It’d be great to be able to limit how much of different items are kept. For example, I can never get my farms the perfect size, so I either run out or have hundreds of wheat pile up. Another item I have issues with is wool since the sheep constantly produce it. When an item is at it’s limit, any new ones should be automatically marked for destruction.
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Or potentially marked for auto-sell every time a trader shows up. There could even be a UI option in the market stall to auto-buy and auto-sell marked/set items at regular intervals (e.g. once per day, or once every couple of days – might as well make it something else that the player can select for themselves); which would make the market stalls much more useful for players who have large towns and an over-abundance of goods.
It would be awesome to be able to “set and forget” some of those trading options to ensure a constant income from surplus goods; and it makes sense that a frontier town such as we build would be exporting those goods to the more established cities and capitals.
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One solution to this until something else is figured out is to limit the amount of sheep your village actually keeps to just a few. Same with farm size, theres no need to produce huge swaths of farmland really when a few well placed ones will keep the village fed.
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Even doing that, the extra adds up over time. It’s pretty much impossible to get no net gain.
well, by definition you’re producing an infinite amount of goods while you’ll eventually reach a stable requirement (i.e. once you cap out your hearthlings you’ll eventually reduce your need for new resources to virtually nothing, after everyone is maxed out with the best equipment); so at that point you’re always going to have a net gain on things like wool/fibre, pelts and other auto-produced items unless you outright stop producing them.
But in practical terms, even in the resources you constantly consume and replenish (e.g. food) are very difficult to balance exactly with demand; and I believe that’s more the sort of thing you’re talking about. A slight under-supply can quickly lead to famine, while a slight over-supply quickly leads to either a) a glut of food in storage, or b) a ton of rotten food laying around.
Even stone, ores, weapons, armour and other monster drops will accumulate indefinitely (unless you’re playing without enemies.) In the very late game it’s possible to “farm” quite a lot of resources simply using well-placed defences, a lot of archers and a couple of clerics to keep them topped off on health – the zombies will drop healing potions and spools of thread, the giant rock golems will drop stones and ores, and the orcish and kobold enemies will drop metal bars; plus the hats can be sold for good amounts in order to buy in anything you aren’t farming from monsters. So it’s possible to reach a point where you never need to mine anything from the world, and can still build indefinitely, without even having to resort to buying materials off your neighbours (who presumably just mine in their own lands, undoing your good work of protecting the environment hahah.)
For now, manually summoning merchants via the market stall and selling them your surplus is the only way to efficiently clean out your storage.
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Or the AI should simply stop harvesting the goods.
The option to auto-sell surplus beyond a configured limit seems the most promising though, as it would also apply to good not produced automatically. It would be good to get a report though, in order to be able to identify unintended oversupply, which would give important feedback (e.g. “I don’t need that many farmers”) to free hearthlings up for other jobs.
funilly enough its not the amount of farmers that caps the production of food, its amount of fields x what crop is produces (all need different hours)
in my nordlingmod, all workers are farmers next to workers so they so and harvest at blidning speed…but all i need to feed 25 people is 3 fiels. personally, i say fields are OP and all growth times should be longer
Personally, I really enjoyed the way Towns handled this. In one panel, you could set the maximum number of goods that you would want at any one time (kind of like we can do now in each professions panel), but it also worked with raw materials, where once you reached the max the Townies would stop producing said item. In another panel, you could set the maximum you wanted of any item in the world. If you went over, they would incinerate the surplus.
However I have no idea how easy or difficult (I imagine difficult) this would be to implement in Stonehearth.
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i seem to remember stuff like settlers 2 also having this (ah fond childhood memories)
As far as producing the raw materials, the way Towns handles it doesn’t translate nicely to Stonehearth. Towns has explicit harvesting “orders” which can be automated from the production menu; if you just place down crops they wouldn’t automatically be harvested. By setting a production count, the game is able to give out orders to harvest crops and also to stop giving out orders once the quota is reached. That also works the same way in, say, mods which changed how mines worked (i.e. changed them from buildings to items); but you’ll notice that when it comes to Towns’ vanilla mineshafts and farms there’s no limit to how much they’ll produce (well, mineshafts will eventually stop pumping out metals if they run out of space to place the item, but that’s an unrelated limitation – so long as you keep collecting the resource the mineshaft will keep cranking it out.)
Switching track to Stonehearth, it would certainly be possible (I daresay even simple) to implement a “incinerate surplus resources” system, as Stonehearth is more aware of items and entities than Towns is (whereas Towns usually has to find an item after it’s been requested by a job, Stonehearth is able to assign jobs based on triggers coming from the item itself.) Stonehearth could even replace the idea of incinerating your surplus with, say, automatically loading it into trader stalls to sell to the automated merchants.
The flip-side, though, is that farming in Stonehearth doesn’t use explicit harvesting orders; the farming job causes farmers to constantly look for crops that are ready to harvest – so if someone wanted to implement both changes, the “only harvest up to this amount” change would require more work and creativity. I believe it would still be possible, it would just mean changing how the farming works – probably giving farmers their own “crafter UI” page where you can tell them how much of each crop to keep in stock.
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