As i finally got my computer to work i have gotten back to playing Stonehearth again and i have run into one irritating problem.
The crafter does not tell me why he doesn’t build stuff. I have multiple times run into that my crafter stops working because he lack resources, and that’s fine and all but he just sits down at the campfire and waits for me to discover that he lacks gold, wood or some damn flower.
It would be nice if there was some kind of notification when that happened.
That would be nice! Trying to think of a “work around” for now… Do you mean like building stuff or crafting things? I know you said worker but some people could get worker and crafter confused.
If it’s building purposes i’d say bring up the building editor and see what isn’t being constructed.
If it’s a workshop…well…you’ll see what workshop isn’t being worked…which, yes, requires work to find…so it would be nice to have a message that says “X cannot complete Y because there are no more Z”
Haha. Yeah and honestly “crafter” probably isn’t the correct term but that’s the best I can think of. Crafters have workshops and workers are the guys building/hauling/chopping/drone working.
What’s annoying is when a crafter starts making somehting and then stops because he has half the resources.
If he can’t start something at all, he stops but you can go into his workshop and move the task down and give him a different task, all good. But if he has already started and then runs out of resource (e.g. you tell him to make a steel block, he puts two charcoal and an iron ore on his anvil and THEN realises he doesn’t have a second iron ore) then that’s it. He’s screwed semi-permanently. You can’t cancel the task, you can’t have him do anything else, he is literally useless until and unless you find that second iron ore.
It’s only an alpha, I’m sure this is something that will be fixed, it’s just frustrating right now
I’m sure this will change in time, but you shouldn’t be able to queue crafting items you don’t have the resources for. The image of the item should turn grey when you can’t craft it (or any more than what you have in your list).
Agreed. Or at the very least, when I am in the crafting screen that shows how many of each thing I need, I want a line below that says how many of each I have (as well as how many of the item I am crafting I have, that would be useful too).
So a fine bed would still say it needs 1 mean bed and 1 cloth, but then below that it would tell me how many mean beds I have, how many bolts of cloth I have, and how many fine beds I already have.
I have those moments where my carpenter doesn’t do anything, so I think it’s just the game being a bug. I reset the workshop, delete the item and put it back in the queue again, but it doesn’t work, so I end up thinking it’s just the game.
What I find out later is that I haven’t cut down some trees in awhile, and I just don’t have any wood left. Honestly, having something that says “Your carpenter requires 1 wood to complete this object” would be extremely helpful.
There’s a big TODO in the code dating back to June of 2013 about this issue. Basically, there’s still no way right now to limit the pathfinder’s search radius, so the carpenter doesn’t know he can’t find the thing he’s looking for. We revisit the pathfinder repeatedly, but until then I’m sorry for the inconvenience.
Thanks Stephanie - What about if he only queried stuff that is in a stockpile, rather than having to check the entire game world on the off-chance the thing he is looking for is lying on the ground somewhere. I would assume it would be pretty easy in-code to know what’s sitting in a stockpile? (says the non-coder)
So if you want stuff crafted, you have to make sure your raw materials are stockpiled…
That’s a good idea! There are many ways to fix the problem–this or, for example to put a timer on the pathfinder. However, assuming we’re going to fix the pathfinder, they’re code we’d have to undo later.
Fantastic idea! Things like weapons and tools already don’t register if they’re not in a a stockpile, I’d have the crafters ONLY check stockpiles for supplies. Nice and simple. Maybe later, we could toggle world/stockpile, but for now, stockpile only would make things manageable (and also let the code check if there’s enough supplies and let us know accordingly).
It probably would be for just that specific instance…but (as a developer) it would be much more effecient (code-wise and development wise) to find a more global solution. Pathfinding can be a difficult thing…and if you add a bunch of different scenarios (check the world, check the stockpile, check around you, check others, etc) you end up taking up a LOT of memory… If you think about it one hearthling would be doing, what, 10 checks…multiply that by the number of hearthlings…and quickly things get complex.
I’d say we should try to be patient until they get the best overall fix. I think when they do we’ll see a VASTLY huge improvement in the game overall. Yikes as I sit here and think about other things with pathfinding (building, mining, cutting,…) I realize how big of a beast that must be for the to handle! And i’m sure they’re still a relatively small team so something that large is going to be on the backburner until they’re done giving us the new content It’s one of those situations where it’s annoying…but it’s not completely game breaking so we’ll priortize it lower because our stakeholders (agile talk) have other things that are higher priority.
Wow that was a mouthful. I didn’t mean to come off rude or harsh or anything…just trying to paint the picture for you guys as a fellow developer
I don’t think anyone’s being impatient. We’re just trying to report what we’re seeing as ‘testers’ and also throwing ideas out there. The devs can pick what they like out of our suggestions (and maybe they get a fresh idea they hadn’t thought of), or ignore if they have better ones. The alternative is no suggestions from anyone and the game would only suffer in the long run.
I think my proposal for what I’ve called a resource manager (or rather service) would go nicely with this. That way, you could decide where the resource comes from - stockpile, floor, or whatever.
I would be interested in coding something like that as proof of concept, but because I don’t know if you guys do something similar right now, I’ve kind of waited.
an indication of when a crafter (mason, carpenter, etc) is stalled due to an ingredient shortage would be helpful. It might also be good to allow stalled work to be bypassed if later jobs in the queue can proceed, instead of stalling the entire queue.
I have to disagree with that. There’s nothing more annoying than having to constantly check the crafting menu to see if you have enough resources to order what you want/need; it would be better if items could be queued, but then if there weren’t enough resources available, the queued item would be greyed out and skipped until resources became available.
This way, it clearly indicates that the item can’t be completed, but isn’t an inconvenience for the player.
