Organizing ressources in an intelligent way

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1

What I would like to see is a way to organize my ressources more intelligent. To make it more clear, here is an example of what I mean:

  • I have a smith
  • The smith needs wood to make coal
  • So he goes of to the warehouse I have placed in the center of the city to get some wood
  • This takes alot of time

Since other jobs also need wood, I can’t just place a chest close to a smith that takes wood in and remove all the wood from the warehouse.

So I would like to suggest a “favourit” function for ressources. I made some screens to show what I mean:

Pic1: If you do this with the chest close to the smith, only wood can be placed in it. But there is no guarantee that you hearthlings will fill this up first. So if you have like 20 chests in your warehouse and most of them can take in wood, your chest at the smith will probably neiver receive any wood at all unless the other chests are full.

Pic 2: Now this is the idea. You can mark the ressource(s) as favourite. That means, your hearthling will prefer bringing those specific ressources first to this chest and then in the others.

This way you can make sure, that the smith has some wood close to him. And you can easily limit the amount of wood with other chest sizes. So if you only want 32 wood close to your smith, build a wooden chest.and mark wood as favourite.

Now there are still some questions. Is it possible to have multiple chests with the same ressource as favourite? Will hearthlings start taking wood out of normal chests and place it in the chest that got marked with a favourite? Those are things we can discuss.

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2

not a bad idea. you could also make a storage section for wood or resources and so on

3

That is a much more elegant solution than the one I suggested~

4

Sharing wood between my “Smith Chest” and my “Carpenter Chest” would be critical. I’d hate to see my hearthlings only fill one chest and not the other. Perhaps the game could try to balance the amount of resources in both chests, so that if one chest has 16 and the other has 15, a hearthling carrying 4 wood would place all four pieces of wood in one chest, then his next “run” of 4 would go in the other chest.

EDIT: Oh, and while I like how simple the star is, I’d like something a bit more noticeable at a glance. I would like it to be bigger, or the blue outline around the resource to be a different shade or color.

3 Likes
5

that would be a great aspect for the hearthlings to do

6

A system like in Banished with traders would be great, where you can set a minimum number of a reasource to always be at a certain location. If there’s less, a courier will come bring them.

7

This won’t work (for long).

When you chop trees the smith’s stockpile will fill up, then the other stockpiles. Then the smith will use all the wood in smith’s stockpile. The smith’s stockpile will be empty. The wood will be in the other stockpiles.

To make it work properly you need a way to “pull” items from a different stockpile/s (e.g. when there’s free space in smith’s stockpile, shift wood from carpenter’s stockpile to smith’s stockpile).

That still doesn’t really work properly. The problem would be that every time the smith uses a piece of wood they’d create a space and a hauler will have a “shift one measly little log” job.

What you really want is “when there are at least 8 free spaces, fetch 4 logs at the same time from the carpenter’s stockpile”. That way a hauler can do one trip (for 4 logs) rather than 4 trips (for one log each).

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Right, I mean, the best implementation is slightly different from the suggestion, but please trust me when I say that no dev should be taking their players’ suggestions without modification~

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Yeah, it’s just a rough idea. The main purpose of this thread is to point to the problem that some crafters need to much time to get their ressources and that we need something to shorten the distance between crafters and his needed materials. So I don’t mind any modifications to my original idea, as long as it helps everyone to organize their ressources and crafters in a better way :slight_smile:

2 Likes
10

Ultimately the primary problem seems to be that we want resources to be in proximity to the crafters that need them. Because multiple crafters may need access to the same resources, but they may not be in proximity to one another or the origin of those resources, we need intermediate steps to ensure everything goes to where it’s needed when it’s needed, without overly occupying our most limited resource (Hearthling workers).

So it seems like this is something that should be addressed in multiple parts, rather than a single one, as nice as that might be.

First, the above suggestion is basically a prioritization option. This location is prioritized over that one, so make sure this has ample resources before you send them elsewhere. You could do this with a star, like above, but I’d think you’d want to expand it a bit; say, one, two, or three stars, plus a neg (meaning ‘do not ever put this resource here’). That gives you a bit more leeway (so the Blacksmith always gets Iron Ore first, but the Carpenter gets it next for Reinforced Doors before it goes to the general storage).

The second thing is when do we move things? You don’t want to tie up Hearthlings moving single items from storage to storage; you want an intelligent (yet elegant) supply chain. So the most reasonable thing that I can think of is tying it to Orders. You tell the Carpenter to make 10 Mean Beds right now, and the system checks the storage to see if there’s 10 Logs there. If not, get them. Ideally this would work with the entirety of the order list; if I want 10 Mean Beds and then 8 Wooden Doors, that’s 18 Logs; rather than getting 10 then waiting for the Mean Beds to be done before grabbing the 8 Logs for the Doors, the whole shopping list is acquired at once. Of course, you have the question of, “How does the system know which storage to check and where to put it?” If I want my 10 Beds made I don’t want the system to go berserk trying to put 10 Logs in every storage that accepts Logs. I just want the Logs in the one storage the Carpenter will be drawing from. So it might be necessary to have an ownership system tied to jobs and/or individual Hearthlings; the job promotion system and the possibility of having multiple Hearthlings with the same job in different places makes this a bit more painful I’d think.

Finally, how do you get it there? This is the biggest headache for players: I don’t want my Workers tied up moving things from place to place rather than building, mining, and so on. There’s a point where there’s just too much going on to make that practical with our limited community. And my suggestion would be to have an alternate. The one that immediately came to mind was the Trapper and/or Shepherd; train pack mules to ferry things around as needed, so your Workers can stick to other things. Or if you want to go with the ownership deal, perhaps owned pets- I rather like the idea of a dozen Raccoons, Foxes, and Rabbits zooming around the settlement fetching things for their masters. You could even add craftable items to increase carrying capacity.

Just some thoughts on how to make this all work out.

1 Like
11

Another thing I just thought of is having some sort of courier task available to workers. If you want to set this kind of system up, you can check the courier task and uncheck build/mine/haul or any of the others and have just that one hearthling shuffle items around. Would be great to also allow couriers to use wagons or pack animals to help move large amounts of items around.

Could also go far enough to make the courier a specialty class but that might be too far. lol

1 Like
12

I guess I’d also want to point out that similar games (Dwarf Fortress, Gnomoria) have already solved the problem (mostly in the way I described above), which adds a little complexity to the game.

I think the main problem is that Stonehearth developers want the game to be “simple enough for a drunk 2 year old monkey to play”, and don’t want the complexity that is needed for organised/efficient storage. I don’t think they quite understand that drunk 2 year old monkeys don’t buy games (or in other words, they’ve misjudged the target demographic).

13

well my guess is besides more load on a.i. if you have a big city and the trees are on 1 side the chest you favor on the other side and the main storage in the middle, it will take much more time to farm wood then it would take to go pick it up your self.

Also I have noticed with my forbiddencity project that there appears to be a limmit how far your citizens will carry stuff. I mean i had them plant trees but they never took them there. When i teleported with command they placed them almost instantly. Same with replacing resourced. They would not move the items from a closed down storage area to another one 300 blocks further away.