A big thing I’d like to see Stonehearth add is the “downed” state to soldiers. In real life, most combat casualties are not instantaneous, and in medieval & ancient war, you were much more likely be wounded than killed, and I think it really adds to the drama of combat. If your knight is wounded to the point where they can’t fight anymore, your footmen should have to respond by changing their current action to respond to your knight going down. Make it easier for your fighters to become wounded enough to be “downed” and tie their recovery into the herbalist class. Make Stonehearth players feel the rush as that single brave Hearthling makes a mad dash across a field as arrows close in to save their buddy from an Orc’s coup de grace. It fits in really well with RimWorld’s deep medical mechanics, but it also really could work well with Stonehearth’s current classes and healing. It’s not hard to imagine a badly wounded soldier being carried by his buddy to the herbalist to be healed, while any minor cuts and bruises are healed by the cleric on the field. It also would prevent your soldiers from chashing a fleeing enemy across a field who has a meagre amount of health left, since they’d be incapacitated.
In another thread, the idea came up to have to need a herbalist to relocate plants.
I’m certain you’ve done this before; you embark to a region and find yourself surrounded by a scattering of silkweed, or perhaps a bevvy of berries. Industrious sort that you are, you decide to relocate them near your town so you can safely harvest them with as little waiting and travel time as possible. But then you find yourself doing this every time you start a new town, and it gets more elaborate… hedgerows of berry bushes by the dozen become a status symbol, and the sheer density of your silkweed arrangements makes your weavers’ heads spin.
However, such convenience in living-off-the-land runs counter to the design goal for the eventual Northmen - a faction more focused on combat. If they can simply pluck what they want and plonk it in their town immediately, where’s the danger? Where’s the adventure? They’ll be able to build their longhouses and wall off their silkweed gardens almost immediately, and never leave the safety of their happy homes.
So what if we change things up? What if an Herbalist of a certain level was required to relocate plants? It’s easy enough to do - simply grey out the “move” icon on the plants, and when mousing over it, add a tooltip indicating the required Herbalist level. (Edit for clarity: Any Hearthling can move the plant, so long as you have an Herbalist.) Here’s an example breakdown;
333 days passed since this topic had been active, and 333 days without love for our poor little herbalists.
The thing is, I haven’t played the game for quite a while. A few days ago I played a bit after this long break I had with Stonehearth, and found that the herbalists’ uselessness bothered me more than it truly should. Honestly, it was a long break, and I haven’t really followed the updates, but almost a year is a long time, and so I thought maybe they did something nice to the flower folks. But they didn’t.
Still, of all the many gripes I had and still have with the class, the way buff potions are handled is what makes my head ache the most! The fact we have to search for them in the game world (whether in stockpile or placed) to activate them is quite annoying. I do realize they don’t add a lot to the overall efficiency of the town, but if my poor little flower girl went through all that effort to produce those things, I want to use them!
So if Santa would be kind and deliver something for Christmas(the earlier the better), I would like to claim this opportunity towish for a better potion system, something along the lines of what I had in the original post.
A simple button somewhere on the UI…or the ability to set them on auto-consume…or both!
I think if anything the cleric, using magic, should buff the speed that crops grow when not fighting. this is a natural progression in my mind after herbalist, combining plants and magic. perhaps even a carnivorous plant that can be used as another type of trap, that does not require maintenance, but does require you to store up magic, or mana to begin growing it so that it only targets specific enemy types (bosses probably immune) and thus you are limited by events more than anything, and this requirement could be adjusted based on difficulty and terrain type. even planting them in different types of soil could boost or delay the growth of the plant trap. I think its a good alternative to the engineer, whos skills would be put to much better use making actual mechanical things that are not magical turrets. I think you might see that the direction for the engineer is in the way of the magical classes of the future.
of course going with the healing theme as well there could be plants that have auras that you can place around your town that slowly heal your hearthlings throughout the day, or does something similar to potions, or just as an added effect to foods that speed the recovery of hearthlings during meal times
Make a 2nd tier job called warlock/witch that can create offensive potions, poisoned/cursed weapons, cast curses on enemies, create protective spells for your city and it could be used optionally as a combat class throwing potions that can do AoE damage/healing. Of course it’ll lose the ability to heal bedridden hearthlings and craft herbalist potions.
I think herbalist is good as it is, it only needs more potions and some extra crafts to be worth to keep more than 1 if any.
And what about creating kegs, beer and wine, it could be even another new profession. it could increase the mood of your hearthlings to have a drink with their food and even give them special buffs.
Oh and i know there is a brewery mod, but that’s not even close to true brewing imo, irl it takes a looong time to make those.
Herbalist would make more sense if potions were used by individual Hearthlings automatically rather than manually applying them to the whole town. Class-specific potions could be brewed and Hearthlings should be able to automatically use them when the buff is gone. This would be more anti-micro as I could queue potions and Hearthlings would auto-use them so no intervention would be necessary.