I’ve been playing Stonehearth for quite a while now, and it’s an awesome game. There’s still one thing that bothers me though, it’s the inability to destroy or edit buildings. Once you’ve laid out your building plan, it’s pretty much set in stone, and if you want to fix a mistake you made or want to add a door, well, you can’t ! Same goes with mining, it’s easy to dig a hole, much harder to fill it back up ! I’m sure that you can do all of this somehow in a tricky, non-intuitive way if you’re super smart, but I’m not !
To be honest, the irreversibility of many actions in the game is usually what makes me just stop playing my Stonehearth games. I don’t like planning 100 hours ahead, I prefer starting small, build up on what I already have, erase my initial, crude installations and replace them by something bigger, etc. And I just can’t do that in Stonehearth.
Now I’ve seen several threads about this, but I’ve never seen an official answer. Is it planned to adress these kinds of issues in the future ? And if so, why not have done it sooner when you improved the building system or implemented mining ? These seem like pretty important things to me. Or is it something intended and is just how the game works ?
There’s a Command Prompt way to Destroy structures as a whole, but not a single block. It’s not part of the game, more like an input command to make your life easier in some instances.
“~” Key, and while in Shift-B structure building/editing mode, click on the structure, and in the Command Prompt type “Destroy”. It will make it disappear from the game entirely. You will not get resources back, and it may or may not cause issues with the Hearthlings if they are in or on the structure. I myself have not messed with that yet.
This is a temporary solution, as I’m sure the developers have a mind to make it possible to remove structures later.
I agree there should be better methods to deconstruct buildings and what not.
I have found that you can use the eraser tool to cut holes in floors. However, when I did it, it caused hearthlings to build scaffolding around the entire building just to do it (reported that).
Stonehearth really needs the ability to delete things.
The answer is: YES! we do intend to allow for the editing of finished buildings. We haven’t done so yet because it’s hard. T__T. Aside from pathing issues to whatever location you want hollowed out, the building, as I understand it, is saved all together, as one structure, for use in RPG mode. Allowing for the editing/merging/partial-destruction of buildings means the building envelopes etc need to be edited and merged too.
I don’t think we intend to allow reversing of mining regions, because IRL, you can’t really undo what you’ve dug out. But you could fill in a mine with blocks, if you wanted.
i agree almost 100% with you there, except that the only “mining” that we should be able to reverse is dirt, because IRL you can fill a a whole in the ground with dirt
but perhaps that will partially be the geomancers job as some have guessed it to be?
That or have a way to fill it in with water (buckets, causeway, rain). Cause that’s how quarries are usually used IRL. And hearthlings could swim as a means to “travel” over the hole.
I’m glad it’s planned to improve all of this. In my opinion it’s the biggest weakness in the game right now, other than that everything feels quite enjoyable.
Regarding "un-"mining, I understand your position. Saying that mining 10 blocks of stone doesn’t give you 10 blocks of stone to put back in the ground makes sense. It’s a clear gameplay choice, not necessarily one made by other games of the genre. As long as it’s consistent with everything else and that there are still ways to fill holes if needed, it’s fine !
