s because I’m coming from a Strategy and RPG background of games (where long lists are the norm), but they honestly don’t seem that bad for me. The only thing I can currently see them improving (besides modding support, which I’d consider a “big” feature and would likely reorganize the lists’ GUI and code anyway) is being able to close certain sections of the list like folders (like @phector2004 said) or being able to select recipes that use (or don’t use) certain materials, or removing those not currently available to the player. That, and selection options for certain object types (ONLY wall decorations or ONLY tables, for example).

Sadly…I think people will be asking that anyway, until Radiant gets to it. But fair point. Again though, just 2-4 items each release would be nice to holistically improve the game.

I’d personally love some metal-based objects. I think a lot of hybrid recipes between the Blacksmith and Carpenter/Weaver/Mason are possible.

Ohoho… you have no idea who you’re talking to.

2 Likes