Hello guys, its me again. I have more ideas that we could discuss. The topic I have in mind is transportation, I am one of the players who play for aesthetics a lot. So I was wondering what the plans are for transportation. Horses would be nice :D. Make it a part of the shepherd class. This could add a whole lot of other dynamics. Horses could lead to calvary, which could lead to cannons of some sort which leads into the engineer. You could create a caravan where you send some supplies to be sold and every week they come back to give you the money and to take more supplies. This could as go into the cook, horse feed, food made from horses. The list goes on. Next on my list of ideas is the minecart, I would like to have a minecart with rails of course, this leads into the engineer, make it so you need iron and steel to create both the minecart and rails. It runs off of coal blocks and goes at a slow speed but it can deliver items. Different tiers of minecarts are made from different things, from crates to vaults to vases, etc etc. Boats, I assume they already have plans for boats but If not I think boats would be nice. Of course that would need a new class. Tho the engine and propellers can come from the engineer and the plans itself comes from out boat builder. Or something like that. Well these are just suggestions so feel free to critique my ideas.
Yes, that’s a good suggestion in my opinion. I think right now it’s not really worth having a shepherd, since you rarely need skins from certain animals and if you do so, you can easily get them from traders. Only for cooking stuff a shepherd is nice to have, but to be honest: Cooking is not really worth the effort right now, since different foods dont have special effects and nutrition isn’t important for hearthlings right now. But giving the shepherd the ability to grow animals like horses and bulls (who can be used with a wagon to transport alot of goods) would be nice.
First: It would make the village more lively. Not just hearthlings, but also a few animals
Second: It would really help for mobility/transportation. A hearthling using a horse to get to point A, getting off the horse, taking the loot and then hop on again and travel back to the city quite fast. Also nice having a bull with a wagon that can be used to transport like 40 pieces of wood/stone etc. at once, reducing the time the hearthlings need to haul tons of items that are far away from the storage.
Third: Additional, a new military unit could be introduced. The Cavalry. Quite an offensive unit and very fast. Has certain skills, like ride through (stunning and damaging enemies in a line) and trampling (high extra damage against ground units) and is very fast ofc.
Just a small off-topic insight
Better foods are worth more (gold), as such, one single roasted mutton is worth much more than many raw food or low level cooked food, which means you can get a new hearthling with less food items (good for item limits) as the food requirement is counted as the gold value of the foods.
I always sell all the excess raw food. (And lower the amounts of farms so I have just the necessary for the cooker)
This may be true, but you can also just craft wooden swords and sell them for 10 gold pieces each, which requires much less effort from your hearthlings, since creating high value food requires a real food production chain and it also requires multiple hearthlings (promoted jobs) to create such food items. That’s why I suggested food buffs some weeks ago, to make cooking more interesting. 
No, gold doesn’t count to the food requirement, only the food items (the gold requirement is your kingdom worth, builds + gold coins). The number to import a hearthligns, for example 50 food, is about the food value in gold, so if you have a single food item that sells for 50 gold, that alone would met the food requirements.
Must say i really like the idea of transport! In addtition to this i would like to see that you can send items from one storage to another by workers. Cause right now either your crafter has to walk miles to get its materials or workers have to walk miles to store what they just gatherd. I would like to store my materials close to where they gather it and if workers, or people who can pick up and store items, have nothing to do go transport those goods from the temporary storage to the storage that has a higher priority. That the transporting is a low priority.
I agree. A knight needs a horse! Of course the horse would need food and shelter, and a saddle and bridle…
Unless the pathfinder is opened (a lot) to lua, which might (or likely) decreases its performance, different modes of transportation are highly unlikely.
Even for Zulser’s conveyor belts, I couldn’t rely on the pathfinder and just used straight line heuristics… I think. There was some evil hack intended, the hearthlings didn’t actually figure out “Oh, I can get this rock faster to the stockpile by using a conveyor”, it was more of a “Oh, this conveyor accepts a rock (because the end of the conveyor belt is close to a stockpile), so I’ll use it!”.
Pathfinding is a, if not the, bottleneck of the game and adding modes of transportations to it isn’t going to help, it would likely only make things worse. Way worse. So while knights-on-horses might work, stuff like minecarts, lorries, or planwaggons would become really difficult really quickly.
This could add another “class” for the enemy. The spear mean, it does more damage to cavalry units. Adds more depth to enemies maybe? Just a few ideas.
I think they could expand upon the food more tbh. I like it for asthetic reasons since I love playing this game for that reason but beyond that it isnt much helpful except for what you stated. They could make it so different foods add different things. Like poyo meat makes them happy but slower or something like that? Also like add they need a base diet of proteins and carbs etc etc? Maybe, im just shouting out ideas at this point.
This is kind of where my minecart idea comes in. If youre mining a mountain far away and you dont want them to walk every time you need stone or something they can just put it in a minecart and send it back to a bay area where another worker puts the stuff away. Or something like that. idk exactly.
I see, that makes sense, thank you for your insight on that.
Would it be posible for me or another modder the create a class called transport for instance.
You could give him a pickup place and a drop place and as long as there are items in the stpckpiles or chest at the pickup place he would come and pick up the items put them in his cart, get to the other place and unload ita cart.
I wantt to know if this is posible to mod with the current modable files.
That its gonna be a lot of work is for sure.
Sure, if your intention is a simple “Get items from here, put them over there” with a fixed start/end, then that’s doable and rather easy. It becomes more difficult if you want to have a generic approach to it though, e.g. telling a normal worker “Grab a minecart from the station, take it to the mine, abandon it for a bit, grab items, put them in the minecart, grab more items, put them in, haul the minecart back to the station, and unload everything into the proper stockpiles”.
Technically, even minecarts as “rolling stockpiles” aren’t difficult if you give them pre-defined places, as in, “Fill that minecart, then take it somewhere else, then empty it”. However, I’m not sure right now if you have any control over it - e.g. if hearthlings won’t run from very far away to the minecart to fill it, or even just empty stockpiles to put them into the minecart. I think this might be preventable, but it’s not exactly super friendly for mod compatibility.
Then would it for instance be posible to make equipment for your hearthling so he can carry more items? Like it would be the equivelent of the weapons that can get better but then the transporter can hold more items.
This way you could even make it that the “equipment” would be a donkey that walks besides them where he is not actually storing the items on ofc but still belivable that the donkey carries it. Since the sheperd can have animals follow him in think this should be posible right?
And maybe other thing for the minecart. Could it be possible to create a as you said moving cart the just goes automatic like crafted by the engineer. You would have to place a giver chest that would be for hearthlings just a normal cest and and then you place a reciever chest and the minecart woul just go up and down loading and dropping as long as there is space.
Hm, I think it could work if the transportation options must be controled by the player himself.
For example:
- You have a bull with a wagon
- You also have a mine far away, with lots of stone/ores.
- Now you, as the player, need to send the bull with the wagon off.
- Things can only be loaded on the wagon if it stands still, so hearthlings won’t try to find a path to the wagon.
- When you click the wagon, it shows a 50x50 (can be bigger if it makes sense) area around it. Hearthlings will only place items into the wagon when they are inside of that area. Otherwise they wont try to find a path to the wagon
- Once the wagon is full, you can send of the bull close to the storage and click unload. Again, the storage must be within the 50x50 range of the wagon.
With this approach, hearthlings wouldn’t try to find a path from all over the world, since they need to be in range to the wagon and they also wouldn’t try to place the items into the wagon when it’s moving, which would probably be problematic, since the path needs to be updated all the time.
The problem is that SH’s restocking mechanism is not working the way you would expect it to at all. For example, “they won’t try to find a path to the wagon” isn’t that easily possible, because every search for an entity type (which storages and items are) are handled as BFS, not A* search. They will always find all entities in order of their distance - it doesn’t help the problem.
Another thing is that with the recent optimisation to pathfinding in general, an approach like “if the distance is further away than X” is not that easily possible anymore. Filter functions for pathfinding ought to be only relying on very, very few things, in the best case nothing, in the average case a player id. If you say now that you have another parameter, which also changes - such a thing would be quite bad-ish. It means every minecart or whatever needs its own PF function (which will also need to calculate the distance between two points for every entity it finds, which is not quite as trivial as it sounds when we think about the fact that every entity could be matched).
but about the equipment. Is it posible to make some sort of backpack to increase the amount of items a hearthling can carry?
It seems to be hardwired in the restock storage action. I didn’t investigate further, but would say “No”. Not without overriding all actions that deal with inventory.