Thoughts on Children and Population Growth

If you leave your babies unaccounted for, goblins should kidnap them, take them back to their base camp, and raise them as their own. Then they come back as adults to raze you.

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Nice idea, but probably not family friendly / cute enough :stuck_out_tongue: .

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Exactly what I thought about the whole Samruai being able to kill peasants who aren’t respectful aspect of Japanese culture. Not gonna make it into my mod unfortunately. xD

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Oh hey it’s completely different for mods - I’m hoping to see DF-style babies being used as weapons in a SH mod. Just, y’know, not the vanilla game :smiley: .

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I believe it would be a great idea for Radian to add Reproduction and children as a way of increasing the population of your town as having a few random people join here and there just isn’t an efficient way of gaining members. Let me know what you guys thing

I really like the idea, but I seem to remember Tom saying that they didn’t want to go there, at least not for quite a while, as it was tricky and such. This was, by the way, discussed earlier, such as here.

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And her :smile:

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My problem with these stages is that I imagine my Hearthlings as either in their late teens or early twenties. The baby stage couldn’t be stretched out more than two years. The child stage would then have to last about ten years in order to reach teenagehood. Then you have about five years left as a teenager. In order to make things more even, the child stage would have to be split in two, which means more models and animations.

I like the ideas, but I’m not sure about the practicalities. Although, you could possibly reuse models and have smoother transitions by scaling down the character, and scaling up its head.

some games and societies 15 is old enough to work so an adult model would be fine

Why? Just resizing them works pretty well.

The “scaling up the head” bit only really works if you’re aiming for an “awww cute” effect, which I don’t think is necessary for humanoids. On top of that, they already have pretty huge heads, I’m not sure how I would feel if they had even bigger ones.

Different clothing may be useful, but that’s one or two models per gender, so not a big deal.

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I like the number 4 in things like life cycles and what not, 4 seasons, 4 directions, 4 parts in the medicine wheel so 4 stages of life is a must in my book. In addition to there being a similar state of being when very young and very old there should be a 4th age category of Elder. Elders could have certain functions like passing down knowledge, telling stories, overseeing but not doing the hard work in crafting areas, government and more.

Young people could also be taken care of by the elder’s of the town when the parents are working. Also when there is an attack children should absolutely run and hide in cupboards and things that would be great. I liked the kidnapping idea but I’d say we should go one farther and be able to have the children raised by the goblins and come back later to attack your town on the side of the monsters as some sort of feralling.

Edit: Also the teenager should not be useless but rather the weaker version of the adult stage. Let them get into their career as a teen. Perhaps working slower or requiring supervision.

from what I have seen to far Radient Entertainment doesn’t ever shrink the voxels, but they sometimes make the voxels bigger. I think you may just want to design new models for them.

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Actually about everything is scaled down to about 10%.

There are only a few entities which are not scaled down or even scaled up. You can verify this yourself, it’s in the entity’s JSON under components.render_info.scale. In the screenshot I’ve posted, I’ve used values from 0.06 to 0.115 I believe, where 0.1 would be your normal height.

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Now that I can see it, children with adult-sized heads would tip over a lot. Yeah, simple scaling could do a lot for aging. Is it possible to a model up or down in real time? If not, it should be.

It is. entity:add_component('render_info'):set_scale(new_scale) - I’m using it in Jelly.Console+ for the set_scale command. If you’ve seen my sheep rave video, it’s also what I’m using to make the speaker appear “playing”.

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Well I guess in that case I kind of misunderstood. Maybe it would probably be best to leave the minimum voxel size the same as the human voxel size. the size of the children is right but the voxels look much too small.

What are children if not small humans in small clothes?

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Just to add my 2 cents, two things were mentioned. A stork bringing children, and Cultures 2 way of handling babies/children/attacks on mothers with child/children/babies.

Cultures 2 babies were delivered by stork. :smile: (though i don’t see why this would make it not usable in Stonehearth, they certainly didn’t come up with the idea of a stork bringing babies)

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I didn’t read all the replies, so sorry if what I propose has already been said. I like this game, I see a similarity with the game : Banished. If I have a suggestion to do with this topic, maybe the children could go to school. A child with education will produce faster and will live longer.

I hope my suggestion will be useful.

Thanks.

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It might be interesting to incorporate the Pre-Adult-But-Big-Enough-To-Help-Out stage into the Apprenticing Workers Concept. An undifferentiated young Hearthling grows into a Worker, but one that is apprenticed gets a leg up on the career he eventually enters. The size of the boost (or even an XP gain rate boost) would be dependent on the skill of the teacher. This way, a home-raised Hearthling will have an advantage over a random immigrant that stumbled out of the forest. The downside could perhaps be that the Player cannot pick what the kid apprentices in… giving more of a feeling of the Hearthlings having their own will on the situation (one of my favorite things about Stonehearth).

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