Quality of life and Hearthling Entertainment

Something that occurs to me as I play games like this is that often the goals of the game are to work simply to assign work for work’s sake, which I suppose is fine since we’re the ones that are supposed to be enjoying the game and not the Hearthlings or whoever you’re controlling. However, the longer I play a session of Stonehearth or Dwarf Fortress or whatever, the more I wish that there were recreation options for the characters. Dwarf Fortress will be adding music and dancing and storytelling (FINALLY) and I was wondering if there was any plans to put recreation or some sort of “enjoyment” or “quality of life” system into Stonehearth, be it bards or libraries or dancing or parties or some such silliness. I think games like this have a much greater impact when the end goal is to help the digital people have an enjoyable and fullfilling life rather than just working from dawn until dusk, sleeping, and going back at it.

Maybe I’m in the minority, though. And maybe I overthink these things :stuck_out_tongue:

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Well, I do find that hearthlings daydream a lot more than I’d like them to. It’s for that reason they shan’t get any dances or games or cookies!

i am certain there is an older thread with theses same thoughts, i will look around and see if a i can find it.

Festivals! Apparently when your Hearthlings are happy enough and have enough food, they will eventually throw a festival/party thing. Should be awesome, i’m excited for them to implement it.

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Here’s a few posts I was able to find discussing free (idle) time and entertainment.

Standard 9 to 5

Idle Animations

Idling and Interactions

Most of the discussions so far have been more oriented towards small actions/activities the hearthlings might do when they don’t have any jobs at the moment. There’s a few though that could lead to larger concepts of entertainment–one of my own Suggestion threads was focused around the idea of museums, which would result in passive activity for your citizens, a new depth to Net Worth, and the potential of theft (offering more use for Footmen in your city and deeper gameplay). Here’s the link for that one…

Flaunt your Wealth and History! The Curator

Hope a few of these help!

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Thank you so much for doing the footwork that I really should have done. I shall take a look at these!

I am with Dracorexian, the Hearthlings do take their time to ignore tasks and keep the stroke risk low. However, I like Solus’ idea of a festival. Thats something that occurs just rarely, maybe even a kind of quest/mission where you need to gather food, build the bandstand and seats etc