I haven’t played Stonehearth in a while, but just seeing the new Desktop Tuesday inspired me to just write a quick suggestion here. The video was about the intelligence of hearthling AI, and how it prioritizes tasks.
Radiant has been doing a great job of doing work on this under the hood, but I’d argue that you’ll never be able to get the hearthlings to predict exactly what the player is going to want them to be doing at that time.
To answer that, if you’ve ever played Rimworld, that game has a feature that allows you to manually select tasks to be prioritized. While that system is a bit more specific, having you select the person to do the task or even setting tiers of priority for the AI to follow, Stonehearth could benefit a lot from a simplified version of this.
Just allowing the player to prioritize certain tasks, and having the AI control pull the nearest hearthling to complete that task would account for the little nuances that the code itself won’t be able to pick up on.
I would guess that the loot tool will do just that, having a higher priority than other tasks. So you can “loot” your own stuff to get it first.
I’d love that, seeing that’s how I thought it worked. Every time I sit down to a serious gameplay (instead of just testing something), I forget that it doesn’t work that way, try to use it for that, get disappointed. Every. bloody. time. (bastard brain)
I know in the past Hearthlings would use their backpacks for loot but not regular items and so looting made it go a lot faster, were you just still used to that? I think I do the same thing sometimes.
Entirely possible, I have been playing for some great amount of time
Also being able to prioritize other stuff, like building a specific thing. Say, a ladder or something.
So, perhaps a task queue; like the crafters have, except for workers?
Yeah, exactly. Also nice to see the same people after being gone for so long 