New player, have multiple questions

Gameplay
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Hi all, I bought this game on Saturday and have enjoyed myself greatly over the past few days - despite getting repeatedly stomped by Goblins and having to reload. I guess you can’t avoid that when you innocently think that choosing a desert start with Rayya’s Children is merely an aesthetic choice and has no impact on game difficulty, since you select that separately… :wink: Oh well! Better than too easy and boring, I suppose.

I’ve collected some questions that I’d like to ask, which I have not been able to answer for myself by reading the wiki.

  • I’m planning on promoting my trapper to a shepherd soon. Will she be able to find sheep and poyos in the desert, or will I have to make do with rabbits all day, every day?

  • When I let my combat units off the leash (no ‘defend here’ order), and they start patrolling… they will always, 100% of the time, walk towards where my farmer has her fields set up. And they’ll stick around them closely, never straying more than a few meters. Why? These fields are - intentionally - in the safest possible location in town! My combatants walking there leaves the village defenseless.

  • Is there a way to share and/or download custom buildings? I’ve seen screenshots with great builds by other people, and I’m not (yet) very good at custom building. Maybe I can import something someone else made, and let my hearthlings construct it like the default included blueprints?

  • I have not played before alpha 20, so I don’t know how the game was in the past. But I’ve read some people’s responses to the changes here on the forums, and they confused me a bit. For example, people state that hearthlings eat so much food now that they need multiple farmers plus multiple shepherds or trappers just to feed a large village. Meanwhile, I am sitting here, at the 20 hearthling default cap, and I have… one trapper bringing in jerky, one farmer tending a single 11x11 field of vegetables, and one cook producing meat stews from the proceeds. I am generating a food surplus from that! The farmer also tends to a corn plot of the same size again, but I sell everything from that to traders because I don’t need it (I suppose it will come in handy for animal feed). And those two plots together don’t even max out the single farmer, she’s also just started working on large amounts of wood.

Is there a bug or intended feature here where Rayya’s Children eat massively less food than the Ascendancy (which I gather is played by most people), or what? How can other people need so much food, when I’m feeding 20 hearthlings with a third (at most) of one farmer and less than one trapper?

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Welcome. Glad you are enjoying Stonehearth!

  1. Yes, your shepherd will be able to raise all the animals no problem.
  2. Your soldiers patrol fields and stockpiles. You can use the Patrol Points mod which will let you set up custom patrol points.
  3. You can find custom builds and put them into your template folder (in the Stonehearth > saved-objects > stonehearth > building_templates folder. You can find some online or here on discourse (I recommend looking up some Michael Handy builds here )
  4. The issue that some people have is that the Hearthlings now eat 2 times a day, which when you are playing on hardmode and you need to put more hearthlings as soldiers who don’t do anything (apart from giving their lives to save their town) other than patrol and eat twice a day.
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  1. You might want to take a look at this site
  2. Different kinds of food tend to be of different “sustenance”. Cooked food is more nutrient than raw. Late-game dishes and crops are more nutrient. Also note that a skilled farmer gathers more food from a single plant.
    So it’s possible to support ~20 H with your setting on normal difficulty.
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Thanks for your answers! Definitely gonna look into downloadable templates. :slight_smile:

Followup question: do stockpiles have to have something in them to be patrolled? I’m thinking to make my own ghetto patrol points by just putting a ring of 1x1 stockpiles that don’t allow storage around my settlement.

…Actually, I’m just gonna try it out!

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A lot of this game is planning ahead. I personally prefer the rayas children faction over the ascendency. As long as you manage your resources wisely you ought to be fine having just one farmer one cook and a Shepard even with hard mode

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I return today with extra questions, which cropped up yesterday evening.

  • Can I somehow order rotten food to be removed from storage/destroyed as soon as it appears?

  • If I have a hearthling who is level 6 in a class, and I demote that hearthling to worker or promote them to a different class, are the old class levels and perks permanently lost? Or will they be returned active if I change the hearthling back to the original class? I’m thinking of reducing my military some, now that I’m all walled in and random attacks have apparently ceased entirely as a result. But I don’t want to have to retrain them all from scratch when I want to progress with the Orc campaign later.

  • Is there some way to tell the trapper not to make new pets all the time? I’m storing all my stuff in boxes now, which leads to an entire town full of pets with hunger symbols over their heads, because they can’t find any food to steal. After several hours of this, it gets very, very annoying. But I don’t want to store food out in the open. It doesn’t fit into my town’s concept. So I go and release every pet I find, but the trapper just keeps making more… and more… and more… I was planning to promote my trapper, but I have too much going on in terms of construction and village restructuring right now.

  • I have multiple firepits placed, because I looted them from goblin camps. At one point, I wanted to make room for a building, and told my hearthlings to pick up a firepit and put it into storage. But… nothing happened. They completely ignored the order even while idle, and even while responding instantly to a request to move the pit elsewhere. While I was still able to build my house thanks to that, I’m still confused. It seems like the only way to remove a firepit from the world after placing it down once is to destroy it. Possible bug? Or is there an actual reason for this?

  • Bear with me, this one takes some explaining (actual question is at the bottom). I’ve built some new large houses, and wanted to move beds into them so that my hearthlings would have more space. And I discovered a very peculiar interaction. When you move a bed that you manually placed somewhere, it works fine, but if you try to move a bed that is part of another building’s blueprint, it gets weird. For starters, no move order is generated. The bed stays where it is. Second, the new house is modified, even though it had already finished construction. I thought this was impossible… like, the game literally tells you so before you begin building a blueprint. But no, if you try to move a bed like this, the destination house suddenly reverts to being under construction, and gains a “missing items” entry for one bed of that type. If you have one in storage, your hearthlings will fetch it and place it. If you demolish the source house you wanted to move the bed from, they’ll even add that particular bed you were trying to move. The newly added bed becomes a fixed, permanent part of the new house, as if it had been in the blueprint all along.

I was obviously getting very confused while discovering this, and ended up ordering the move of a ‘fixed’ bed twice. To the same location. With the end result that there were now orders to place two beds in the exact same physical location, which is normally impossible. My hearthlings tried to place beds, but could place only one of them. Worse still, when clicking that bed, it would only select the ghost image of the missing, unplaced bed, rendering me unable to interact with the actually placed bed in any way. Also, because existing buildings cannot be modified (except by this buggy interaction, apparently), I was unable to delete the ghost image or otherwise cancel the order to place another bed there. I ended up having to tear down the whole building and getting it rebuilt… which hurt a lot, because this was a Desert Lodge. The single biggest building in the Rayya’s Children catalog. Takes aaaages to build.

My question here: was there any way at all that I could have deleted that bugged bed placement order? Any way at all to interact with a house once it is out of the planning phase, aside from tearing it down?

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  1. Destroyed as soon as it appears - no. You can order to manually remove it though.
    If you have “Better Stockpiles” mod you can switch off storing rotten food for all stockpiles.
    Note that rotten food should not occupy storage space anyway and should despawn on its own after a while.
  2. Old perks are suspended, not lost. If you promote your H back to its original class he gets all his perks back.
    However if your H is not lvl6, he will lose his experience progress to next level when promoted/demoted (his lvl and perks are still preserved).
  3. No, but you can make a trapper with low spirit - he will make less pets. You can add a suggestion to make this feature toggle-able - seems like you’re not alone.
  4. I suspect it’s a known bug - a firepit lacks some storage tags so it can currently only be stored in a stockpile accepting “all” items.
  5. A known bug. You can use the console to get rid of ghost items. To do it:
    a) Press Ctrl+C to open debug console
    b) Select you ghost item (click on it)
    c) Type “destroy” in the console and press [Enter]
    Be careful not to destroy useful items. There is no confirmation prompt!
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Thanks for the answers! :slight_smile: Didn’t know a debug console was available to players - that should help a lot.