Live Stream Question Bank

Well, what I meant was an OSX at release. There will definitely be one at First Full Build (FFB?), but for the FPB, I’m not entirely sure yet.

Just to clear that up.

I know what you meant, no harm no foul. I was only curious about the beta, just because this game looks awesome, and everything i have read and seen (livestreams particularly) has looked really sweet.

I think we might be overcomplicating matters with the namings and acronyms? FFB and FPB are just a bit complicated ya know?

I notice the website has changed so we can just go with that?

December release = Preview release
September 2014 = Official release

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A, BWWJG… never mind. It’s of no use, with you around.

Thank god there is an official name for each release, though. Or at least on that has been revised.

I’d like to know what the price of stonehearth will be at the official release and if you will continue to work on the game after the game is officially released.

Whilst pricing can obviously change, I don’t think it will be too different from the $15 at the moment … maybe up to $20? Who knows, we’ll have to wait and see what happens I suppose!

Yes they will, 100% they’ve stated numerous times that this is really a project that they hope will continue for a few years at least. How long exactly? Again, one of those things that only time will tell, but rest assured it will be supported and updated post September 2014.

Are we likely to see villagers talking with each other; Anything like chat bubbles, whether they show something vague like symbols, or even true dialog?

good eye! preview release it is… rolls off the tongue better, doesnt it? :smile:

i’ll update the sticky accordingly…

i know this has come up before, but i cant find the discussion…

i seem to recall opinions about having sims like gibberish, etc.

my guess however is no, or at least not initially… they wont be chatting with each other… but the units will “interact” with the environment in various ways…

perhaps this will evolve into something between units at some point?

will forests expand automatically? with older bigger trees in the middle with smaller younger trees popping up every once and awhile near the edge of the forest.

Also while the ground have effect of you townies? Simple things like swamps/marshes add slight debuffs (like slowness) but there is no need for irrigation there. Or deserts there’s no chance of bad storms and you can maybe see farther, but there is little to no water.

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Are we gonna see Elves in-game, after the dwarfs? You have mentioned traces, but no definite answer. For all Elf Lord Of The Rings fans, I stand beside you!

massive thanks to @Ellogeyen for trolling through a handful of streams, to provide this mini Q&A… :+1:

note: there may be some paraphrasing and fragment melding going on, so keep that in mind… :wink:


Animating and Implementing Basic Sleeping Behaviour:

9:00
How long are the days?
“I don’t know, we’ll have to tune it. Just from the top of my head I think maybe like a day should be 10 minutes. But we’ll stick to a 24 hour clock”

18:48
(wasn’t read out loud)
“We do actually want decoration in the room to have buffs that make sense. For example, if you have something in your bedroom that belongs there, it will give a buff to sleeping.”

20:10
Will there be fun time in bed with couples?
“We were actually thinking about, not fun time, but how many people per bed. We’re just going to keep it simple for now with 1 person per bed.”

32:25
Will there be Z’s above a sleeping guy?
“Yes, when he’s snoring there will be Z’s”

1:23:25
Have you thought about road until now?
“No, we have not. Roads are a good idea. Right now we are focusing on crafting, building & world generation”

1:25:45
Will there be night-time specific events?
“Yes, definitely. We have one in mind for beta right now”

1:25:55
How will exploration work if we never leave our town?
“You won’t never leave your town. Sometimes you’ll leave you town. You might occasionally send out guys to find something or explore, and as your town gets bigger, you’re naturally going to explore more of the landscape. And you’ll eventually need to send out parties to search for resources. You’re not going to explore the whole map though”

1:27:07
Will the settlers sleep automatically?
“Yes, they all will do everything automatically. You’re the orchestrator, but they’ll have their own needs like wanting to eat or sleep. You will never have to micromanage.”

1:28:06
How many classes are there so far?
“To be honest? 3: the worker, carpenter and footman. But once we have the basics set out, the rest will go faster and every other crafter will be easier to make.”

1:32:35
Will there be a system where different workers will have to do different things to distribute to something?
“Crafters, not workers, but yes. An example: to make a bow, you need twine and a wooden shaft. To make twine you need a weaver to spin it, and the carpenter to make the bow.”


Modelling the Waver part 1:

9:10
Will the weaver make armor?
“He might make cloth armor”

48:50
Will there be any additional pre-beta builds provided to your youtube contacts?
“Yes, when we get closer to beta we will start providing pre-builds for youtubers, especially the youtubers who helped us out during the kickstarter, but we won’t do that till like right before the beta for a couple of reaosns. I’m riffing from the to of my head right now, and Tony might disagree, and we’ll fight about it.”

59:33
Will sleeping be affected by time or a sleepiness meter? And if it’s by a sleepiness meter will they take a nap while not working and during daylight to get an extra boost when the need to do something again??
“Right now, it is driven by time of day, but by the time you get it, it will be driven by meter. We won’t surface it to you, the player, but it’s there nonetheless. If you o through the day and work, you will get more and more sleepy. When your sleepiness hits a certain threshold, you go look for a bed, and if you cant find a bed or don’t have a bed, eventually you will be so sleepy you will just clunk out on the ground.”

1:01:54
How do you think the skill tree will work? Large amount of levels with percentage buffs, i.e. Cube World? Fewer levels with bigger skills, like a level 1 Blacksmith can craft stone swords, level 2 gains ability to craft bronze, level 3 can craft bronze shields, etc?
“We don’t want you managing a bunch of numbers in the game, and we don’t want you managing individual skill trees or anything like that, so the way levels will be handled with crafters is gonna be like, really obvious stuff: when you go up a level you will be able to create new recipes, or when you go up a level there will be a chance of something really awesome happening. And we want you, in crafting, managing more of the workshop rather than the individual crafter guy.”

1:03:51
Fighting mechanics?
“Fighting mechanics are something we are taking another look at. We want to make combat more story-book like than RTS-y, so instead of numbers popping up above their heads, larger events like someone getting stabbed in the heart will be highlighted. We try to make it fun to watch.”

1:06:17
Will the weaver be able to customize colors and design banners in PVP?
“We want you to have a town banner that goes everywhere, so maybe the weaver can craft the town banner, and that’s something you can set up when you start your new settlement, and that banner would show up in all kinds of recipes. Designing per pix”

1:07:05
How many models are done for the game, and how many more will you make?
“I would estimate that right now there are probably 100 models that are done, and I think that’s about 5%. I think that when the game is released, there will be at least 1000 models. And we have secret plans how we will generate all this art, which I won’t tell you, because it’s a secret. But you can probably guess.”


Modelling the Waver (Part 2)

4:28
Will dyes be handled in a fairly realistic way, from flowers and such, or will you have dyes from more hard to find ingredients, making dyes kind of a luxury?
“Yes and yes. We want dyes handled in a fairly realistic way, but dyes in the real world are both common and rare, so we will have dyes that are based of plants, which will be fairly easy to get, and then dyes based of some mineral or super rare mineral, so there’ll be a nice progression of dyes, so it’s not overly hard to get going but there’s stuff to strive for later on.”

6:34
Will the mammoth and dragon be accompanying you every time you start a new game?
“Yes, if you choose. So at the embarkation screen, you’ll get to choose the names of your settlers and on that screen you’ll also be able to toggle on and off the pets that you’ve earned.”

15:38
You said last stream we could design a flag and symbol and put it in the game, but how would this be handled?
“Indeed I did. We’ll get a simple in-game painter fro pre-fabs. We gotta figure it out. The ideal of course is that there’s a simple in-game painter and we will have that eventually. If we do that for beta, questionable. For the first beta we’re probably gonna give you a couple of pre-fabs and you’re gonna pick one, just because we’re focusing the first beta on gameplay features. So eventually you can count on designing your own flag pixel by pixel. At fist, probably not.”

31:45
Will the weaver act as a tailor?
“The weaver is going to act as a tailor as well. We wanna be careful about the number of classes. We don’t want you to have a weaver just to make cloth and then a tailor to turn the cloth into useful things, because if we do this a number of times, you would double the number of craftsman and you would just have to ping pong between then more. So when possible, we are combining a single crafts person into multiple roles. It’s a tuning thing.”

35:30
Tailor equals upgraded weaver?
“No, because, what does upgraded mean? If it’s and upgrade, maybe it’s like, level two, like a very easily accessible upgrade, because we don’t wanna take out all the clothing recipes from you”

35:48
How does leveling work?
“Eh, that is a good question. We know that we want to grand new patterns to your carpenter when you level. We don’t want you to try and level them up, because that’s like micro. So they’re gonna level up naturally, but we don’t want you to grind. We don’t want you to try to get your blacksmith to level five, so I’m gonna make a hundred swords, and then just throw them away basically, because that’s what it takes to get him to level five. So it might be time-based, which would work but is not very fun, or something else. Honestly we haven’t figured out exactly how. We know how we want it to feel. We don’t know how we want it to actually work. You’re not gonna be able to grind it, because that’s just grinding.”

38:30
Will the higher level craftsman, like tailors and blacksmiths, make items with better quality?
“Yes, they will. So the old recipe that you have, like your wooden level zero practice sword that the day one carpenter can make will potentially get better, if a master carpenter made the same recipe. And that’s how we’ll keep low-level recipe relevant in the late game.”

43:55
Is there to be a baker to proof …?
“Yeah, there’ll definitely be a craftsperson that takes raw food that you farm or something, and refine it into better food. Ad that might be a baked, but it’s probably something more generic like a cook, who can make bread and can make meat, for the same reason I talked about before: we don’t wanna have a cook and a baker and something else, so you would need four craftspeople to refine some food. That would just be unfortunate.”

44:22
How many tier will there be?
“It think, probably, if I had to guess, I would say three. That means there’s maybe three set pieces per workshop, on average.”

57:03
Will there be sporting events?
“Actually, I don’t know about full-fetched sporting events, but we do have the idea that you can craft, like, a ball and that, when people get bored, one of them would take up the ball and throw it up and down or something, and if two people get bored, they would toss it or kick it around.”

59:54
How do you change wool colors?
“You start with fiber, and fiber can come from a sheep or from a plant like cotton. So suppose you have a weaver, and then you get fiber from a sheep, which turns it into a shore sheep temporarily, or you can start from a cotton plant, which you can find in the wild, very rarely, or more likely from a farmer
So you take a sheep, shear it, and it turns into a shore sheep and a bundle of wool. You will take your fiber, and refine it using the weaver, into thread. Now at this point, if you have the guy who can acquire dye, which is probably gonna be the herbalist, you can dye that thread into one of many colors. And then, you can take your thread and produce bolts of cloth, and whatever color thread you used you will get that color of cloth. SO you could dye at any stage. If you wanted to you could dye the wool before even created the thread.
Here’s the kicker: think of how you would actually do this. One way is you say you have a recipe for thread, and the recipe for thread takes wool and the recipe for green thread takes green wool, but it’s not just for wool, it could also be cotton. And you could also take thread and then dye it. So there’s a huge web of independent recipes, and we could make all there recipes, and get all the links right, but if you as a modder wanted to introduce a new kind of fiber, we’d have to introduce that and think about all the new recipes that would be introduced in this super complicated web, and all will break down into chaos very quickly.
So what we’re doing instead is, every object in the game has certain properties, and then, recipes accept materials with these properties. So the thread recipe is gonna say, to make thread, you need fiber, and then cotton and wool and spider silk all have that fiber property. And the game would take all the things made of fiber and ask of which of these things you would wanna make thread. And when you make the thread, some of the information goes along with it, so if you make it from wool, it’s wool thread. And we do the same thing with dye.
So when you introduce a new material like spider silk, it will create the recipe for spider silk cloth automatically. So a bolt of cloth could also be a bolt of green wool cloth. You won’t have to be hardcoding hundreds of recipes this way.”

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Hey guys! there are few things id like to know!

Will there be farmers and archers in the beta?

this seems like a good “catch all” thread, for now…

we know there will be crafting, but the specific types of crafters hasnt been revealed… carpenter is probably a safe bet for one, i would imagine…

I’d think blacksmith and weaver may be in it too, since they have male and female versions and/or a defined workspace.

I am, of course, speculating. :eyeglasses:

Edit: So we now know it’s just the carpenter to begin with, but I hope we might see the blacksmith and weaver and many more! by January.

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Apologies for double post, but this is very much unrelated to the above post, being a question rather than a speculation/answer.

Will there be any way to “measure” in the game? As in, lets say Game Theory do a thing on it. They may well want distances. Will there be any way for us to know how far something is?

An example would be 1 block = 1 metre in Minecraft. Having this ability to define distances can be sometimes useful, if a little unnecessary :stuck_out_tongue:

i know this isnt what you were asking, but it would be nice to have a numerical value applied to layouts you can drag out for building… knowing that that ground floor is precisely 15x12 makes building specific sized structures a breeze…

as for the question of game distance, i thought this was mentioned elsewhere, in passing… i cant recall where though… le sigh

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Indeed that would be a nice, like maybe just a window to the side with literally “15x12” reacting as you change the your drag size? That would be simple and useful.

But yeah, I would be hoping for an actual game distance. It would be fine if it was literally that a 15x12 stockpile was simply 15mx12m.

well, something similar to T&S’s mechanic (which i’ve seen in a few other titles as well), where the initiating corner displays the dimensions of the selected area… in this example image, its expressed in X, Y and Z values:

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As discussed in the Mod Idea: Save Game thread, will there be a creative mode? Obviously Minecraft can be drawn on for having a similar mode, but so can RCT3, some form of Sandbox mode in which you can just create all the houses you want and have a thriving city? Or any kind of similar idea? :slight_smile:

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