Hey there All - just got this game recently and loving it - had a few thoughts on the game in general and figured I should put them out there for people to see. This is mostly a wish list of stuff which probably aren’t possible without a lot of work, some are smaller suggestions though. Would have posted it yesterday, but it seems I hit my limit of posts in a 24 hour period.
Sorry if these are duplicates, and sorry they aren’t separated out into individual posts - there are a lot : /. Also sorry for the wall of text.
Suggestions:
- Number 1 Wish: You cannot assign any sort of priority to hearthlings. Would like a “this is top priority” flag functionality which could apply to a building, or mining operation, or thing to harvest, etc.
- Could also be a general priority list in the UI which lets you drag each request around in priority.
- It would be very nice to be able to lock doors – to keep hearthlings from going to locations where you do not want them going.
- All spawns in world are evil – could there not be good spawns?
- Traders come in and want to sell you stuff.
- Gipsys move in and want to put on a show that boosts moral.
- Strange witch gives you a selection between 3 boxes for 50 gold, but can only select one. One could have crap, another mediocre stuff, and another great stuff.
- I was playing SMB3 and was amazed at all the different cool hidden things they give - White Mushroom houses, Flipping Card Game, Ghost Ship Full of Money, etc.
- Workers often mine themselves into locations which they are stuck – would be nice if workers (or anyone) who was stuck would start calling for help. If another hearthling heard them, they could prioritize building a ladder to save that person.
- Workers who are stuck a small distance above ground could jump down on their own - would help sometimes.
- Would like for farms to make a little more sense – when you come into the world, farmers can automatically build various farm types form the get go. Would like it if you had to actually find the fruit/vegetable which you wanted to grow, and then farmers had to break that fruit/vegetable apart (or plant a root like a potato) to get it to grow.
- Would like a new ‘designated zone’ which auto-harvests anything which is in it. This would be very useful for things like berry bushes or flowers. I find it a little frustrating and easy to forget the berries and non-farmed flowers.
- Would like either for wood and stone (and any resource) to automatically condense itself to things like ‘log piles’ or ‘stone piles’ – or for there to be a way for a designated zone to support only ‘piled’ materials.
- It could also be nice to limit the max amount of gathered resources – like I set somewhere that I can only have 100 stone maximum, and the rest is either sold automatically or destroyed or left where it is.
- Would like a ‘ward’ (or whatever) which prevents enemies from spawning. So if there are areas which constantly spawn enemies, you can simply place this object there to have them no longer spawn. I believe you can build anything in that area to do that functionality, but the idea would work better ‘lore wise’.
- One really great thing about this game is just letting the game run for hours unmonitored – unfortunately sometimes you come back to everyone dead, or sometimes everyone is alive and well, but you still don’t know what happened while you were gone. It would be nice to have some sort of graph or chart (or multiple) which show progress of various resources, when people were killed, what killed them, how many people you had overall, etc. Like Dota2’s gold chart, or Starcraft’s after game charts - lots of RTSs have this actually.
- Could go further and look at what individual Hearthlings did with their time – how much time they spent building/walking/fighting/etc, what they ate, how long they slept, etc.
- Along those lines, it would be a whole new feature, but it would be nice if stonehearth could function as a screensaver – loading up with nothing else is going on and having your workers do what they do in the background. I was thinking that your town would actually load up, but that would probably be too intensive and could have bad things happen - but a simple map with Hearthlings building things/fighting goblins/harvesting/etc. could be really peaceful.
- Warriors sometimes have no one to fight, so they become out leveled – or you lose a level 6 warrior and need to train someone else up, but you have no way of doing that besides hoping they don’t die on the high level enemies which are around. It would be nice to have a ‘training dummy’ which could be constructed to train warriors on – maybe needs to be constructed by carpenters but only after having a cook who creates hay? That way it pushes this functionality to late game and people don’t just quickly train up their soldiers.
- Alternatively, or additionally, it could be nice to have a device which calls enemies to you. A ‘goblin spawner’ so some extent. This could easily kill yourself though, so its problematic.
- Enemies could be much more threatening if they knew how to climb over walls. An item in general which could be created is a rope and grappling hook. Would also be beneficial to workers, allowing them to get to hard to reach areas to mine or build, or save themselves when they are stuck.
- There could be a little more variety in how the minerals are deposited – instead of being on one layer and all together, they could be broken up across multiple layers and have gaps where there is just stone.
- When creating ‘mine block’ or ‘mine tunnel’ areas, it would be nice if they displayed in x-ray, so you could see completely what you were doing if you were ‘cutting through’ some other layer of ground above it.
- Herbalist “buff tonics” seem a little odd in their application (not their functionality). It’s nice to be able to increase courage with a simple potion use, but having to go somewhere in the world and activate it via a bottle is a little odd feeling. Could there be a place in the UI where all ‘activate-ables’ were listed out and could simply be used via the UI?
Thanks for reading!
