By now I’ve got almost 30 hours in Stonehearth and I really try to love it again and again. But everytime it is the same problem. I know, it’s EA, but still. For buildings to get finished properly you have to sacrifice goats and dance around a fire. This time I even limited myself to just building template buildings.
The first building went surprisingly fine. The second one was missing two windows. Now I had this weird situation where a Large Urn wouldn’t get placed and I had to built a new one, that would be put on the old ones place instead. Buildings additional windows fixed one of the two windows. The second window doesn’t get finished, the ladder still stands there. I tried everything.
(So I had to remove one image cause as first-time poster I apparently can’t put in 2 images in a post…)
The third building is where the fun began anew. Suddenly everybody stops working (seeing that this template was more complex, I even pre-built all needed items), saving, loading doesn’t help. Pausing and resuming the building just leads to removing some scaffoldings. I decide to remove the building. Some more scaffolding gets removed and the option to change anything and that’s it. Sure I could load an old save game, but come on.
I read you would be able to remove buildings now (“Structures that have been completed can now be torn down.”). This doesn’t seem to work on roads.
After like 6 settlements I did in total in this game I just can’t be bothered anymore to try an actual settlement. Seeing the development of the building AI/fixes, the heart of the game, I don’t feel like it will ever work without problems.
There’s not even some basic dev tools to fix the common issues (It’s not like this would do any harm to a singleplayer game). Moving Hearthlings that get stuck somewhere (bugging out in midair), the complete deletion of a building or blocks with a simple selection. I have to try through all the possible solutions for a problem (saving, loading, all kinds of actions, pausing, resuming, building new props, constructing ladders). I even feel like the game should simply cheat at some points when the Hearthlings can’t get stuff “manually” done.
And I’m looking already past all the performance issues. The implementation of containers for items makes the clutter go away, but I don’t think the performance got much better from it. I can just assume that it’s not related to the single items on the screen, but how those get managed in the back-end.
I just felt like I have to write my opinion about the state, before dropping the game again for the next months.
. If this does not work, or you want more details on the what you can do with debug tools, let me know!