These lil’ guys are so cute … but dancing in a circle while on duty and ordered to attack is not what I expected!
This behavior seems most common when I try to use the attack or ‘go here’ flags inside one of the new graveyard areas. They are getting ‘stuck’ near the edge of it… but not necessarily always right on the border of it … I don’t know if this needs categorized as a bug for that or a bug for footmen orders / movement banners.
I don’t have a screenshot or anything but it’s fairly easy to reproduce:
Default footman group of 4 or 5 footmen (I did not notice this happening when I only had 3 footmen)
Using the ‘flags’ - order them to go to the edge of one of the new enemy areas - specifically the new graveyard but I did have it happen on a goblin village as well.
Move the flag location once, maybe again. I did this to try and get them to ‘catch’ an escaping monster in another direction.
Move the banner back to original target.
Footmen will invariably get confused on their orders and often get ‘stuck’ in the location the old banner was before you moved it. They will run in a tight circle together.
The only fix I’ve found is to quit out and come back in and try the banners again.
Yes …sometimes. I know, not very helpful there but most of the time, when these things start to happen, I will eventually start getting UI lag and error boxes popping up so that’s my cue to do a save and exit out. When I reload the game, it seems to stop chugging so bad (memory leaks?) and then the flags seem to be reset as well, unless my footmen happen to be in battle then it seems to remember them.
I’m also having duplicate banners all the time. I don’t like the Defend one so much so I avoid it but I can confirm without a doubt now both the “Go here” and “Fight” flags will duplicate and not because I have an individual footman targeted. I’ve been very careful about this and make sure I select the party banner first, then give them an order as a group. Most of the time the Go here banner works pretty well and I use it almost exclusively now as it does not bug out as much as the other two.
*Edit: Worth noting too - this really only starts happening after my ‘party’ (the default footman one) grows to about 4 footmen. By the time there’s 5 it’s a mess and bugging out all the time. 1-3 footmen is not a problem as far as I can tell on two different games now (both Ascendancy and Rayya’s I’m playing to test).
*Edit #2: I don’t think Devs can reproduce this by simply creating a 4-5 man group either. This happens after day 20 of the town and when things are really crowded… full stockpiles tons of stuff, tons of buildings and 16+ Hearthlings. Before day 20 it’s not so bad.
All in all the new banners are pretty frustrating. I’d rather have the old system back to be honest.
Someone made a post about it with a screenshot the other day (“What is this place!” I think it was titled) … seems they’ve introduced a new ‘camp’ type for enemies that is a crypt, tombstones and other items surrounded by a fence. It’s neat! You probably won’t see this (only in unstable A14) until about mid-game as I think it’s intended to be a ‘harder’ encounter that needs attended to and cleared out similar to how you have to clear out those goblin camps with the penned up wolves right away or they get loose and wreak havoc on your town. Those goblin destroyer wolves are very powerful (a bit too much imo) but the undead that come out of the crypt have so far been fairly easy. I haven’t let one of the graveyards sit long enough for the rumored necromancer (Boss) to appear however.
Anyways… I think the ring-around-a-rosy bug can be reproduced just the same (A14 only mind you) with a goblin camp by placing the banner right on the border between the camp and regular land. Move it somewhere else, move it back… this is when I see the bug happening.
Worth noting: might have been a stealth patch for this as last night I didn’t see it happen at all on my Rayya’s Children save except later in the game after 30 days when things started really choking on performance! I also noticed the camps are not ‘sunk down’ one layer in foundation the way they were before. It’s entirely possible this bug happens in relation to that.
*Edit: Do they even do stealth patching or hotfixes without notice? I’m in other testing / opt-in unstable games where patching is ongoing and unannounced so I’m quite used to things getting fixed randomly (and broken randomly!) as the Devs push out constant updates - Subnautica being a prime example of massive experimental branch updating (twice a day sometimes!)
Idk if stonehearth does stealth patches but I doubt they do. But this graveyard area sounds pretty cool. Time to sit in my little fortress of solitude and wait for it to happen XD Unless theres a command to spawn that stuff? If anyone knows @jomaxro >.>
No. No stealth patches. Almost all patches will be detailed on the dev blog, or a dev (usually Albert) will make a post in the #development category with the patch details. TR is very good (better than most games I follow) in detailing all the changes in the build (not simply writing “miscellaneous bug and performance fixes”). There should not be any “random” fixes, and while not unheard of, multiple patches in one day is rare.
Ok thanks for the info on how patching / hotfixes work. I wasn’t sure if the reason I hadn’t seen any of the running-in-circles behavior was because of some fix to unstable that I didn’t notice since I don’t normally play that version. I do appreciate the detailed update notes as well.
*Edit: I think maybe the bug isn’t happening because I’m being much more cautious where I place the banners and not over-using them if possible. They are very finicky and unstable!
I just changed my profile picture today - fits better in that little circle and is more happy Stonehearth themed!
Summary: Hearthlings fail to successfully execute an attack on the currently aggro’d target, and are left dancing back and fourth forever until they are manually moved away.
Steps to reproduce:
Promote hearthlings to footmen (4 in example)
Have them attack a Bandit Camp (although ive had it happen with other things but mainly buildings)
3)Watch them dance back and fourth as their path-finding seems to fail communicate with their aggro target.
Expected Results: Successfully kill or destroy current aggro target
Actual Results: Dance around a specific point in a bandit camp even after trying to manual pathfind them with the move party command.
Notes: These were in Party slot 1 and all were told to defend location, but their natural ability to suss out danger and kill still fails to successfully execute a correct path-find solution.
lsh? I came to report this too, and this might be similar, but I don’t think it is. This feels to me like a symptom of the recent pathfinding distance increase, because I now also get the ‘combat music never ends’ bug again, which was not present for me in the last release.
In any case, I saved and reloaded to make sure it would persist and it does, so I think this save will show you exactly what’s up: Link - I included Day 7 and Day 17 for comparison. Refer to Day 7 for this issue.
indeed seems to be the same problem, they are doing it a lot more often now the further into the game I get, im 20 villagers atm going on 21. They didnt do it to begin with it seems more like a late game thing unless anyone can confirm it at earlier points too? Sometimes they will behave but most of the time they have their own little conga session in a circle xD. Its definitely aggression path-finding as opposed to regular, because when using the “move” command they do it flawlessly every time… so far…
I have a feeling that this is caused by hunger, maybe their local aggro is fighting with their hunger or sleeping needs? Like lets say there is a party sent to “defend” a goblin camp, their hunger or sleeping needs naturally make them head back home, but obviously if they are near an “enemy/enemy structure” its in their best interests to destroy it right? Which results in them dancing back and fourth?
:Edit:: ive done some testing and I cant put my finger on it, my hunger idea doesn’t seem to be the solution, at least i haven’t been able to recreate/ alter it based off of their hunger anyway, they’re still dancing now and again though, seems to be more often when they are around camps or graveyards.
You can see it on my Day 7 save above, where I had less than 10 Hearthlings at the time, I believe. In the Task UI his current activity text would waffle between a chase action and something else.
What’s weird is, from a Pathfinding perspective, the critter he decided to try and chase shouldn’t have even triggered him, it was so far away. If you were to take height out of the equation, then he WOULD have been close enough to trigger the footman. So it seems like even though the mob is a long way away from a pathing perspective, the actual proximity is near, and so it triggers the footman.
…and perhaps that’s the conflict causing the dance?
“There’s a mob in close proximity! Kill it!”
“Let’s see how to get there… Oh that’s far. Nevermind.”
“Oh, but, there’s a mob in close proximity! Kill it!”
Oddly, after the footman flag fixes that were done after I first reported this issue, I have not seen the stuck circling behavior recently though granted I restarted two new games since then as well and one of them was creative mode so I could test some building stuff without attacks so I assumed I wasn’t seeing it happen due to no footmen obviously.
To me the issue seems to be pathing confusion when using the various banners and switching between ‘go here’ and ‘attack here’ or vice versa. I want to start a new survival save to see how it’s doing but now my game is really stuttering even before I get to the dreaded 20+ day mark where I have experienced it before. I have a new game started and it’s very laggy right out of the gate (may be the map choice though).
I’ll start a new Rayya’s Children / Desert game tonight on survival and see if it happens anymore for me. It usually takes awhile to see it start happening more and more… with more frequent attacks and using the banners.
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