What will be future purpose of buildings?

Gameplay
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Hello everybody!

Lately I have been wondering about general usefulness of buildings in Stonehearth.
Basically, as the game’s development will go on, there will be more and more things to do, more decisions to make and paths you could go. Also, there will be more threats. This will probably lead to time being more and more important.

As we know, building in Stonehearth, as cool and fancy as it is, takes a lot of time. Because of that, I was trying to come up with ways to make building profitable, or even mandatory, but still I can’t seem to find good enough solution.

From what I read, I found out that destination of buildings will be determined by objects put inside of it. If that’s the case, I guess these objects (like weapon/armor racks, beds, or even tables and chairs) should be only possible to insert inside of buildings. (with some exceptions, why not have a seat outside? :relaxed:), or at least on certain flooring types.

I am aware that Shelter and Happiness statistics will probably have more and more impact on the game in the future, and they’ll be strongly connected to having buildings, and this will possibly be enough to justify existence of buildings. But what about decorations? Is it even possible to make them significant to our survival?

There are also other factors to consider, such as the size of buildings, floors of them, usage of different materials and so on, and so on.

This intrigues me a lot, since making all the building essential seems very difficult to me. I don’t want to end up living in a cave or mud house, like in Minecraft :grinning:

As always, sorry for any mistakes and obscurity of this post. Please give me your opinions on how big of a value buildings should represent, and how to make them work properly.

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in my opinion buildings should be used as shelter when monsters and such come. so when goblins come with torches, your wood building with a thatch roof wont be much help, but a stone building with a slate roof? those goblins will have a tough time burning that down.

unless they still know the dark arts, from when they used to steal and burn stuff i still dont know how they burned all those junks o’ stone…

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There’s actually a few posts where we’ve been discussing what role(s) buildings should have–check them out! Here’s three I was able to find at the moment:

Functionality of Buildings

Buildings with tethered purposes

Actual function of buildings?

They’re a little dated, but it’s a decent start to the discussion through the development process as of yet.

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It already increases your universe’s net worth.

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While they may not actually do this, I like to believe that because buildings increase Shelter and Happiness, it affects the entire productivity of the settlement. It’s also possible that when/if seasons and weather are implemented, buildings will become vital as protective barriers from the harsh elements. Decorations, on the other hand, are simply that. Perhaps they can increase Happiness a little bit, but other than that I don’t believe they should have a use.

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Personally, I’m hoping for a huge library of decorations and furniture to choose from, so the player can really go all out with designing their town. But… I’d like a little encouragement to use different objects.

One potential purpose could be to attract certain types of immigrants. Have a house with lots of plants or books? Maybe you’ll attract some sort of horticulturist/forester or researcher. Or maybe if you already have those units, surrounding them with objects related to their field or nature could act as a sort of feng shui or improvement to their abilities and efficiency.

The big concern is giving the player a reason to do more than just take the cheapest, most value-raising objects and just cram their buildings with them. Heck, maybe some personalities or professions require being in crowded or minimalist settings, further diversifying the decorations used. Maybe someone’s afraid of curtains, or loves paintings on their walls. (Hey, curtains can be terrifying.)

Maybe the villagers could even randomly mention a desire for a certain piece for their home, and fulfilling this request (like the current travelling trader requests) would result in a morale and stat boost–in more challenging or rare requests, possibly creating a continuous boost (an Archaic Bookshelf raising willpower/courage, for example–knowledge is power!)

Of course, these are all just hypothetical. We’d still need to add functions to structures and furniture beyond the kingdom net worth!

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@Atralane, your entire thought ties so perfectly into the soon to come character traits idea…

for example,

[quote=“Atralane, post:6, topic:12832”]
require being in crowded
[/quote]a simple trait could be something like “packrat” the more they have in their house the happier they are, if their house is empty, they freak out and wont do work…

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Yep, that’s actually why I included that section–I remembered the mockup Tom made a few streams back. Of course, we’ll need the game mechanics to recognize when furniture is actually in a house (or room) for some of these to work…

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well lets hope that TR puts something like this in the game eventually.