Right now you can select a trade for a hearthling, my suggestion is once the hearthling is at max level he/she is able to take on a secondary trade, but only be able to max it to half the max level of the secondaries normal max level. This would help when you only need 2 stone gates made every 5 days or other things to this effect.
First post btw, The awesome forum search while you create a topic is extra awesome, nice thinking devs. Enjoying the game, managed to make a few hovering building so far, was quite neat (wasn’t the original intention).
Hey there @Azuratte, welcome to the Discourse! Your idea can “sort of” be done right now, as you can change a Hearthlings profession at any time, and they will maintain any levels they previously gained. So if you have a level 6 carpenter and you really need to make more armor, you can promote him to a blacksmith and he will start working (and gaining levels). If you find you really need another fine comfy bed, and don’t want to wait to level up a new carpenter, you can switch him right back, and he will still be level 6.
One thing to remember is that while levels are maintained, XP is not. So if your carpenter was level 5, with almost enough XP to reach level 6 and you switch professions, he will “lose” all that XP. Additionally, more XP is needed to reach higher levels, and previous levels are tracked, so getting your level 6 carpenter to reach level 1 of another profession will take significantly longer than a brand new worker would.
Wow, thanks for the ridiculously fast reply. I was unaware of how the trade switching fully worked. It is great to know I can do it how it was mentioned above.
My suggestion still stands as I believe as this game gets bigger and more optimized, things like switching a trade on a hearthling for a couple items would become bothersome.
Along the lines of what Azuratte was thinking of, I think it would be great if the swapped (inactive) profession still supplied 25%-50% of any stats that had been gained from that profession.
It’s a good solution for extreme situation. But for gameplay it’s a bit naah, well boring. The main issue is, as far as i understand, the lack of business for some professions like carpenter, potter, mason. Once they fullfilled all tasks, they act like workers or they have a never ending cycle and generate more resources than you can even use (eggs, wool, jerky and leather). my suggestion is to sort the task for every class in 3 categories and add additional content and mechanics to create more “life” and some kind of game balance:
Daily Business, like checking the traps is the business of the trapper
Player orders, crafting furniture/items etc
Event triggered tasks, like a wounded hearthling is the event for the herbalist
if we could manage a huge list, we would be able to merge lot of class suggestions, i mean we don’t need for each task a new class and on the other hand we can divide special tasks between some fitting classes.
Lot of ppl suggested a mining class or forester, but you don’t mine 24/7 or plant trees and collect wood, otherwise the mountains will be empty and the stockpiles full with unused wood. So taking care of the forest would be a fitting daily business for a carpenter, cutting and replanting trees, maybe even add additinal resources like resin, bundle of firewood. Mason and stonecutter could both share the role of miners and maybe even have some sort of special pet like a mole who is sniffing for resources. Trappers could also share the role of a forester, also the role of a real forager would fit, so he is constantly checking the traps and gathering mushrooms, tracking animals etc which all counts as daily business and creates lot of resurces without any cost, so maybe he needs some resource consumtion like crops/berries/jerky as an object to lure animals into the traps to create some kind of balance (at the current state i see no use to hold bunnies using the shephard and consuming carrots)