Heya, I’ve been dedicating alot of time in Alpha 16 and I really love it, it properly feels like a game now and it’s alot of fun!
But one thing I’ve noticed to annoy me now when my little village is growing bigger and bigger with more and more crafters is managing the villagers inventories.
My suggestion will be very familiar for you that have played the old empire managing games such as Pharaoh, Ceasar III, IV, Rise of the middle kingdom: Emperor, Master of olympus etc.
In those games the warehouses have 4 settings for accepting goods for every kind of item that warehouse is able to handle.
Don’t accept - No good of the type will be transported to the location.
Empty - All types of that types of goods vill be transported away when there’s room in other storage places.
Accept goods - Aquires goods of the desired type
Get - Prioritize filling this inventory with the desired goods, get’s transportations from other warehouses that only have Accept goods.
Along with this the player able to set the max amount accepted or “Get”.
I’ve found this system to fill in all my needs in the old games, which I have countless hours spent in, I think this is some stripped down version to be in place for Stonehearth!
What do you think?
Just the “max” option would be really a game changing. Prioritize would be good too, but can be emulated with the max, setting a max at the right stockpiles would force them to dispose the items at the others.
rather than a filter on a storage window, I would like dedicated storage items for different material.
for instance barrels and ceramic pots for foods and liquids that delays and separates the rot of consumables, shelves for decoration and food or plants, pallets for furniture that can be moved with items deployed on top of it (a pallet with crates fill with items that you can move around with a cart or a sled), vases for flowers, wheel-barrel for temporarily storing and moving more than 3 blocks at a time - load it up and haul it away
I agree with Patrik, inventory management is a mess, apart from the fact that there are to few catagories in the storage menu. (They even merged some, which i personally cant grasp why they would do that, so what if it contains one item, maybe for the future there will be more, not to mention mods using them)
Then there is the fact that i dont want crafters to have to walk far for resources. It slows down everything. The efficiency goes down. And to counter this you need to do allot of micromanagement.
With patriks system you could make some dedicated haulers and your town would run very smooth. Ppl would eat at their own house instead of where ever the f the nearest source of food it.
I dont want to have my blacksmith to walk 20 miles to get some leather from the weaver. Workers should bring it to him.
with that eat at their own house idea, you still need to build some kind of storage at the house, and make sure it is set to contain food, and make sure it gets a daily supply. proximity or prioritized personal storage is probably something that can happen easily, since beds can already be assigned.
the problem with this idea is say you make 10 food every day and you have 10 hearthlings in 10 houses and you deliver that food every morning. you still need a distribution method that doesn’t fill the first house of storage to 10 first then the second to 10, but evenly distributes them one at a time to each of the 10 houses so that the last guy doesn’t starve to death. yeah you could limit the storage to a 1x1 square or use that max storage idea, but then you have to make sure that no other hearthling can use that storage , so now you need personalized storage, not just max limiters. this is what makes food especially difficult because you talk about walking far for resources. Its either all of your hearthlings walk to one central location for food, or one hearthling delivers them from a central location. the second is obviously better if you have multiple cooks or plenty of haulers, but the way stonehearth works right now the cooking queue would be shared over the entire map, so if you want to customize deliveries on one side of the map different to another side, to make sure the correct amount of food is make at each location for optimal delivery time now you need to change the way the crafting system works. the game as it currently is has not been designed for problems like this
I didn’t even throw in the wrench of rotting food and how you deal with that
currently the way I get around long distance walking for resources is first I build the farm, place a stockpile right next to it, then build a cook right next to the food and then store the food in the dining area right next to the cook
the only thing you cant really do this with is stuff you mine out of the ground, in which case I create three stockpiles one near where I mine, one near where I craft, and one near where I build, and you jsut toggle them off or on to move the resources to the different stockpile
yeah I know how to manage food across my town. how ever that is micro management and that sucks. I hate dining areas, because again then it doesnt feel like a town but more like small camp. i have the same with putting crafters in the same building. if you do that you create what i like to call a MMORPG town. all crafting stations close to eachother, everything convinient for the player, but they never look like towns in RL.
Also the point you made about the 10 food needed to be delivered 1 by 1 to each house, is somewhat valid, however if you say min 10 food at each house and you overproduce, and all the rest goes into an overflow stockpile. the moment its dinner time all houses have 9 food and the haulers will restock. so it wouldnt be much of a problem if we could have some kind of maintain fuction of resources
Interesting discussions, I’ve been reading in my silence, until now!
From what I understand your concerns and suggestions I think the system I proposed along with being able to set amount would be sufficient to solve it.
How I would set up: Food source, 3 small houses houses (i.e. two bed residence) with their own stockpile of food.
Big kind of “Silo” (Like a bunch of stone chests or whatever) near the farm with accept to full inventory of foods desired, empty on all spoiled foods. Just a dropoff so the farmer doesn’t have be the farmen And deliveryman.
For each of the small houses I would have a small crate with Get 6 of the foods wanted. As mentioned above this would require an overproduction, which I would say everyone should seek. If not it’s kinda realistik, if it’s shortage, everyone doesn’t simpl have enough food.
I would also put Empty on all rotten foods.
I would have a waste plant of some sorts with loads of crates with Get all rotten foods.
Explanation: The farmer drops off harvested food nearby, another hearthling comes to get it and delivers it to the first small crate in a house that’s <6 items. At the same time every food storage in the line would be emptied from rotten food and delivered to the wasteplant continously.
This would require a alot more specifik inventory list, like genboom said there’s no point in the compacted inventory list for storage.
Simple solution, convert all the current choices into windows for each specifik item. All done!
the problem still remains in those 6 food you deliver from the farmers chest, if not eaten they will rot in the personal storage of the house it was delivered to and take up inventory slots and require more management.
This is why I say compost should be a thing, because right now this rotten food things is simply a giant waste of time and a huge inventory management problem. it needs to be a mechanic that is expanded upon and right now there isn’t really a solution.
probably the best way is to add an expiration date to all the foods in the game with tooltips and a way to delay rot - rimworld does this exact thing very well. ( and I think space engineers does something similar with oxygen dispersing throughout an enclosed structure and the same could be done in Hearthstone for the temperature / airflow mechanic Rimworld has) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chnK-FAh2aA&feature=youtu.be&t=14m55s
it doesn’t need to require refrigeration technology tho or even temperature, like I have said before simply organizing foods based on age you picked them and placing them into storage like crates or pots etc should delay the rot because rotten food next to fresh food spreads rot like a slow fire
there are no positives for over producing food besides keeping a log of how much your town eats and selling the excess before it rots
Another thing I’ve seen for rot is Don’t Starve, where rot is averaged out across a stack. Therefore, adding one bad apple won’t spoil the bunch, but you’re incentivized to toss out or eat bad food before combining stacks.
That said, Dwarf Fortress - if that may be invoked here - cut down its micromanagement exponentially when it added the ability to filter stockpiles to take from one another. I don’t know if Radiant wants DF’s exact level of OCD when it comes to storage (“store only Fine Wooden Chairs in this pile”, for example) but I for one wouldn’t mind it.