It would be pretty cool if, When you made a new save that ruins of your old settlement could be find somewhere in the map.
I don’t know if this is even possible, but it would be cool none the less, opinions?
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so, sort of a perpetual landscape scenario… your existing settlement is overrun, you “fail”, and when loading up a new map, you could find remnants of the past failures scattered around the “world map”,so to speak…
interesting idea, but i have no idea what would be required from a programming perspective…
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Exactly, It would be interesting to see, but probably not possible 
Hm… interesting idea. I could imagine that you can mod it in somehow. Easiest way might be if you can load your old save-map into the new game as an alternative plane and add some “deconstruction algorithm” (removing most of the roofs, etc.) on top of it. Maybe even replacing your settlers with Skeletons and other NPCs.
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I might be way off the mark here, but perhaps your old settlements could be incorporated as modules?
A certain chance of them being loaded perhaps?
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Why not have the option to carry on with the same map with new settlers but start in a newly generated area, that way you have to explore to find it again (stopping you from just reclaiming the city and its resources). And then when you do return you might be faced with whatever destroyed it i.e., a titan or a goblin army, etc.
I love this idea.
Well in terms of a programming perspective it might be possible, the list of things that would be required to pull it off as far as I can see are.
A way of turning a village into ruins.
A way of running a script on loss.
A way of making a module that spawns a specific set of buildings.
A way of making a module that can’t get spawned more than once.
A way of editing a mod from within the game.
In terms of capability: 1 is definitely possible, 5 and 3 should definitely be possible, 2 could be faked if needed, and 4 should also be possible but could cause issue’s with finding them.
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I also like this idea a lot; It’s a good way to build some additional history into a new game.
-Will
Programming-wise I don’t think it’d be too difficult. Just load the old save, copy it to make a new one, do some weathering on the city to make it into ruins, then move the players starting location. The issue I could see is if you’re able to declare a world seed where the terrain is generated based upon that seed. Then there really wouldn’t be an easy way to do it.
Maybe something like a hardcore mode? If your city falls, you’re able to reuse that world to start a new city, and you’d be able to return to the old city with it in ruins?
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Now let’s just hope Tom and Tony take a look at this thread, maybe they can tell us if its possible or not, but I do see what you mean Xavion
@SteveAdamo Actually, I’d think that would be pretty easy, from a programming perspective. Assuming you can reload a map, why can’t you load a transformed version of that map. I would expect something like Timber & Stone, when all of your villagers are killed or starve, you get a dialog box telling you they all died, and saves the game (so you can’t reload it) and saves a copy of it in a “failed” maps folder so that randomly in the next game it can reload broken down structures. The “failed” maps folder is so you can delete your dead games but still have them as potential ruins. Great idea.
This is an amazing idea, I hope they see this 
Mmmmm from a gameplay perspective… OMG!! that sounds amazing!!! but i will set a limit of 2-3 ruins spawned in every map, because if you have made like 10 cities, it’s not proportional if you find 10 ruins in your surrundings (because as far as we know, the map it’s not going to be infinite; it’s very very large, but not infinite).
From a programmer point of view… i think it can be handled if we use the maximun of any programer: “Divide and Conquer”.
In the new maps that we create, the mod will create a file with the plans (blueprints) we’re already making in our city.
Then the same mod, will read that file and use some world-generation to pick one of those plans, put it in the map, and make some ruins from the plans you’ve placed :p.
Sounds like a cool idea… but let’s think through it a bit more:
- It’s mostly aesthetic, so it has to be minimal effort and provide a lot of benefit (in the form of adding charm and detail to the game)
- It’s mostly a hidden Easter Egg. Many players won’t even start a new game, others might not play their second game long enough to find it, and still others may not recognize the ruins as their first town.
- What happens if a player is working through two games at once? Will the ruins simply be a snapshot of their other town at the time they created the second game? Only taking ruins from a pool of “failed” games doesn’t appear to be an option, because the devs have stated (particularly in the Pizza Party livestream) that they don’t like the idea of utter failure and being forced to restart, and that they see the punishment for failure mostly as waiting longer to complete your next objective.
- If those previous towns haven’t actually failed, then what does that communicate to the player? That their town is destined to someday be an abandoned ruin? That sounds very depressing!
I had a similar idea last week, that cities (with citizens) and the land directly around them could be uploaded to a server and when you start a new game it would take a couple of cities of varying sizes and place them in the new world as NPC cities. That way you could come across really interesting cities that works and has actually been designed by a human instead of just being generated. And people would be modding the game simply by playing it.
If something like this would be implemented then having the game pick out some of your old cities from the server and using it (possibly against you) or showing it as a ruin would be a quite small step.
These are all very good points, but who’s to say that all of your saved games take place at the same time? Maybe one game is hundreds of years after one, or before!
Many of us will be playing “dwarf fortress” Stonehearth, meaning we’ll crank up the difficulty so that we die often. Have you played the early versions of Timber & Stone? You’d know what I mean if that were true. It takes something to survive and as they say “losing is fun”. I would expect to have many “dead” games.
But that is a style of play thats not for everyone. Nevertheless, while this may not be a before release idea, it surely is a post-release enhancement idea.
Also for the player that does start a second game after playing for a long time, he’d possibly have a HUGE ruin to explore and build his new city in the ruins of an old city. Very Mayan, or pre Columbus South America were many new cities were built in and on the ruins of a previous city.
It would be hilarious if the ruined town had a plaque or memorial describing the horrible fashion in which the town was wiped out.
-Will
I thought that perhaps when a town fails, six exiles “escape” the cataclysm to become the new settles (akin to the start of the normal game). I imagine it wouldn’t be too hard to just spawn the new settlers a few game-kilometers away to start a new homestead. Of course if you find your old town than it should be in ruins and inhabitable (lingering mobs?) but you could still potentially scavenge for spare resources. It could provide a very interesting Multi-player aspect, where if two server buddies go to war, you sit it out and then when one person loses and their civilization turns to exile you sweep in and salvage what you can while no one is watching (all very cloak and dagger mind you).