"Slept in a shared room" shouldn't be a thing

As title says.

Shared rooms aren’t that bad. Really. It should be restricted to those hearthlings with the loner trait.

It doesn’t really help the spirit of the community if every single one of the bastards whine about having to share a room at times when they are mostly just unconscious and not even aware the others are there.

If anything, there should be a plus effect for sleeping in “own room” but shared rooms should be neutral.

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3 points for the awesome logic in your post @CrazyCandy! I totally agree :merry:

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I totally agree. However I do think there should be a penalty for having a room like a quarters where 10 people sleep together. I know IRL you wouldn’t want to sleep with that many people.

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Shared room shouldn’t be a thing but for loners (and maybe the opposite for the … what’s the trait, the opposite of loners), but maybe ‘slept in a dormitory’ which would be like >4 hearthlings or something, and then that’s a penalty.

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Rim world had this issue and used Disturbed sleep for when people went in and out room and woke them. this would be close to IRL due to if you slept in a shared room you may not mind the company but if you keept getting disturbed you would become grumpy no matter how nice you and your mates are .

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This is roughly what we’re approximating with the current thought.

Part of the reason we’re currently displaying shared room as a negative thought is so that it provides a hint to the player as to what to do to make their hearthlings happier. In general we do want to encourage players to make separate bedrooms for each hearthling, as it causes the player to build more and complex structures to accommodate it. If there was only a positive thought players may not as quickly discover this motivation, as when they examine a hearthling in a shared room they wouldn’t see anything. I’m not inherently opposed to the idea of pairing a “shared room” negative thought with a new “Solo room” positive thought, but we didn’t take that approach initially because that means there isn’t a neutral state.

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well actually…your logic is fairly flawed here because one of the personality traits a hearthling can have is LONER which means they don’t like to be around other people in general. so the “shared room” – emotion thing should exist. but I would tweak it. specifically, have it as just 1 - when it’s a normal person who has no personal preferences over being around others or being alone. and -3 to those who want to be ALONE. if they changed how sleeping in a shared room affected specific types of hearthlings it would be better.

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I think that would be especially nice because where people sleep is one of the few things we can micro(ish)-manage at the moment.

its not just a loner that is effected by shared room tho, would you like to sit in a room with a callous person? some other traits too may have a good or bad effect. on a room .

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Getting disturbed by roommates isn’t a constant thing, though. It may happen on occasion, but quite rarely, unless the other person is careless enough to make a ton of noise every time they move. People who do go in and out of a room where they know somebody sleeps tend to keep it quiet.

Well, perhaps certain traits could have a negative effect on the other Hearthling they sleep with like a new trait called “snores heavily” or something.

As for this, I laid down my thoughts in this post in the neutral thoughts thread. But!

I also want to mention that this is one of the things where a proper tutorial might be of help. Or perhaps an in-game encyclopedia that explains the workings of the game and thus also listing all negative and positive effects and explains what causes them.

And also… is it absolutely necessary to hold the player’s hand whereever they go?

Can’t they be just left to discover little secrets on their own? Discovering little things can be fun.

And what if the player wants to focus on complex defense systems (eg. in hard mode) and simply can’t afford to store every single guy in their own room, or they have to keep it cramped, which then brings up another negative effect. Should they be punished for that?

Edit: and I doubt that people within a fortress under siege would complain about having to sleep with someone else.

Well, I believe the answer in that will have to lie in an alert system later down the line, where you have yellow, orange and red(current town alert) alerts, each with different levels of how defensive the hearthlings are/ how much needs/ complaints they have.

I agree that only loner hearthlings should get a bigger decrease in contentment when sleeping in a shared room. Although I also think that all other hearthlings should get no decrease or increase in sharing with only one other hearthling. More than two hearthlings sharing a room could get the decrease in contentment.

About the gregarious trait, they should get an increase when sharing a bedroom with other hearthlings. Of course the other hearthlings would get a decrease if there was more than just one more in the bedroom (and doesn’t that sound more interesting than it should for the hearthlings! :wink: ).

I don’t particularly consider a hearthling thought, which is already buried in a sub-menu, as hand-holding to a new player. And yes, discovering little things is fun! There’s a concept in game design called “discoverability” which is an important metric when designing a mechanic. At the most basic level, it refers to what amount of indication a player has that something of interest exists in the game. Discoverability in general is something that is worth pursuing in one’s designs, and how much emphasis you put on discoverability should relate back to how much you want the player to interact with a mechanic. In this particular instance we opted to call constant attention to the fact that hearthlings want to sleep in their own room because we feel that building construction is a core appeal of the game, so we want players to interact with it more. However, since we only wanted this to be a small nudge, we made the impact of sharing a room small, and only made it visible on closer examination of hearthlings.

I don’t mean to answer this in a flippant way, but it should be more difficult to keep your hearthlings happy and defended in hard mode. That’s somewhat the point of that mode.

Perhaps part of the problem is that I don’t understand why this is an issue. Can you guys provide more insight into why this is important to you? Possible examples might be:

  • You don’t want to build separate rooms for each hearthling
  • Building separate rooms is hard in the current toolchain, so you opt not to do it
  • You imagine that certain hearthlings are dating/married/a family, so it’s ok for them to share a room
  • You think the penalty for having a shared room is too strong

Maybe if I can better understand the root of the motivation for the feedback better, I can come up with a solution that resolves both of our concerns.

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point one:On the separate room thing, there is things like having a worker bunk room for town astetic reasons.

point two: its more of how towns worked in the era you set, sure people would have their own houses but in many old cities there where bunkhouses for the lower class. its more of a these people should be use to sharred spaces and well getting there own should be a buff.

point three: I think we would need a directed interaction system for that with the ability to actually have hearthlings marry, and have family groups that can apear at the start or later days like you start with one hearthling and their brother/sister comes in later giving a bonus for keeping them seperate (sibling rivalry) or together depending on relations.

would require a better system, just imagining can cause problems in the long run if everyone just plays on how they think it actually can limit systems you guys can make.

point four: there should be no penalty for a sharred room, though hearthlings should complain about it, think of it this way a bunk house means you are not likely in the highest place in life and you will need to get out of there eventually if you want to be happy. MY suggestion is give sharred rooms a happyness cap, like they can’t hit the highest tier or something. and have that cap be negated by things like marrage or family.

though my ideas are random and on the spot and I am highly likely to be mis understanding this completely.

Yes and no. We should be able to do both without being penalised for one over another. Sometimes I just want to be able to build a home for a pair of my lovelies next to the grumpy loner’s home.

I doubt this is an issue in this regard.

Well, yes… Actually, I didn’t have this in mind initially, but now that you mention it, it is quite a strong point. So if say I imagine Kate and Bob are a couple, they are basically punished for that silly thought of mine. As if the lack of double beds wasn’t punishment enough. * winks *

The issue isn’t that it’s too strong. The issue is that there shouldn’t be a penalty for this. Or maybe only if there are like 4-5 beds in the same room but 2 or 3 beds should be ok.

I think the main issue we have here is that, as you mentioned, you want us to design our towns in a specific way (to give a room to everyone). But we, the players, want to design them however we think is proper at the moment. If we want to build a big dormatory with rooms with 2-3 beds in each, well, then for the sake of Rayya, let us!

Also, as a sidenote, I think it is only proper to mention that some of the default blueprints include buildings with more than one bed in the same room. This, in my opinion, contradicts what you said about the hints we were supposed to take from the negative effect of sharing rooms.

good points made by warbrand2

Also, good points made by @CrazyCandy.

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You’re welcome to design buildings however you would like. However, building buildings where hearthlings share a room is easier and lower cost than building one in which hearthlings have their own rooms, so this thought adds a little bit of a trade-off to that decision. Otherwise, without this negative thought, there is no inherent incentive to building individual rooms for each hearthling. Yes, switching it to only a positive thought when a hearthling has their own room is mechanically identical, but it lacks that discoverability that I mentioned earlier. That’s why we’ve taken this current approach.

When we get to the point of a having a social system, I want to include this style of hook, to be clear.

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I think the Root of the problem is Intuition, the Devs have a deep understanding and vision on why they hearthlings should have seperate rooms (to encourage the player to build more complex structures and all) BUT, not only does the vast player base not know this intention, but when they see the nagative thought ‘slept in shared room’ they just go “What?!”

Sure if you didn’t really furnish your room and just slapped in two beds in you can go “yeah that makes sanse” but if you placed Two beds in one room and you’re mindfull of the people living there, you’ll place two drawers, chests, closets and everything for the Hearthlings, and though you may know that the Hearthkings aren’t aware of that in an AI standpoint, it still feels like they should be okay with it, Why? Because there is no Visible reason that they wouldn’t.
Nobody snores, nobody visibly irritates another hearthling, hell- they don’t even really get into fights or anything, as far as it looks, the whole ‘slept in shared room’ is just, there for no reason beside forcing the player to make seperate rooms for no aparent reason, there is no trait to suggest a reason, there is no interaction to suggest a reason, they just hate it, they just Do

The complaints i saw i feel are more about why as well, ‘give them a trait and give penalty to that’, ‘shared dormatories are a thing, why can we not do what’, it’s not like they snore’(snoring is a reason why the don’t like it)

It’s intended to be intuitive and visible by having it be a negative thought that you can see why they hate it, by having them share a room it’s suppose to be visible why they hate it, but it gives no reason, nothing specific, as far as the player thinks, they’ve put those two hearthlings thinking (and assuming based on observation) that they are polite and loving of each other, not that they hate every second with eachother, if they made a bunk dormatory with a lot of people, they probably don’t expect them to like it, but they would expect them to live with it, not get grumpy about it for half of the day, because frankly, not that it’s a good thing, but you will get use to it, you hate school, but you get use to it, at some point, you don’t like it, but you just don’t care, especially when it’s a lifestyle, and that lifestyle is something the player is roleplaying with the town, and they won’t like it, but nor will they care

Ps: also i’m not dead, just busy

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Ok, I can get behind this logic. So, conceptually then, if hearthlings snored when you zoomed in close, and the thought was “Disturbed Sleep - Man, it’s tough to get a good night’s rest when I’m sharing room with someone that snores”, that would resolve the issue. I’m not proposing we do that, but I think I understand the perspective now. Let me ponder.

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Personally the biggest issue at this point for me is the effort it takes to create those individual rooms and buildings. That might change soon with the new building system coming along.

Is the plan to make furniture and decorations give the hearthlings some positive benefit? If so it might balance out a negative feeling of sleeping in a shared room and wont be such a obvious thing?

It is kinda the same thing with the beds. First they complain about sleeping on the ground, then in a low quality bed and will only really be happy when they sleep in the best bed available? What is the point with the first bed then?

Then they complaint abut sleeping outside, but if they get inside in a shared room with a bed, they are still focusing on the negative? Would it not be positive compared to sleeping on the ground outside?

If they ever only are happy when they achieve luxury conditions, it seems that there really only should be two options…

The gameplay design and its “rules” seem to weigh more than the logic here? Oh and the word logic may be a wrong definition, but when you take inspiration from our world, to create a virtual world for hearthlings, the logic represents not only a certain world view, but should represent a bigger diversity?