In the latest stream, the suggestion was made that there might be icons, stickers or something like that, that portray the contents of crates, once these make it into the game. Tom said that wouldn’t work, because there was just a 12x12 space to model that in and you’d have many combinations based on what’s in it.
I don’t know about that first objection, but I thought I’d address the latter by suggesting that you could just have generic icons for “food” and “ores” and “furniture”, and then whenever there’s multiple different types, you could just use a single icon for “miscellaneous” (or go without a sticker entirely). That way, it’d still be somewhat informative from the outside (which I imagine could become important if you get lots of crates and they’re all stacked up and such.
There’d still be the issue of having only a 12x12 area to work with, so perhaps even then it would be difficult, but I just wanted to point out the possible solution to that other issue all the same.
1 icon via percent … like 80% ore = oreicon
2. crates for a specific category
3. crates specific will be set via stockpile … so if you have a crate and your wood stockpile is at 75% the heartlings set the crate in the woodstockpile and do some wood in them
for my opinion i would prefer variant3 ^^ because you have already your specific stockpiles and so you know what should be in ^^
Yes, although the issue is that, if you don’t have your specific stockpiles and have more than one type of thing in a stockpile, you won’t be able at first glance to see which type of thing you have most in that stockpile. So I think I would like the first option best, although I think I’d just go with 100% instead of something like 80%; you’d still have to check all your “miscellaneous contents” crates by hand, but at least you’d know immediately if something contains only some particular thing you may not be looking for, so you don’t have to bother looking in there.
Trying to think of a simple solution here, but all the other games I can think of make you just open the crate and have a look. (Starbound/Terraria/Trove of the top of my head) You could, potentially, have 50 different things in there and I don’t know how they’d handle that…
I don;t see why a wooden box should “magically” tell you whats inside.
Why not just have several crates you can make. Instead of a single generic craftable crate, your carpenter can make one of 5. One has nothing on it (the one from the stream) one has a picture of a tool, one has a picture of a chicken leg or something for food, one has a picture of ore, etc - you get the idea.
Players can still put whatever they want into the crate, but they can choose to make and use crates with these generic icons on it to keep track of hat they intend to use that crate for.
When you click on a crate in-game, a little ghostly 4x4 should hover over your mouse showing the contents as if it were a 4x4 stockpile on the ground. This is analogous to someone going over and looking into the crate.
Easily done, and easy for someone to mod extra picture/template crates in if they want more granularity later.
I don’t think it’s necessary to have a barrel have multiple types of items and isn’t realistic for storage means anyways so a simple fix is just to select what type of material it can hold and as for an Icon I would instead color cordinate the barrels you could still have a simple logo though
alternatively I would make the barrel open at the top and then you could see the type of item that’s inside that way too a little and it could fill up the more that’s in it (this idea is from castle story)
I honestly don’t think it has to be so many labels, or a difficult problem with multiple things in a chest. Like I suggested in my original post here, just make it go to “misc” as soon as it’s two different types; if you have that, and then just have the types that you also have as major categories in stockpiles, that’s just 7 labels to make, which at 12x12 shouldn’t take that long.
I wasn’t thinking about “magically” telling you either; you could easily imagine your citizens slapping those labels on there.
Also @taklu, that would indeed be a solution but Tom already stated in the stream that that’s not how they want containers to work; they will just work as stockpiles where anything can be stored in each one. Realism isn’t often that big a consideration for Stonehearth anyway (although I would argue sometimes it could indeed be a nifty starting point… but in this case, not so necessary imo).
Would it be more feasible to have a hover or click to view option with the crates that lets you see exactly what is in it rather than having stickers that could be changed many times throughout the course of 1 person’s game?
Referencing Minecraft, why not short hand it to the groups rather then specific items? If it’s more than one storage group type, use a generic symbol, but if it’s a specific group type (think of stockpile selection) then it uses that groups logo.
@naturalnuke It would work for those people who do that. I just think it should still be visible what’s going on in a stockpile that accepts more varied things. If you made such a stockpile and didn’t use crates, although it’d be a bit chaotic, you’d be able to see immediately what’s inside said stockpile. My suggestion would allow you to still see this to an extent even if you did use crates.
@Melite I agree that there should still be a way to explicitly see what’s inside the crates. I think that should be obvious as an important feature. I’m just talking about a way to tell at a glance, especially when you have a large number of crates.
@SirAstrix Yes, thank you, that’s precisely what I’m suggesting here.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to be able to mouse over crates and have a window displaying what’s inside pop up?
Beyond that, a user-end solution would be to have a small stockpile of the material (forbidden somehow) in question in front of the crates; e.g. a row of logs in front of some log crates.
@LeadfootSlim Right, like I said in my last post, there should still be a way to really see inside the creates, perhaps by mousing over them like you said. I don’t think it’s an either/or case, however; if you have a lot of crates, the sticker idea might allow you to get quicker, if less detailed, information, if that’s all you’re after.