Title: New villager spawns in an inaccessible area
Summary: I received a notification that a new villager wanted to join my settlement. Hooray! Accepted the villager, but she unfortunately spawned on top of a nearby tree, and was unable to reach the ground/village. I know we have reports on error messages when new villagers arrive, but I wasn’t sure if this had surfaced yet ( @Phagocytosis, that’s your queue!)
Steps to reproduce: No specifics repro steps, other than to “trigger” several new villagers, and wait to see if one becomes “stuck”.
If it’s still the same way, the reason would be that the entity placing function is (likely) running a trace from the sky to the ground - and wherever it hits something first, that’s the location it will be spawned.
In your case, a tree. In theory, by placing the banner near trees, you should be able to reproduce it with the starting resources/villagers easily if that’s the culprit.
Hearthlings spawning randomly in map (not so far from your flag location but its far enough for a random spawn) and it can be a big problem sometimes as u can see in example. Why they dont spawn near at our flag?
The idea, I think, is that they walk in from “the surrounding area”. It definitely would be nice if they’d check whether they could actually pathfind to somewhere in your town - e.g. your flag - before spawning in.
Just to add to this - while it isn’t technically inaccessible, I’ve had new villagers spawning too far away from my camp to find their way over. The first one was starving on his own about 100m ‘west’. I only discovered his existence when a zombie spawned near him and he began running away, towards my town.
The second one spawned at the edge of the map and I had to put him in a party to get him over:
Seeing how the party and flag-your-town trick works so well, could there not be some kind of a “run to the camp standard” order for new hearthlings?
I didn’t think this merited its own full report so I’m dropping it in this somewhat related thread, but if there’s a proper one for it, feel free to plop it in there, @8BitCrab! Also, is the pathfinder in any way related to one’s PC performance? I seem to get shorter pathfinding distances as my game progresses, which may be a cause for this in older computers…
Hey @phector2004, yes, the pathfinder relates strongly to PC performance. Unlike a human brain, when a computer tries to figure out a path it has to do so in a purely logical way, one step at a time. This means that it has to consider many possible options before it can actually “complete” the path. While computer pathfinding has definitely improved in efficiency over the years, it is still one of the most difficult tasks to do well programmatically. As you pointed out, even when done well, the later in the game you are, the more entities are trying to path find at the exact same time. This includes all your hearthlings, as well as enemies and animals.
I also am experiencing a similar issue. My new settler appeared under a lake with a swimming animation. The settler will not swim up and out of the water. They just sit there.
I started a new game, and placed my starting flag very close to the shoreline of a lake. Three of my hearthlings spawned IN the lake, and would not come up even after a ladder was build.
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