Goblin spawn and agro issues

First I want to say this is by far one of the best pre-alpha games I downloaded from Steam. Excellent job, it’s nice to see developers that are passionate about their project, and about what the people playing the game think. Onto the issues!

First: I am not sure whether this is intentional or just something that has not been noticed, but I have an issue with goblin camps spawning right inside my small village. I have had villages spawn on top of my storage zones, as well as farming zones and immediately begin attacking buildings. This is not a huge issue, as they’re usually wiped out fairly quick, however I was wondering if there was a way to limit goblin spawns to not happen within a certain distance of a player structure, zone, etc?

Second: Goblins are not aggressive enough. I had an event that spawned a goblin town with a goblin Commander, or king or whatever. He was upset because he ordered me to give him gold and I told him to shove it. the large goblin camp began spawning goblins that did… absolutely nothing. I geared up six of my people as footmen and sent them over to try to see how many they could kill (after saving of course) only to find out that the goblins did not agro until they were attacked. I slaughtered 22 goblins, including the king, without having a single footman injured.

Some suggestions for this, as the goblin camp was on a ridge above my town and I had no ladders leading up is to give goblins the ability to create ladders, or when a ladder is built by the player, have them immediately send out their attack parties.

Third: Would it be possible to set crafters to prioritize crafting over any other actions? For instance, I created 20x20 rooms inside of a mountain. I wanted to move all of my outdoor storage zones into the mountain. All crafters stopped what they were doing to help move inventory… not what I had intended. Although the transition was faster, no crafting was conducted during this move.

Hey there @Kamakani, welcome to the discourse! I am going to address 2 of your points.

This is indeed an issue at the moment, if you look through the discourse you can see some humorous images of Goblin camps popping up right on top of all sorts of structures. I know the devs plan to fix it at some point, but right now they are doing a lot of performance related work…I am sure they will come up with a solution eventually.

Crafter are supposed to craft if there are items in their queue before they do anything else. In the next alpha build (alpha 13) there will be a new interface that allows for more fine grain control over each Hearthling (à la Dwarf Therapist), but at the moment there is not. I am going to page @sdee to see if she knows anything about crafters not crafting. To my knowledge that was fixed…