Scaffolding Alternative?

Suggestions
#1

As it is, I never use blueprints. I just live in fear of all the many scaffolding-related bugs and weirdness.

How about instead, they don’t build scaffolding at all. While a building is under construction, the workers can simply treat the entire structure as if it was made out of ladders. Or, alternatively, just give them a much higher vertical “reach”, so a worker on the ground floor could put the roof on without climbing up.

I know the scaffolding looks cool, and it’s very immersive, but I feel like trying to work around it has been a non-stop headache. Personally, I’d rather just abstract the whole thing in favor of it being more functional.

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#2

Are you saying you don’t use templates? Placing a templates building is identical to building it manually in terms of scaffolding.
I personally applaud that they’re actively working to fix the issues rather than abandon the system. I assume if they hit road blocks down the line they may take shortcuts as you described to increase functionality, but as it’s still Alpha I’m okay with bugs that they’re seeking to fix

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#3

I use the built-in templates, yes, because they’ve been carefully designed to avoid pathing problems. But I can’t make my own templates.

I LOVE building … well, buildings. It’s my favorite thing in these games. But it’s a non-stop frustration to try to get my blueprints to actually function. The actual structure is fine, but the pathing/scaffolding thing gives headaches. It’s irritating to spend hours designing a wonderfully detailed and complex architecture, only to realize the template has to be scrapped because it can’t be built due to unknowable pathing issues.

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#4

I too would like to see the scaffolding go away, but I feel like the devs have invested too much time in to it to get rid of them. It can be very frustrating to watch your hearthlings spend a lot of time and resources on scaffolding that they don’t even need.

#5

i am 50/50 on the scaffolding it creates a dept of realness into the building process but i think your right its very frustrating when the scaffolding is taking the majority of the time for the hearthling to finish a building i suggest maybe to speed it up is that hearthlings doesn’t need to build scaffolding every like 1 block high they should be able to place 2 block high on a single scaffolding this will make the building process much faster in my opinion and would require less amount of resources when building a single building.

#6

Ugh, sunk-cost fallacy.

This is a post I’ve written and erased multiple times over the last few months, because I see both viewpoints. I know Radiant wants to do things “right” – their big announcement that the game won’t be ready for its September 2014 date was accompanied with a post with how they COULD have hearthlings just tap on the ground until the building was complete, but they’d rather not. I totally understand that point of view, too. Stonehearth aims to be an ant farm more than an RTS, so watching your hearthlings do their thing is half the enjoyment.

However, the other half of the argument is that, once again, it’s a couple of months shy of two years that the building system has been a pain in the neck. I don’t know if you’ve seen my thread, but one of the things I talked about there was how hard it is to make custom buildings that work and that aren’t simple cookie cutter boxes with roofs. Honestly, I would start discussing cutting my losses and doing something a little less realistic, just so I could free up my team to work on all the other stuff. An ant farm, yes; but if building is the only thing the ants do well, I do not think it’s something that will hold anyone’s attention for very long. And that’s the best case scenario! As sophisticated as the building code no doubt must be, it is still very imperfect.

I would rather see Hearthlings operate machinery, coordinate in defending the town, be clever about using roads / horses? / backpacks? / trains? to efficiently carry cargo and get around, defend themselves from coordinated goblin/hostile Hearthling attacks that also involve some amount of cleverness and action… I really do not see building as the cornerstone of Stonehearth, and it confuses me to no end why the devs treat it as so. Mind you, I do not complain; Radiant is by far my favourite game company right now. They do an enormous number of things right versus the number of things they do wrong. Still, it makes this already strange decision even more questionable.

I’m not going to offer solutions to the building problem. I have my own idea, but I’d like to save it for a mod. For now, I will say that there was a thread here previously where the poster talked about being in construction and how it makes more sense to build all scaffolding first, and tear it down as you need, as opposed to build it as you need and tear it all down at the end, and that seemed interesting and sensible. At the end, though, I contend that I’d rather see the rest of the game grow flesh than have this one feature perfected.

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#7

Exactly my thoughts as well. They COULD probably get it working, given enough time and resources. But I’d really rather see that time spent on more important (or at least, more interesting) features.

#8

I don’t think it can work “as is”.

For a very simple example, dig a 4*4 cave into the side of a hill and try to line the wall/s with nice fancy stone. What happens is that because builders can only place blocks at their feet (unlike miners who can mine something at chest height), it’s impossible - their head would have to be buried in the ceiling to get their feet level with the block they want to place at the top of the wall.

In fact, forget about fancy lined walls. Try “old school” wooden mine shaft support struts - just a column up each wall with a beam across the ceiling. It’s insanely simple, yet not possible.

Let’s try something even simpler then. Build a column of slabs 5 blocks tall, then put a 5-block wide bar across the top so it looks like a “T”. Now erase the column so it’s just 5 horizontal slabs/blocks in a line floating in mid-air. This will work, but watch them build it - they’ll build a ladder to the top, then build scaffolding along the full length all the way up, then one hearthling will run up and place all 5 blocks and run down in less than a faction of the time it took many hearthlings to build the scaffolding, then many hearthlings will start taking all “99% unused” scaffolding down. It will take a minimum 4 times longer than it should - they could’ve placed that initial single ladder 1 block closer and skipped all the pointless scaffold building and removal.

Now try building a 1-block wide road/bridge out of stone across a river. Put a temporary ladder on both sides of the river first (so that a hearthling can swim across to the other side, and 2 hearthlings can build the bridge from both sides at the same time until they meet in the middle). They should be able to do “place block, move 1 block forward, place block, move 1 block forward” all the way (until the ends meet). Sounds trivial, but what happens? They start building scaffolding underwater!?! It takes a massive amount of time and you’ll probably run out of wood before they get half the stone done.

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#9

Agreed :stuck_out_tongue:

and expand this to just over all be able to reach up to build. this would eliminate a lot of other problems too.

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#10

I know it was mentioned as something they DIDN’T want to do, but I’d rather the Hearthlings just stay on the ground floor banging their hammers, and the structure rises up in front of them. Just, eliminate that problem altogether. It would also fix other strange problems, like building against cliff walls and building underground (which is causing me massive headaches).