The game is awesome.
But!
The resource and stockpile system need a major overhaul.
Having stockpiles take up ~75% of your “building area” is just an eyesore and extremely inconvenience when trying to build a compact and efficient town.
The new crates helps to mitigate this problem a little bit. but it doesn’t solve it.
Items need to stack in stockpiles. especially resources like wood, stone and food.
Resources in general need a overhaul as well. (wood, stone, minerals…)
1 resource = 1 crafted item, is very hardware intensive when reaching over 1000 physical in-game objects.
its better to make it so that resources in them self stack in to one physical item.
Example: 1 wood log = 10 wood.
this will help mitigate a huge number of physical objects in the world, and help with smaller stockpiles.
Also. as of right now, stone and wood is way to easy to accumulate.
I can almost build a whole town by chopping down ~10 trees.
The rest of the trees i cut down (usually just for making space for my town) will be either just taking up space in my stockpiles, or be sold of to the next merchant that comes around.
And while we are on the subject. making huge cave like bases are really fun, and a easy way to enclose your self from goblin’s and other creates. but making it so that its faster/cheaper to do so then by just building fences around your city just cheapens the whole “king of the mountain town” feeling.
Building cave/mountain bases should be extremely labor intensive, and should take up at least 3x the time it takes now.
Sorry for the wall of text.
Hope Iv raised some valid points.
BTW. i also checked the crate capacity right now and noticed they need to be re-adjusted.
8 small crates takes up the same space as 1 large crate.
Meaning, if using 8 small crates you get 64 slots to store items. while using 1 large crate you only get 32.
My suggestion:
Make large crates hold 64 items, and increase the cost to at least 6 wood/large crate.
I would like to make a strong comment on the Stockpile UI mod, I have noticed the behaviour of hearthlings towards these is not the most efficent one.
Black: Carpenter workshop location.
Blue: 20 x 20 stockpiles
Orange: Product layers being placed over time.
This is the way carpenter searched first for closest stockpile and then closest tile inside the stockpile where to place the goods, I believe the UI should search for closest available “stocking tile” instead of the whole stockpile.
Going a little further, maybe the game logic would be for it to consider those spaces just as the game currently reads “woke-able” side of a tile, we could also have it consider if it has been made “available” for stock or not.
This way path-finding would work as a ring expansion in search for closest tile and would also consider delay by objects or obstacles on its own by delaying more in “finding” them. So best option vs closest option would be auto-analysed too by its own core processing logic.
