In the most recent stream, me and @Averest have together formed a great idea, mice!
I know what your thinking. Hear us out!
@Tom has mentioned the fact that uncooked food would spoil. Hence giving cooking a use. It would be very cool if the “spoiling” would be manifested as mice. When your food is left out too long little cute rascals would pop out of the ground and begin feasting on your vittles! This opens up a more broad option for food preservation. Not only could you cook the food to dissuade the mice, the kitten/cat shown in this previous stream would have a very practical use. Mice killers. Alternatively you could build mouse traps or put your stockpiles on stone to keep them rodents away!
I think there could still be spoiling, but it should take longer.
What do ya’ll think?
(if any of you modelers out there wanna try your hand at mice it would be greatly appreciated.)
secondly, this would be yet another thing the engineer could make.
[quote=“TurtleSquish, post:1, topic:12506”]
put your stockpiles on stone to keep them rodents away!
[/quote]that doesnt quite make sense… unless you mean the mice literally pop out of the ground beside the food…
[quote=“TurtleSquish, post:1, topic:12506”]
This opens up a more broad option for food preservation
[/quote]you could also perhaps put it in barrels/crates
that’s what I was thinking, but that specific point could be discussed. The reason I said that is because it would up the lag a ton of there were mice running around the map always.
yes but it doesnt exactly make sense for them to pop out of the ground, and keeping it on a stone floor wouldnt help much in the time span that Stonehearth is set in… if you get what i mean…
As an added feature, the very presence of mice already there could induce the rest of your supplies to begin to spoil even faster than it regularly would. (Little nibble here, little nibble there!)
If such a thing as health/hygiene are brought in to the mix, the presence of mice could threaten plague/sickness. (And the worse the infestation, the higher the chances)
Unit spam is a pretty big deal - more units on screen that aren’t Hearthlings, livestock, or frenemies (read: goblins) with little gameplay value beyond “annoyance” kinda hurts. So there’d need to be a way to make these interesting while reducing the bandwidth load. One approach might be implied numbers.
Try this on for size:
-Rat Nest: Immobile structure. Has an “Internal Rat Number” ranging from, say, 1 to 5.
-A Rat Nest releases 1 Rat, which goes looking for food, returns it to the nest, and increases the IRN by 1.
-At more than 5 IRN, a new Rat Nest spawns somewhere.
-With multiple Rat Nests, Rat releases are staggered so that only 1 or 2 Rats are active at a time.
-If a Rat Nest is destroyed, it releases 5 Rats which run away and disappear/burrow/etc.
The result would be this; even in the worst-case scenario, a city infested with dozens of Nests, you only get a maximum of a handful of Rats active at any given time, but the implied number of rats is massive.
@LeadfootSlim I like your idea for sure. But i’m not sure I made my method at “lag reduction” clear enough. The game would spawn the mice when your food is left out for too long and its accessible. The mice would come out of “holes” in the ground and attack the uncooked food. So in essence there would only be a very small amount of mice at a time.
Of course the debate could go on all day b/w which of our methods is “better” but I don’t really have a problem which ever is used.
@Wuelfe loving both of those ideas, would you mind if I put them in the original post?
Having mice appear and then disappear works for bandwidth, but doesn’t give the player a tangible way to deal with the problem. That’d be my only concern.
Either way, I’m certainly in favor of more details like this in any version of the game!
I am on board with this idea, it’s very in the time peiord where the game is set. Like people mentioned above, if the mice or rats came they could bring an illness that could effect the hearthlings. Ahah this post reminds me of Majesty. when your kingdom got bigger, small sewers would pop up and eventually rats and giant rats would come to attack. Ahhh I love that game
The way it is being described is making it sound more like a cosmetic feature that supports a passive effect that would consume development time and beg for a larger system to be implemented.
If there are rats, players are going to want rat traps, cats, etc. If you added plague mechanics that would tie up even more of the player’s time and the developer’s time implementing and playing with a system whose original intent was to introduce spoilage. Not to mention system resources that I don’t know enough about hardware/software to speak about in a serious way.
I think spoilage should happen, but I don’t want to have to manage mouse traps. That sounds like the bad kind of micromanagement. And if the net effect is that my food disappears from my storage, I don’t need the mouse/rat graphic. Lets save everyone (and our computers) time and energy and also not give the player the impression there is anything he/she can do about the mouse problem.
Instead, I suggest spoilage happening fastest when the food is just sitting on the ground and as was mentioned, cooking and putting the food in barrels/chests will reduce spoilage.
Other, much more interesting and engaging systems need work/implementation. I would rate mice as #199 on the my feature list.
while i like the idea, i wasnt necessarily saying drop everything and implement mice, i was thinking of it being more towards the end, when spoilage is added in the game already.
They were just off the top of my head additions to what you suggested. So go for it. Hahah. 
