Oregon Trail Style Traveling

If you’ve never played the game Oregon Trail, please go look it up!

We all know now that food/water/sleep/seasons will play a huge roll in Stonehearth and will add to the dynamics of travel.

Traveling in Stonehearth should be a challenge in itself, the larger the group/farther the travel, the more supplies that will be needed.


Assuming settlers will have to go eat, drink, and sleep:

  • You will need to carry a limited amount of supplies on your settlers and obviously a caravan or pack mule.

  • You could decide on whether or not to bring military personal on your travels to ensure the safety of your settlers.

  • You can setup a basic camp with fire/tents/sleeping bags or build a small mini-fort if you have the man-power/time to build it
    (especially if you found an area that has some temporary resources
    that can be gathered)

  • Basic advantages and disadvantages when traveling during the day/night like visibility, water usage, being spotted by enemy
    bandits.

  • You will need to manage sleep schedules, guard/patrol duties, hunters and gatherers.

  • Seasons will affect traveling, proper clothing/shelter in winter must be provided or your settlers wont last a fortnight.

  • All with SPECIFIC manual and automated load-out systems created for travel to make it easier to prep a group for travel, (some could
    include saved caravan loadouts, settler type loadouts, camps/mini-fort
    layouts previously made by the player)

I’m assuming that most of this will already naturally be in as it applies already to your main settlement. However, without giving too much spontaneity away on the possible woes of your travels, Id like to see some streamlined systems that make it easier and less micromanagy to setup travel groups and camps when out and about. Either way, I hope traveling is dangerous and difficulty and requires good management to be successful.

What do you guys think?

Make sure to favorite/like if you agree!

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If even a single on of my citizens dies of Dysentery I am going to be so mad at you! YOU. Not the developers. You. Sigh… I love Oregon Trail.

Well, it sounds pretty fun, but only if I could choose in like the “new game” screen to have it on or off.

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I’m sure they will have a sandbox cheat mode where you can build awesome towns without any need to farm for actual food or gather for actual resources needed to craft items.

Now if we assume settlers have to go physically eat, drink, and sleep (we saw some sleeping in kickstarter video). There could be an option to turn on arcade mode so that food, water, and sleep could be simulated through time and automatically subtract from variables above ie. 500 Gold, 150 Food, 123 Water, 300 Sleep points etc.

This Arcade mode could be an option so your settlers auto-simulate this in real time like in most traditional RTS games and could be nice for players looking for a more casual RTS play-through.

And arcade mode sounds fine, but I was talking about the travelling aspect, considering that I want to take care of all the food and drinking and so on!

My idea is that everything is automated so you dont need to micromanage a travel group though you can still have manual system of telling a settler to go eat/drink/sleep now.

In the automated system, If hes hungry, he will automatically go to the caravan and grab some bread and eat. If no food is in the caravan and your out in the middle of nowhere, he will resort to either a stock pile of food you created nearby or just complain a bit and then starve to death.

If settlers don’t physically eat and drink, they can essentially be 100s of miles away and still be fed from your stockpiles in your main settlement. This would be like most traditional RTS games and kill any type of immersion or simulation. This should be an option and it would not be that hard to code/mod in either.

As a mod that would recreate the Oregon Trail game into a new context and environment, I would love to be involved putting something together like this. It really wouldn’t be Stonehearth in the traditional sense, but it would be an awesome mod variation using the Stonehearth engine in an exciting and new way that could still re-purpose existing assets and do some other fun things.

Dang, this is an awesome idea all to itself. It is also something that could take advantage of the module system so it could also become something of a mini-game as well and wouldn’t necessarily require a complete overhaul of Stonehearth either.

I should also note that Oregon Trail was one of the very first computer games that I ever played… so long ago that it was embarrassing. At its heart it taught the concept of logistics, as decisions regarding what supplies you brought along on the very long journey had a huge impact upon the eventual outcome. Micromanagement of individuals in the pioneer company was not the point, but rather how you dealt with decisions like staying to hunt for food or pressing forward to complete the journey faster.

What I don’t know is if something like this would require a custom map or if it could be applied to randomly generated continents in some fashion?

I feel this can be created in some form because of the description of certain races in Stonehearth. I know one of them is known to be in caravans, so why not do that?

I like the idea of bringing supplies and basic camp. Not sure about the “manage sleep schedules, guard/patrol duties”.