Stonehearth reminds me of civilization but in a fantasy world. So like civilization it should have a tech tree that you use to research different technologies. For instance you could research masonry to be able to construct large cathedrals and fortresses.
You could then have breakthrough technologies that unlock whole new levels your civilization.
Basically you start off in the default medieval fantasy setting. The after building the university and getting researchers/ scholars/ scientists that you get by sending a villager to the university and having a reliable food supply to feed him/her. Then you can select from the tech tree what you want researching and the researcher will begin researching it.
Eventually your university researches steam power. This unlocks machines like the auto loom and the steam locomotive allowing you build railways to transport citizens and goods across the map. You enter the steam punk era. The technology available is based off steam punk. That means airships and steam tanks along with top hats and suits for citizens! The hostiles will also upgrade to become sky pirates and angry peasants that will try and topple your kingdom. These will introduce new bosses such as a massive zeppelin and a huge wagon- mounted hammer!
After getting through the steam punk era you’ll enter retro futuristic stage of your civilization. This is achieved through researching the internal combustion engine and the atom bomb allowing you to research 1950’s era tech. But instead of powerful computers you research the maglev; an upgrade to your railway that allows fast trains that levitate above a guide rail. And robots. This ends after researching space exploration and colonization of space. Giving you access to the lower celestial region via retro futuristic looking rockets and allows you to build retro futuristic space stations.
Your main foes are, like that of the 1950’s communist invaders armed with Chinese/ Soviet assault rifles along with endless waves of tanks and aircraft. Even a couple of ships and the infamous 50ft tall robot that fires lasers out of it’s eyes!
Bump Please comment on this idea. Is it possible to make a mod like this anyway?
@Labigcheese please refrain from bumping after just a bit more than halve an hour. Remember, most people as it seems are not on european times and thus likely still asleep or just getting busy.
I think, something like a tech-tree is possible if you put together a module/mod that looks for certain triggers and once met, opens up new options.
Something like that is already planned/included if you look at the available jobs/classes. A carpenter will receive more options once he is more skilled or has leveled up to a better class and thus can craft more things. So the game is looking for indicators like that.
Something that is not possible would be the thing with buildings. The game as designed will have no buildings that are named as this or that. You can create a building that has the floor plan of a typical religious building of whatever religion… and put down a forge in it so it will be a smith.
Steam on the other hand is at least in the vanilla-game available through the engineer.
I assume though, you could put together a module which disables the standard features of the game, like free floor plan and classes and supply an own chain and only allows use of prefabs which can not be changed and unlocking classes (vanilla-classes and module-supplied ones).
There are many things possible and considering one of @Tom’s early interview-statements we should bring this whole idea to their attention, so they maybe can adjust the core of the game if needed. Your idea @Labigcheese would need to deactivate features of the vanilla-game or the players would need to remove files/modules from their games (which would be a bad way). some kind of flag/hierachy for modules would be needed with your idea flagging it as “highest priority” or “total conversion” so only features of the vanilla modules or mod-modules would be active which not interfere with such a total conversion.
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Just to build on what @Sheenariel has said, I think a lot of what you are detailing is quite far from what they envision the core game to be.
Everything you have said, I would say yes it is possible to mod in, I mean someone asked if you could rework everything to be a futuristic sci-fi game, and the answer was yes but obviously it’s going to take a little time.
I won’t reiterate what has already been said above, but I do think all those thoughts you’ve put out there are quite a different path to what it would seem SH will take.
Also you don’t need to bump stuff, discourse tags all new posts so people will be aware of this 
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after copious amounts of copy-pasting, i got my nerdy programming question answered last night… basically, if you want to dig in deep with Lua, virtually anything is possible, given enough time, ingenuity and effort… everything (outside of the low level engine logic) is available to the modding community…
@SteveAdamo still they need to be aware of some ideas as some ideas might be not possible as the low level engine logic does prevent it. That is something @Tom and @Ponder want to prevent and adjust the engine to make it possible.
absolutely correct… there will be some limitations… i for one am looking forward to seeing just how far we can push those limits though… 