I’d like to see a more fleshed out inventory system. What I have in mind might be way more in depth than what the game currently needs, but I think it’d be neat.
I think “stockpiles” should be able to be upgraded to store rooms. Or better yet, instead of placing a flag to start the game, place a store room that takes up a 25x25 area. It holds 500 items until you assign a quartermaster. Then it upgrades to 1000. Stockpiles could then be added to the back of the building if necessary. But if a stockpile is attached, only the quartermaster can retrieve items from it. Hearthlings would go to the quartermaster for supplies, he/she would gather them up, place them in a cart or wheelbarrow (please add carts/wheelbarrows) then the hearthling would take everything they just got from the quartermaster to the building location.
This might help reduce the number of stockpiles required to run a small town as well as give a more realistic feel to building. It would cause the Hearthlings to go to the stockpile once for materials instead of running back and forth several times as well as potentially increase the speed at which building are constructed.
One problem with this is that 25x25 for 500 items is super space inefficient.
Plus 25*25 = 625 so you know you can get more in a standard stockpile.
Vaults are 4x4 and have 256 storage.
Using vaults you can get 6400 items in a 25x25 space and then some extra if you add some chests.
A quartermaster is not going to speed up how many times a hearthling has to run backwards and forwards whilst doing a job.
What you want is some AI code that makes the hearthlings empty there backpacks of everything they don’t need for the current job whenever they are near an appropriate stockpile and then to fill there backpacks with what they actually need.
I like that idea, @Freedom and hope that’s the way they go. Adding a quartermaster would actually slow down production with how I handle materials.
I just put specific stone vaults next to each crafter’s area to hold their materials and such. And I group the crafters that use the same materials (such as wood) near each other so that travel is lessened. It seems to work well for me.
I’d LOVE it if the crafters emptied their backpacks of everything except what they need for their next assigned job.
For that matter, I hate it that hearthlings drop everything where they are to run for meals or sleep. They should at least take what they are holding back to the town. They could just empty their backpacks once back inside the town zone. They are carrying it anyway.
TBH They just need to do as ‘Banished’ did with the storage zones. As Hearthlings add to them, they grow. They take from it, it shrinks.
Reason: It is easier for the program to hold the items as numbers and have them represent as 1 object ( or a few in the game) instead of also representing them individually in the game as well.
They could do this already by having the player lay down a zone that has a large storage box already in the zone. As the Hearthlings adds to the zone and it reaches that box capacity it places another box in the zone.
I don’t mean remove chests or anything like that. Mostly giving a function and animation to the physical stockpiles. Leaving chests how they are and having hearthlings go to the quartermaster to fill the chests.
The 25x25 space would include living quarters for the assigned character as well as contain rows of stackable stockpiles similar to that in banished and a store front. Think of it as the marketplace in banished. A more visually appealing form of the stockpile, with the added bonus of carts to distribute materials more efficiently and a more realistic feel to inventory management.
I never really got past the titlescreem of banished so I don’t know how that works but if you have to give up a hearthling to a job where all they do is take the items off other hearthlings and put them in chests for them then it’s basically a wasted hearthling.
Hauling in general is a job that the hearthlings do as a community, imagine a bustling town of 50 hearthlings all doing different jobs and to get any item out of or into storage they have to go ask a guy for permission/help that one guy is going to have such a work load, he’ll be like the NHS at Christmas.
The one quartermaster will create such a bottleneck in goods flow he would be pointless, even if you had several, but the more you have the less of other jobs you can have.
Which leaves you with a fun min maxing problem with the most obvious solution is to not have quartermasters at all.
You could just build your own quartermasters hut if you wanted it
You also mentioned carts, I do think stonehearth would benefit from some sort of backpack system, which would allow the hearthlings to carry more when certain items are equipped.
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