Lumberjack option for workers

Suggestions
1

It would be pretty sweet to get a lumber jack option on workers where they can plant saplings and harvest them in specific regions you can mark out.

Reposted from Reddit

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2

Well that is currently rolled into the farmer’s job. They grow the saplings and your workers plant them. I assume you’re suggesting something like what trappers and farmers have where it’s an automated process of food collection, but do you really go through that much wood?

I don’t plant trees frequently enough to dedicated a profession to them and even end up selling most saplings to make room in my inventory. Once a month (in-game) or so I plan a medium size forest and harvest it when my available supply runs low. And even a lot of that just goes to stock piles because it’s surprisingly hard to go through 1000 units of wood.

3

I see what you mean, I just think that as the game develops and we get larger map sizes, it would be nice to have that automation going on so that we can expand more rapidly, and have our towns generating resources whilst we are not there.

4

When you’re not there? Either you are making some very generous assumptions of what direction they plan on taking the game in or we have VERY different play styles.

6

The issue with just using the current farmer option is you have to manually plant the new trees. To me at least, this goes against the existing model of the game. The suggested option would make it all automated and let the user concentrate on other things.

Using your farmer example, you don’t have to manually tell the hearthling to til the soil, plant the seed, or harvest the final product. I’d imagine the “lumberjack” zone to work in a similar way to the trapper zone. You would drag out a zone and heartlings would automatically cut down trees, and plant the new seedlings that the farmer has grown as appropriate within that zone.

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7

abstract that into a “overlapping or multi-job zone” + job generator?

job generator -> periodically look at stuff in a specified zone to generate jobs for any appropriate stuff found there.

tree basic possibilities for multi-job zone:

  1. job-neutral zone, which can be the target parameter for more than 1 job.
    e.g.
  • a zone that is target for “planting saplings” which will automatically generate “place” jobs to plant saplings with a specified density.
  • same zone, that is target for a “harvest tree” which will automatically generate “harvest” jobs to any trees (above a certain age/size?)

  1. Allow overlapping job-specialized zones. Just lay a auto-plant tree zone over a auto-harvest tree zone.

  2. A specialized plant and harvest zone. Not very customizable/extensible though…

I hope for generic zone (1st case) though, as it feels more moddable. e.g. the game engine provides the ability to mark out zones and assign attributes to it, a modder could implement customized job generators that operate in the zones. multiple job generators operating on the same zone could interact and produce emergent behaviors?

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8

Originally the game was intended to have infinite sized maps, but I believe the devs have recently decided against this.