I just bought Stonehearth yesterday when I got home from work, the proceeded to lose myself in the game until 2am. This game is great, as I’m sure all of you here know. I love the graphics, the gameplay was simple enough to not need a tutorial, and the mechanics worked well with each other.
One thing that worries me somewhat is what my next couple days with this game will hold. I admittedly haven’t gotten very far, I’ve mostly been focusing on farming and stockpiling wood and building wooden structures. I know a decent amount of content comes after that stage, but I really can’t bring myself to explore it. One of the biggest complaints I have is the tunneling/digging mechanics, which is a big obstacle in getting ores for your town.
The outskirts of my town is littered with holes in the ground - all of them being attempts at making a functional mine. I still haven’t found a way. You send your workers to dig, and they just end up getting stuck at the bottom of the pit, waiting for you to pull another Hearthling away from their task just to build yet another ladder for the workers to get out, and to destroy the old ladder. I would assume that there’s an easier way that I’m just unaware of (perhaps linear tunneling with the Slice camera option), but I couldn’t find it in my ways of experimentation.
There were some minor concerns about getting Hearthlings a little too slow, as well as trading being drawn out (randomized, seemingly daily routes, wish I could direct my trades to get more ore and stone traders), but I’m sure that’s just to keep pacing at a manageable level. I also don’t know if the ??? classes haven’t been implemented yet, or if they’re unlocked by tools that I haven’t made from classes I haven’t used, etc., so I’ll have to find that out as well.
All in all, solid game. Looking forward to diving in again tonight, and looking forward to future content.
Hi and welcome. Heres some help with your mining, as you might know you have dirt and rock in the game. Dirt will give no ores, but rock will. Rock is darker brown than dirt. You can pick a mountain and mine away using the slice tool to the right of the menu, next to xray view. Or you can mine down about 20-25 blocks and you will hit rock.
If you do this, just mine out till you hit rock, then build a ladder and use slice view to mine horizontal in the rock. Just make sure someone stays above ground to build the ladder. But since carpenters can build ladders and dont mine it shouldnt be a problem
Hope this helps
So now that I’m home and able to experiment a little more, I found that tunneling into mountains rather than digging at any level is much easier than dealing with ladders, which is fine conceptually and for game mechanics. So there’s no fault there, I just had to figure that out.
Small bug in the Class Change menu, two of the ??? classes (Blacksmith’s 3rd upgrade and Trapper’s first/non-Shepherd upgrade) say “Promotion to undefined” instead of the normal “Promotion to ???”, and they don’t have the gold “???” header above the class description.
Up until this point, I’ve been using the preset buildings. I’m impressed about how much there is in the Design Building menu. Can’t wait to explore it further. From what I can tell, I can use it to place multiple Picket Fences/Stone Walls, which would be an improvement over placing them one-by-one which I had been doing, test pending.
There seems to be a cap of 20 Hearthlings, so earning Hearthlings at a slower rate is another non-issue. And trade being at the rate that it currently is isn’t too bad either, though I think Oak Tree Saplings sell for a little too much for how many you get per harvest.
Platform seems very stable, I haven’t run into any crashes or even any real glitc- Of course, right when I say that… I was in the blacksmith’s crafting menu and I brought up the Hearthling list. The Blacksmith’s Hammer (the button you use to craft things) showed up over the Hearthling roster. I just checked, it did the same with the other crafting menus. Examples here
Welcome to Stone hearth - I’d look around the forum for other peoples builds to give you a idea what can be archived - a word of warning, whilst Stonehearth is still ALPHA, it’s not highly optimized so I don’t recommend going above 20 hearthlings for now.
Second thing - when you’re building, you can use the floor tool, wall and roof tools and you can see through them with clicking V, but using SLABS you can not see through them with v, so whilst it’s more free form in design - don’t expect to be able to see people living in it if you build with lots of slabs!
How have you been placing the fences thus far? You have 2 options for fences (neither in the custom building editor). 1, clicking on the fence in your stockpile and clicking move, or 2, using the item placement tool in the build tab.
The number of hearthlings supported is very hardware dependent. Personally, on my 4 year old laptop with a business (not GeForce) NVIDIA card I do keep the limit at 20. @brad who works for TR has a save with over 50, but he is on one of the high-end development machines they have. I would recommend testing it out and seeing what your machine can handle.
I was thinking about this when I had 20 hearthlings, but oddly enough I had similar framerate drop when I had 20 as when I had 30. I have a mid-range PC, and I think my graphics card has a harder time with rendering the environment than the hearthlings while my processor can handle the extra load.
Initially, I was using the Place Furniture menu and doing fences individually. Because I was playing on a Peaceful file recently, I tried my Build Design idea with crates instead. I was able to make designs of rows of crates if I put floor tiles underneath them, so that’s good news for me.
